Be sure you marry a pure-blooded Englishman.' The memory of this inexplicable command to nine-year-old Diana Quick by her terminally ill grandfather was to remain buried for years. It wasn't until she played Julia Flyte in the celebrated Granada TV dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited that it resurfaced, setting her on a quest to uncover the hidden enigma of her father's family in India. Gradually Diana unpeeled the layers of family secrets that revealed changed names, the stigma of being 'country born', her grandfather's obsessive ambition for his son. This knowledge helped her both to understand her own heritage and to interpret the roles she played on stage and screen. It also gave her pride in her family's history: the bravery of her great-grandmother who, as a child, narrowly escaped being murdered during the 1857 Indian Mutiny; her father's struggles as a penniless student in a foreign country.

Be sure you marry a pure-blooded Englishman.' The memory of this inexplicable command to nine-year-old Diana Quick by her terminally ill grandfather was to remain buried for years. It wasn't until she played Julia Flyte in the celebrated Granada TV dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited that it resurfaced, setting her on a quest to uncover the hidden enigma of her father's family in India. Gradually Diana unpeeled the layers of family secrets that revealed changed names, the stigma of being 'country born', her grandfather's obsessive ambition for his son. This knowledge helped her both to understand her own heritage and to interpret the roles she played on stage and screen. It also gave her pride in her family's history: the bravery of her great-grandmother who, as a child, narrowly escaped being murdered during the 1857 Indian Mutiny; her father's struggles as a penniless student in a foreign country.

We’ve pursued and achieved the modern dream of defining ourselves—but at what cost? An influential columnist and editor makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning. “Ahmari’s tour de force makes tradition astonishingly vivid and relevant for the here and now.”—Rod Dreher, bestselling author of Live Not by Lies and The Benedict Option As a young father and a self-proclaimed “radically assimilated immigrant,” opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari realized that when it comes to shaping his young son’s moral fiber, today’s America is woefully lacking. For millennia, the world’s great ethical and religious traditions have taught that true happiness lies in pursuing virtue and accepting limits. But now, unbound from these stubborn traditions, we are free to choose whichever way of life we think is most optimal—or, more often than not, merely the easiest. All that remains are the fickle desires that a wealthy, technologically advanced society is equipped to fulfill. The result is a society riven by deep conflict and individual lives that, for all their apparent freedom, are marked by alienation and stark unhappiness. In response to this crisis, Ahmari offers twelve questions for us to grapple with—twelve timeless, fundamental queries that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the lives and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Andrea Dworkin, Ahmari invites us to examine the hidden assumptions that drive our behavior and, in doing so, to live more humanely in a world that has lost its way.

Niya-Yur is a world at war! Shar-Lumen can’t be stopped, the gods have come out of their realm, and leaders on both sides are worried the world itself will suffer if a solution cannot be found. Ticca and Lebuin, with their elite Dagger team, have no choice but to follow the clues of Shar-Lumen’s plans, clues that lead them to the forbidden Circumveni Desert to discover his secrets. Yet, the Circumveni Desert is so deadly no one has ever returned from it in over five thousand years. Ticca and Lebuin come to realize that one of them must die to save the world.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A powerfully imagined novel . . . [a] profoundly moving book that engages the heights and depths of human experience.”—Los Angeles Times It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to find safety now that the Italians have broken from Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it quickly becomes an open battleground for the Nazis, the Allies, Resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive. Tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters—a charismatic Italian Resistance leader, a priest, an Italian rabbi’s family, a disillusioned German doctor—Mary Doria Russell tells the little-known story of the vast underground effort by Italian citizens who saved the lives of 43,000 Jews during the final phase of World War II. A Thread of Grace puts a human face on history. Praise for A Thread of Grace “An addictive page-turner . . . [Mary Doria] Russell has an astonishing story to tell—full of action, paced like a rapid-fire thriller, in tense, vivid scenes that move with cinematic verve.”—The Washington Post Book World “Hauntingly beautiful, utterly unforgettable.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Rich . . . Based on the heroism of ordinary people, [A Thread of Grace] packs an emotional punch.”—People “[A] deeply felt and compellingly written book . . . The progress of each character’s life is marked or measured by acts of grace. . . . Russell is a smart, passionate and imaginative writer.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A feat of storytelling . . . an important book [that] needs to be widely read.”—Portland Oregonian “Mary Doria Russell’s fans (and aren’t we all?) will rejoice to see her new novel on the shelves. A Thread of Grace is as ambitious, beautiful, tense, and transforming as any of us could have hoped.”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club “A story of love and war, A Thread of Grace speaks to the resilience and beauty of the human spirit in the midst of unimaginable horror. It is, unquestionably, a literary triumph.”—David Morrell, author of The Brotherhood of the Rose and First Blood

Includes section: "Some Michigan books."