The year is 1624. In southwestern Taiwan the Dutch establish a trading settlement; in Nagasaki a boy is born who will become immortalized as Ming dynasty loyalist Koxinga. Lord of Formosa tells the intertwined stories of Koxinga and the Dutch colony from their beginnings to their fateful climax in 1662. The year before, as Ming China collapsed in the face of the Manchu conquest, Koxinga retreated across the Taiwan Strait intent on expelling the Dutch. Thus began a nine-month battl...

A powerful novel of America's Civil War told through the voices of Confederate soldiers, turncoats, and Stonewall Jackson in the weeks leading up to the great slaughter at AntietamIn the summer of 1862, as the Civil War rages on, a ragtag Confederate army consisting of young boys and old men, storekeepers, farmers, and teachers, gathers in Virginia under the leadership of Tom "Stonewall" Jackson, ready to follow their sainted commander to glory—or hell. One of these...

Solovetsky occupies the island site of a former monastery in the White Sea. Here, hundreds of miles from civilization and with a skeleton crew of secret-policemen in charge, some prisoners are consigned to all kinds of forced labor while others sit at comfortable desks in administrative or cultural positions. With the brutal winter fast approaching, Tolya Bogomolov, a young mathematician serving a three-year sentence, hopes an acquaintance he’s been cultivating will lead to a less brutal w...

The Terrific Second Book in the New Horseshoer Mystery Series, Featuring the Incorrigible Female Horse Shoer Rainy DaleA dead blow hammer leaves little to no mark on the surface it strikes. It’s not a shoer’s tool, but horseshoer Rainy Dale knows them and knows there are more questions than answers about how her new client became a widow. The old woman says there was hardly a bruise on her dead husband. Why was he driving his tractor so dangerously near the killer ...

The first book in a huge, bloody and brutal new series from Robert Fabbri, set after the death of Alexander the Great. Who will win the fight to control the largest empire the world has ever seen? Let the battles begin . . ."I foresee great struggles at my funeral games."Babylon, 323 BC: Alexander the Great is dead, leaving behind him the largest, and most fearsome, empire the world has ever seen. As his final breaths fade in a room of seven bodyguards, Alexander refuses to n...

For the first time, all three of Victorian medium Sybil Ingram’s book-length adventures are available in one collection! Now you can own all three full-length novels and five novelettes/short stories starring the intrepid actress-turned-detective as she uncovers mystery, hauntings, and romance. The set contains:Nocturne for a Widow (book 1): Sybil retires from the theater and stakes a claim on a haunted house, where she investigates a mystery and l...

A tale of personal discovery, familial obligations, and competing cultural expectations is at the heart of this exciting sequel to The Samurai of Seville.Soledad Maria, called Masako by her father, is a child of two worlds. Born in Seville in the seventeenth century, she is the daughter of a beloved Spanish lady and a fearsome samurai warrior sent to Spain as a member of one of the most intriguing cultural exchanges in history.After her mother's deat...

This "taut narrative" of the fourteenth-century conflict between England and France offers "a detailed, climactic account of a legendary battle" ( Publishers Weekly).The epic fourteenth-century Battle of Poitiers marked a major turn in the Hundred Years' War between England and France. Prince Edward, known to all as the Black Prince, not only won a surprising victory in his first campaign as commander, but managed the nearly impossible feat of taking the F...

The story of the daughter of Alfred the Great, who fought against Viking invaders and ruled a kingdom in the tenth century.Alfred the Great's daughter defied all expectations of a well-bred Saxon princess. The first Saxon woman ever to rule a kingdom, Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, led her army in battle against Viking invaders. She further broke with convention by arranging for her daughter to succeed her on the throne of Mercia.To protect her people a...

"An extraordinary book, a gripping trip back through time to discover a different but still unique Venice and its political intrigues and mysteries" ( Art as a Part of Culture).In a medieval Venice ravaged by famine and orgiastic revelries, the protagonists of The Apothecary's Shop explore the depths of the city and the paths to the supernatural in their search for a missing child.The young Costanza, of the noble Grimani family, has disapp...

This novel by a New York Times–bestselling author follows three "bold, courageous, and entertaining" women through the tumult of the French Revolution ( Booklist).For Claire Lacombe and Pauline Leon, two poor women of eighteenth-century France, the lofty ideals of the coming revolution could not seem more abstract. But when Claire sees the gaping disparity between the poverty she has known and the lavish lives of aristocrats as her theater group pe...

A novel set during the reign of Genghis Khan and his Mongol Empire from the acclaimed author of Ghost on the Steppe, "a master storyteller" ( Houston Chronicle).Cecelia Holland's historical fiction is well known for its immersion in exotic cultures, and Until the Sun Falls, one of her most successful books, takes the reader into the heart of the Mongol horde during the conquest of Russia and eastern Europe in the thirteenth century.