In seventh-century China, during the great Tang dynasty, a young girl from the humble Wu clan entered the imperial gynaecium, which housed ten thousand concubines. Inside the Forbidden City, she witnessed seductions, plots, murders, and brazen...
The Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year (nominee)
To rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin, seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor's wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking...
April 1915, and it has become apparent that the war will be neither glorious nor short. England is changing, rapidly in some aspects, and the feuding between military and politicians is just beginning.
The three remaining midshipmen, two...
Enemy of God is the second novel of the Warlord series, and immediately follows the events described in The Winter King. In that book the King of Dumnonia and High King of Britain, Uther, dies and is succeeded by his lamed baby grandson, Mordred....
Audacious. Wildly ambitious. Prolific. All describe William T. Vollmann, author of the seven-volume nonfiction work Rising Up and Rising Down and “Seven Dreams” sequence of novels, which the Chicago Tribune hailed as “likely to...
From T. H. White's The Once And Future King to Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists Of Avalon, the legend of King Arthur has haunted and inspired generations of writers to reinvent the ancient story. In The Winter King and Enemy Of God, Bernard...
Exodus is an international publishing phenomenon--the towering novel of the twentieth century's most dramatic geopolitical event. Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies--the beginning of an...
October 1913 and the St Vincent is in Portsmouth harbour, where four midshipmen have come to the end of their first two-year cruise. Called to Captain Ironside’s cabin, they learn their fate. Three are made sublieutenant, the fourth is pushed out...