It is 1939. Lavender--La to her friends--decides to flee London, not only to avoid German bombs but also to escape the memories of her shattered marriage. Settling in as small town, she organizes an amateur orchestra from the village and the local RAF base and falls in love with one of her prized recruits.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize–winning, internationally bestselling author.

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old...

"London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion--the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Soon after a demobilized British soldier, ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, takes shelter with the group, Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners. Maisie is deeply puzzled by the children's reticence. Their stories are evasive and, more mysteriously,...

"Mrs. Braithwaite, self-appointed queen of her English village, finds herself dethroned, despised, and dismissed following her husband's selfish divorce petition. Never deterred, the threat of a family secret being revealed sets her hot-foot to London to find the only person she has left--her clever daughter Betty, who took work there at the first rumbles of war. But when she arrives, Betty's landlord, the timid Mr. Norris, informs her that Betty...

Set in London and Cornwall from World War II to present,The Shell Seekerstells the story of the Keeling family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The family centers around Penelope, and it is her love, courage, and sense of values that determine the course of all their lives, Deftly shifting back and forth in time, each chapter centers on one of the principal players in the family's history. the...

"It is September 1940-a year into the war-and as German bombs fall on Britain, fears grow of an impending invasion. Enemy fighter planes blacken the sky around the Epping Forest home of Susan Shepherd and her grandfather, Bertie. After losing her parents to influenza as a child, Susan found comfort in raising homing pigeons with Bertie. All her birds are extraordinary to Susan-loyal, intelligent, beautiful-but none more so than Duchess. Hatched from...

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured the golden age of comic books, interwining history, legend and story-telling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to create a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that re-imagines the classic 19th-century detective story.

In deep retirement in the English countryside, an 89-year old man, vaguely recollected

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"1939. As the wife of the King George VI and the mother of the future queen, Elizabeth, the queen mother--shows a warm, smiling face to the world. But it's no surprise that Hitler himself calls her the 'most dangerous woman in Europe.' For behind that soft voice and kindly demeanor is a will of steel ... Elizabeth holds many powerful cards, she's also hiding damaging secrets about her past and her provenance that could prove to be her undoing. In...

"Liverpool, 1935: Raised in a strict Catholic family, Viv Byrne knows what's expected of her: marry a Catholic man from her working-class neighborhood and have his children. However, when she finds herself pregnant after a fling with Joshua Levinson, a Jewish man with dreams of becoming a famous Jazz musician, Viv knows that a swift wedding is the only answer. Her only solace is that marrying Joshua will mean escaping her strict mother's scrutiny....