"December 6, 1941: Best friends Frank and Stanley have it good. Their dads are Navy pilots stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and the boys get a front-row view of the huge battleships and the sparkling water. Yes, World War II is raging in Europe and in Asia, but the US isn't involved in the war, and the boys are free to dream about becoming comic book creators. They've even invented a superhero of their own, in the style of Batman, Superman, Captain America, and other stars of the Golden Age of Comics. Maybe they'll even get their comic published someday. December 7th, 1941: Everything explodes. That morning, Frank and Stanley are aboard the battleship the USS Utah when Japanese planes zoom overhead and begin dropping bombs on the ships below. Chaos ensues as everyone scrambles to dive for safety. Frank and Stanley realize what's happening: Japan is attacking America! The war has come to them. As the boys fight to make their way home amidst the carnage, it's clear that everything has changed. Stanley's mother is Japanese American and he is suddenly facing a terrible prejudice that he's never known before--he's now seen as the "enemy," and Frank, who's white, cannot begin to understand what Stanley will now face. Can their friendship--and their dreams--survive this watershed moment in history?"--

"Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos-an unforgettably compelling masterpiece tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of the two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: "The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck's work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies." In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: "Hofmann's translation is invaluable-it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'""--

"Charlie Marder, a World War II veteran and popular academic, is an unlikely congressman. Thrust into office by his power-broker father's connections, Charlie is determined to use his new position for good. He quickly learns, however, that in 1950s Washington, little is as it seems. Struggling to navigate the treacherous waters alongside real-life figures such as President Dwight Eisenhower, Senator John F. Kennedy, and Roy Cohn, Charlie is confronted by a world in the throes of McCarthyism, where no one trusts anyone. His education in the compromising and occasionally illegal ways of Washington makes him question his own ethical compass and the morality of men he admires, including his father. Alongside his pregnant wife, Margaret, a zoologist with ambitions of her own, Charlie struggles to do what is right while learning more about the mysterious circumstances of his predecessor's death. Amid the swirl of glamorous and powerful politicians and businessmen, a fatal car accident plunges Charlie and Margaret into an underworld of backroom deals, secret societies, and a conspiracy that could change the course of history. When Charlie learns too much, he has to fight not only for his principles and his newfound political career... but for his life.--

'A page-turner full of historical intelligence, wit and heart' DAN JONES Sir Tony Robinson - actor, presenter, historical expert and star of Blackadder and Time Team - makes his adult fiction debut with this earthy, entertaining and gloriously witty recreation of the Anglo-Saxons, Alfred the Great, and the making of England. 'Brings the Anglo-Saxon world riotously to life' S.J PARRIS 'A thrilling tale of ambition, betrayal and power' ALICE LOXTON 'Entirely brilliant, a story and world vividly evoked' KATE WILLIAMS 'Every bit and wise, witty and entertaining as you would expect from one of our greatest storytellers' MARK BILLINGHAM ______ Rome Father Asser is waiting to die. His idealism has landed him in a papal prison on trumped-up charges of heresy, until salvation arrives in an unexpected form. Cardinal Balotelli also dreams of a better world, free from the ravages of the Norlanders. He has a vital job for Asser, one that could shape the future of Europe. Wessex King Aethelwolf's power is fading, but none of his feckless children are fit to rule. His eldest sons would rather fight each other than the blood-thirsty Norland invaders. His daughter, Swift, is clever and cunning, but often blinded by her ambition. Finally there's Alfred, his once-promising younger son, whom nobody has seen in years. Then Wolf meets a young priest with a proposition from Rome that could change everything. Lindisfarne Rhiannon is a slave with a profound hatred for her Saxon captors. When she meets Guthrum, a Norlander hell-bent on wiping Wessex from the map, they set out on a journey of destruction. So begins an epic struggle between greed and idealism, ambition and betrayal, freedom and tyranny. Because change always meets with resistance and, on the path to power, nobody can be trusted.

"A prophetic lost classic from interwar Germany, now translated into English for the first time, following a group of Berliners on the skids as their nation unravels. Berlin in the 1920s is the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess: a hedonistic Babylon, though there's little glamour for the hundreds of thousands out of work, the war wounded, the prostitutes, and the beggars. Come evening, they too want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where they gather to drink, dance, and reassert their pride. But there's always disaster lurking in the alleys and flophouses, a disaster that the twenty-two-year-old author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz clearly saw coming for his nation. In this dark comedy of petty theft, soapbox speeches, and bar fights is the disarray of a country devouring itself. Tragically, Germany's self-destruction engulfed the author, who was killed five years after finishing this novel. When Boschwitz's The Passenger was rediscovered in 2021, it was heralded as a masterpiece that terrifyingly captured the zeitgeist of life under Nazism. Now, Berlin Shuffle-his literary debut from 1937, finally available in English, with a preface by the preeminent translator Philip Boehm-brings to life the society that would enable fascism's takeover. The triumph of one of world literature's spectacular talents, Berlin Shuffle is a dire warning, sent from a pivotal moment in history to our own time"-- Provided by publisher.

