The WWII memoir of a young German conscript who survived the Eastern Front and the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. Born in Munich in 1926, Hans Fackler was conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the age of seventeen. He became an infantryman on the brutal frontlines of the war in Russia. But after suffering a grievous injury from a grenade explosion, he could no longer fight. Hans was given morphine onboard the controversial Wilhelm Gustloff, an armed military ship which operated under the guise of transporting civilians. When the ship was sunk by Russian torpedoes, drowning more than 9,000 passengers, Hans was among the lucky few rescued by a German freighter. Hans recuperated in a military hospital near Erfurt in the Harz, which subsequently fell into the Russian zone. He escaped and undertook the arduous task of walking almost 200 miles back home to Bavaria. Screams of the Drowning is Hans’s extraordinary first-person account of his wartime experiences, as told to Klaus Willmann.

Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut. Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge--she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake. When Mathilda's husband comes home from the war, wounded and troubled himself, he finds that Amanda has taken charge of Ruth and the farm, assuming her responsibility with a frightening intensity. Wry and guarded, Amanda tells the story of her family in careful doses, as anxious to hide from herself as from us the secrets of her own past and of that night. Ruth, haunted by her own memory of that fateful night, grows up under the watchful eye of her prickly and possessive aunt and gradually becomes aware of the odd events of her childhood. As she tells her own story with increasing clarity, she reveals the mounting toll that her aunt's secrets exact from her family and everyone around her, until the heartrending truth is uncovered. Guiding us through the lives of the Starkey women, Christina Schwarz's first novel shows her compassion and a unique understanding of the American landscape and the people who live on it.

Important American periodical dating back to 1850.

Estella Danzetti lives the idealistic life as the daughter of a rich and powerful merchant in 14th century Venice but all this comes crashing down around her once she realizes that her Uncle Silvestro is responsible for her parents deaths. She is quickly sold into slavery and finds herself part of the harem of the sadistic Amir Shaykhu. She learns to adjust in her new situation but in her heart she burns with a vengeance to kill her uncle for everything he has done to her family. Now known as Huda, she gives birth to two children whom she builds her new world around and slowly the fire of vengeance is forgotten. However, due to a twist of fate, she and her daughter find themselves in the court of the Turkish prince Orhan, who her daughter is promised in marriage. It is while she is there that she is called upon to translate for a Venetian prisoner who she discovers is her cousin, the son of her Uncle Silvestro. It is at that exact moment of discovery that she sees, at last, an opportunity to become an avenging angel but she is torn by the fact that her daughter is pregnant with the princes child and that she has finally found the happiness she once had as a child. Her dilemma tears her apart and she knows that whatever road she chooses to follow, part of her will always second-guessing her decision. Set in the time of the emerging Renaissance in Italy, the friction between Constantinople and the Turks and the Black Death, Scarred is the story of every person who finds him or herself at a crossroad and hopes they choose the correct one.

In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than thirty feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance. Among them are fourteen-year-old Molly McHugh and her friend and employer, Felix Orlov. Once upon a time Orlov the Conjuror was a celebrated stage magician, but now he is an old man, a psychic medium, contacting the spirits of the departed for the grieving loved ones left behind. When a seance goes horribly wrong, Felix Orlov is abducted by strange men wearing gas masks and rubber suits, and Molly soon finds herself on the run. Her flight will lead her into the company of a mysterious man, and his stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem, whose own past is a mystery to him, but who walks his own dreams as a man of stone and clay, brought to life for the sole purpose of hunting witches.

A history of our time.