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  War and Peace Book 10: 1812

  Leo Tolstoy

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  War and Peace (Russian: ????? ? ???, Voyna i mir; in original orthography: ????? ? ????, Voyna i mir”) is an epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy’s two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world’s greatest novels.War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy’s time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense. (Summary by Wikipedia)

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  The Maiden of All Our Desires

  Peter Manseau

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  Fourteenth-century Europe. The Black Death has killed half the known world, and in an isolated convent, a small group of nuns spends their days in work, austerity, and devotion, chanting the Liturgy of the Hours. But their community is threatened. Rumors of heresy and a scandalous Book of Ursula, based on the teachings of the charismatic former abbess and founder of the order, have prompted the male church hierarchy to launch an investigation. The priest assigned to minister to the nuns, Father Francis, who is wracked by guilt for an unspeakable crime committed during the lawless plague years, was no friend of Ursula and can't be counted on to defend the order. Disrespect and rebellion infect some novices, and the youngest among them pines for the bishop's chief inquisitor. And Mother John, the convent's aging spiritual leader, fears she's losing her mind after experiencing a vision that brings back her own rebellious past.As events unfold over the course of a single day, a blizzard that has swept across Europe will break over the convent, endangering the women there and testing their faith. In this astonishing novel, the author of the award-winning Songs for the Butcher's Daughter explores the territory between faith and freedom, and how the horrific events of history shape individual lives.

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  The House of Lyall

  Doris Davidson

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  In this sweeping historical novel, a Scottish lady will do anything to protect her aristocratic life from the guilty secrets of her humble origins. Young and ambitious, Marion Cheyne feels trapped by her poor village roots and her lowly job as a domestic servant. So when she’s suddenly faced with an opportunity to escape her dead-end life, she doesn’t think twice. Absconding from her employer’s home with more money than she’d ever seen in her life, Marion sets out for a new life in faraway Aberdeen. Years later, the struggling servant girl Marion has become Marianne, wife of the heir to Castle Lyall, and every inch the lady of the glen. More a business arrangement than a love match, Marianne's commitment to her role and to the name of Lyall is total. As family, friends and world wars come and go, she will stop at nothing to protect her hard-won position. But the many secrets of her past refuse to stay safely buried. Nothing in the small community of the glen can remain hidden forever . . .

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  A Time to Bloom (Leah's Garden...

  Lauraine Snelling

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  Will their dreams fall apart when confronted with all that is stacked against them? 
   
  Delphinium Nielsen and her sisters have accomplished much in the past year, traveling west and settling in Nebraska. They are on their way to building a garden in dedication to their mother and working against the forces of nature to make their farm thrive. However, none of that can mask their concern that they are quickly running out of money. Del's work teaching in their booming town offers hope, not only to support her sisters financially, but also to better her students' lives. Not all of the town sees it that way, though, with the rebuilding of the schoolhouse continually neglected and her brightest student's father demanding he work the farm instead of attend class. 
   
  When their brother Anders arrives with his war-wounded and heartbroken friend RJ, Anders sees the strength of the sisters' idea to start a boardinghouse and decides to invest in it. Del finds RJ barely polite and wants nothing to do with him. But despite Del and her sisters' best-laid plans, the future--and RJ--might surprise them all. 
   
  "Snelling's thorough research pays off in her vivid evocation of frontier-era Nebraska . . . The result is a transportive historical worth getting lost in."--Publishers Weekly

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  When Nighttime Shadows Fall - A...

  Diane Michael Cantor

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  A young social worker from Atlanta struggles to gain the trust of pregnant teens in rural Appalachia in this novel by the author of The Poisoned Table. 
   
  In the early 1970s, Laura Bauer decides to leave college and head fifty miles north of her comfortable Atlanta home to manage a federally funded project aiding pregnant teenagers from the back roads of Appalachia. Almost as young as her clients, Laura is immediately confronted with—and almost overwhelmed by—a variety of young women in desperate circumstances, having no other source of prenatal care. 
   
  When Nighttime Shadows Fall portrays the world of these girls with compassion, hardscrabble humor, and reverence for their families’ capacities to prevail despite hardships. Among the characters are Mavis, a defiant, tough-as-nails preacher’s daughter; Lisa, a victimized thirteen-year-old; Nell, a shy girl who is constantly berated by her domineering mother; and self-conscious Mandy, whose proud husband, twice her age, detests any form of charity. As an outsider whose urban upbringing is vastly different from those of her clients, Laura must win their trust and overcome her own inexperience and the magnitude of the need she finds. 
   
  The novel follows Laura as she struggles to locate her clients during their first trimesters, when they are still eligible for the project’s services but often trying to conceal their pregnancies. As she overcomes their suspicions and tries to help them during those first critical months, Laura comes to realize she has prepared at least a few of them to open doors to their unexpected futures, just as they have helped her find the determination to face her own. 
   
  When Nighttime Shadows Fall movingly portrays Laura’s clients as they search for love from boyfriends, husbands, and babies. Some find it, but ultimately, through powerful revelations, their strength comes from within. 
   
  “I read When Nighttime Shadows Fall and was transported—first to the city where I was raised and, later, to the region where I began my career. Diane Michael Cantor’s touching portrait of Lauren Bauer is a call for compassion and a reminder of how much most of us take for granted every day.” —Allen Mendenhall, editor, Southern Literary Review 
   
  “Cantor comes from the wide-awake lineage of writers Grace Paley and John Dos Passos, and we need more stories like this.” —Cynthia Shearer, author of The Wonder Book of the Air and The Celestial Jukebox

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  On Earth As It Is in Heaven - A...

  Davide Enia

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  A dark, gripping coming-of-age tale that explores violence, friendship, family, and what it means to be a manSummer, Palermo, early 1980s. The air hangs hot and heavy. The Mafia-ruled city is a powder keg ready to ignite. In a boxing gym, a fatherless nine-year-old boy climbs into the ring to face his first opponent.So begins On Earth as It Is in Heaven, a sweeping multigenerational saga that reaches back to the collapse of the Italian front in North Africa and forward to young Davidù's quest to become Italy's national boxing champion, a feat that has eluded the other men of his family.But Davide Enia, whose layered, lyrical, nonchronological novel caused a sensation when it was published in Italy in 2012, has crafted an epic that soars in miniature as well. The brutal struggles for dominance among Davidù's all male circle of friends; his strict but devoted grandmother, whose literacy is a badge of honor; his charismatic and manipulative great-uncle, who will become his trainer—the vicious scenes and sometimes unsympathetic characters Enia sketches land hard and true.On Earth as It Is in Heaven is both firmly grounded in what Leonardo Sciascia liked to call "Sicilitude" - the language and mentality of that eternally perplexing island - and devastatingly universal. A meditation on physical violence, love and sex, friendship and betrayal, boxing and ambition, Enia's novel is also a coming-of-age tale that speaks - sometimes crudely, but always honestly - about the joys and terrors of becoming a man.

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