"This future history of the next thirty years, imagined by bestselling author Thomas Harding, is surprising, compelling and disturbingly believable. In 2020, a researcher is shocked to find a set of notebooks detailing the history of the next thirty years. Is this a hoax? Or could it be real? The notebooks, written in the year 2050, contain interview transcripts between teenage Billy and Gran Nancy. We learn about the great climate SHOCK, when global temperatures rise much faster than anticipated, resulting in catastrophic consequences for humanity. We learn about a shift away from democracy, toward unelected "ethnarchs" -- heads of corporations who use their access to our personal data to competently run the world. We learn about the giant city towers where most people live, work and play inside -- where it's safe from natural disasters and viral outbreaks. And between these interviews, we learn more about Billy, whose interest in the history that has been erased from the official record is causing trouble in 2050. Is it too late to change the past to save the future?"--Publisher's description.

"The film Casablanca opens with the words, "With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas." Leslie Epstein's Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events--most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942--coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein--the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca--was born to write"--

"Moacyr Scliar was the preeminent literary voice of the Jewish immigrant experience in modern Brazil. Now his most ambitiously satirical and irreverent novel is at last translated into English, offering not just a significant contribution to Latin American and Jewish literature but to world literature as well. In a past-life therapy session, a mysterious woman makes a remarkable breakthrough when she discovers that in a previous life she was one of King Solomon's seven hundred wives. In language that hilariously mixes modern jargon and biblical diction, she sets out to tell the story of her earlier incarnation three thousand years in the past, revealing how she went from a provincial nobody to a queen. Yet being royalty isn't all it's cracked up to be. As the least desirable of King Solomon's wives and concubines, she is unceremoniously discarded and forgotten in his harem. But as luck would have it, she possesses a unique gift: she is a woman who knows how to read and write. Once her talent is discovered, King Solomon charges her with writing what will become one of the most important texts in human history. Along the way our nameless narrator leverages her newfound status as royal scribe to bring about her own secret agenda. A brilliant feminist critique skewering the absurdities of patriarchy, The Woman Who Wrote the Bible is a comic masterpiece of truly biblical proportions"-- Provided by publisher.

Set in Miami Beach in 1972, this novel follows the Posner family--two Holocaust survivors, Sophie and Jacob, and their son, Adam--doing everything they can to avoid one another in a city with an infinite supply of colorful diversions. In '72 Miami hosted both the Republican and Democratic political conventions and experienced the rise of the counterculture, the Cold War, and the desegregation of the old South. Miami Beach was to be the Posner's salvation. Instead they discover their lives quickly turning into a Disney World of funhouse mirrors and chaotic rides that give them front row seats through a transformational year in American culture, politics, and history.

"Through this dramatic history by Stefan Heym, we become intimate with the story of the maverick and internationalist Karl Radek, known as the editor of the newspaper of record throughout the Soviet era, Isvestia. Beginning as Lenin's companion at the dawning of the October Revolution, Radek later became Stalin's favorite intellectual - only to find himself entangled in the great purges of the late 1930s and scripting his own trial. In this, his last historical novel, Heym reveals Radek as a brilliant Bolshevik journalist and politician who found himself at every turn of the wheel of fate. A central figure of the communist world, Radek was such a controversial and perennially ambiguous personality that even his historical biography seems a work of fiction. With his thick glasses and most non-Aryan appearance, marked by what some might have seen as distinctively Jewish argumentative skills and humor, Radek's enormous talent as a writer, political acumen, and continuous curiosity carried him through event after event. In the struggles of the revolutionary movement Radek changed sides several times and came into conflict with Stalin, was exiled to Siberia, capitulated and resumed his editorial duties at Isvestia -- only to get caught up in the purge trials and sentenced to prison, where he died. As Heym sculpts credible conversations with Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Trotsky, Stalin, and many others (all seen from Radek's perspective) we come to know Radek as a man haunted by the fear that the insurgency will cease to move forward, living his life as a frenzied chase in pursuit of the continuation of the revolution, until the very end. Originally published in Munich in 1995, this first-ever English translation of Radek fashions the inner voice of a unique figure in the global revolutionary wave of the first half of the twentieth century"--