In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In...

Brash young apprentice Johnny Tremain, injured in an accident that leaves him unable to practice his trade, becomes involved with Rab, a Boston printer, who draws Johnny with him into the events of the Revolutionary War.

The Caribbean, 1665. A remote colony of the English Crown, the island of Jamaica holds out against the vast supremacy of the Spanish empire. Port Royal, its capital, is a cutthroat town of taverns, grog shops, and bawdy houses. In this steamy climate there's a living to be made, a living that can end swiftly by disease -- or by dagger. For Captain Charles Hunter, gold in Spanish hands is gold for the taking, and the law of the land rests with those...

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors. It's just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. Set during World War II in Germany, Markus...

Mormon elders in the town of Cottonwoods pressure the widow Jane Withersteen to remarry so that her lands and herds will remain in their control. Gradually they frighten away most of her cowboys, and rustlers steal away her cattle, but the gunfighter Lassiter stands by her as the inevitable confrontation draws near.

"When the glamorous Phryne Fisher, accompanied by Dot, decides to leave her delightfully fast, red Hispano-Suiza at home and travel to the country in the train, the last thing she expects is to have to use her trusty Beretta .32 to save their lives. What was planned as a restful country sojourn turns into the stuff of nightmares: a young girl who can't remember anything, rumors of vile white slavery and the body of an old woman missing her emerald...

"The names of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler have been emblazoned in the memories of generations of readers who have made Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind one of the most beloved sagas in American literature. Here is the sweeping take of Scarlett, raised to be a southern lady of leisure, and her world, which changes irrevocably during the Civil War. Scarlett's struggle is that of the south--trying to scrape together a life of decency and meaning...

This Pulitzer Prize-winning classic centers around the key battle of the war: the battle of Gettysburg. In July of 1863, the Confederate Army, led by General Robert E. Lee, invaded the North, in order to deal a fatal blow to the Union Army. Lee's right hand man was the loyal General Longstreet. Opposing them was General George Meade, an unknown quantity at best. In the four most bloody and courageous days of the Civil War, their armies fought, one...

As a detachment of Union soldiers trains and prepares for their first Civil War battle, a young private worries about his ability to endure the horror of the battlefield. His fellow soldiers seem to him to be fearless in the face of the coming conflict. He does indeed lose his courage in his first action and flees in panic, only to recover himself and return to his regiment to fight bravely.

Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father, the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the communist regime.