**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER · A New York Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of 2026 · A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the FallNational Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower, reveals how California’s Gold Rush forged the modern United States—and lit the long fuse to civil war**In January 1848, a carpenter spotted flecks of gold in a shallow stream at...

What happened to the ancient Egyptians? The Persians? The Romans? The Mayans? ARE WE THEIR DESCENDANTS?Recent genetic discoveries are uncovering surprising links between us and the peoples of old—links that rewrite race, ethnicity, and human history.Today’s Native Americans descend from Central Asians who arrived in the early A.D. era.Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still have clearly identifiable descendants, albeit rare ones.Every people group on earth...

"I don't think I can justify it any longer. I'm going to quit my job."August has never been good with change and isn't sure who she is beyond her job of reading memories in the sand. When she comes to the conclusion that she has to quit her job, she's left with an overwhelming sense of emptiness. What follows is the quiet chaos of a girl regaining control over her life on a small desert moon.Deciding to take a job in the hanging gardens of the Spire, August...

The Big Book of Christmas Novels, Stories, Myths & Carols surveys Christmas as sacred observance, domestic ritual, folk inheritance, and imaginative escape. Its capacious selection moves among realist fiction, fairy tale, ghost story, children's literature, lyric devotion, humorous sketches, legends, and carols, placing familiar seasonal narratives beside rarer transatlantic and European materials. Accounts of generosity, poverty, hospitality, wonder, memory, and moral renewal reveal how C...

**From the author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye--the riveting bestseller tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick.Winner of the National Book Award, Nathaniel Philbrick's book is a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of whaling, with deep resonance in American literature and history.In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sper...

“The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”Hester Prynne has given birth to a child out of wedlock. Humiliated, jailed, and forced to wear a scarlet A (for adultress) on her dress, Hester settles with her daughter Pearl at the edge of the town and...

As a serial killer targets prostitutes in Southern California, a troubled traffic cop picks up the trail in this thrilling prequel to The Girl on the Bus .This audiobook is narrated using advanced digital voice technology for clear, natural-sounding storytelling.When traffic cop Leighton Jones is called to sort out an altercation in a used car lot, he is confronted by a prostitute rambling on about a girl...

NEW YORK CITY, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of a cavernous office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is...

Officer Leighton Jones returns in a gripping and fast-paced serial killer thriller from the author of The Girl on the Bus and Carpenter Road .This audiobook is narrated using advanced digital voice technology for clear, natural-sounding storytelling.Two seven-year-old girls, Tina and Suzy, are playing in a dusty creek when a stranger appears and strikes up a co...

First published in 1850, “The Scarlet Letter” is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels. Its themes of sin, guilt, and redemption, woven through a story of adultery in the early days of the Massachusetts Colony, are revealed with remarkable psychological penetration and understanding of the human heart. Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and...

The bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and In the Hurricane's Eye tells the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution, in this "masterpiece of narrative and perspective." (Boston Globe)**In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns his keen eye to pre-Revolutionary Boston and the spark that ignited the American Revolution. In the aftermath of the Boston T...

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family’s salvation—or its downfall. A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, the novel is a powerful ...