An epic saga based on true events of the American West—with the trailblazing fur trappers and the mountain men who lived it. This is an unforgettable journey into the untamed American frontier. Where nature is cruel, violence lurks behind every tree, and where only the strongest of the strong survive. This is a story of America. TO THE RIVER’S END Luke Ransom was just eighteen years old when he answered an ad in a St. Louis newspaper that would change his life forever. The American Fur Company needed one-hundred enterprising men to travel up the Missouri River—the longest in North America—all the way to its source. They would hunt and trap furs for one, two, or three years. Along the way, they would face unimaginable hardships: grueling weather, wild animals, hunger, exhaustion, and hostile attacks by the Blackfeet and Arikara. Luke Ransom was one of the brave men chosen for the job—and one of the few to survive . . . Five years later, Luke is a seasoned trapper and hunter, a master of his trade. The year is 1833, and the American Fur Company is sending him to the now-famous Rendezvous at Green River. For Luke, it may be his last job for the company. After facing death countless times, he is ready to strike out on his own. But when he encounters a fellow trapper under attack by Indians, his life takes an unexpected turn. A new friendship is forged in blood. And a dangerous new journey begins…

When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the earth,” rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers, among them Twain and, in his seminal 1987 New Yorker account, John McPhee. Now Simon Winchester, the consummate, critically acclaimed storyteller and bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, turns his eye to what could well be the height of the battle, one increasingly doomed by man’s interference. The most fateful instance of this interference was accomplished by an inventor and steamboat captain, Henry Miller Shreve, in the nineteenth century. In vivid detail, Winchester re-creates the smashing and digging and the great man- and steam power that Shreve wielded to clear the river of snags and logjams and, in order to shorten the passage to New Orleans, carve an entirely new channel for it. What no one foresaw was that his celebrated shortcut, Shreve’s Cut, would form a sloping chute to an adjacent river, the Atchafalaya, and, aided by gravity and shifting weather patterns, increasingly tempt the waters of the Mississippi in its direction. Resisting this trend with ever more ingenious methods (and ever more expense) began just after, first with a system of levees, then with added spillways, and, finally, with the conception and construction of a floodgate system, the Old River Control Structure, still in place today. And the stakes are high: If—many say when—the Atchafalaya captures the Mississippi’s stream, it will be the end of life as it’s currently known in the American South. The great cities of Louisiana—New Orleans and Baton Rouge—would be rendered fetid swamps; entire sections of the American infrastructure, from pipelines to electricity and water supply, would collapse. Homes would be displaced and livelihoods, if not lives, would be lost. Deftly combining the hydrological and the historical, Winchester tours the challenges that upped the ante on the Mississippi River Commission’s duty to protect the watershed and its inhabitants: the upheavals that came in the form of the Great Flood of 1927, one of the most destructive natural disasters of all time, displacing more people than almost any event in American history, and the record-breaking inundations of 1937 and 1973. He pays tribute to the Army Corps of Engineers, for their Herculean efforts to keep the river on its current track, and to one civilian, Albert Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein, a hydraulic engineer and one of the main architects of the mighty control structure that continues to divide the Mississippi from the Atchafalaya. But how long can it hold in a time when extremes of weather are the norm, when storms come faster and more furiously, sending sediment-loaded water pounding against the floodgates—events that not only pit man against nature but, given that we cannot always agree which causes and correctives to pursue, man against man? In this elegant synthesis of past and present, the exigencies of the natural world and the human, Winchester offers an engrossing cautionary tale that readers cannot afford to ignore. It is a call to arms that asks whether accepting defeat—letting nature take its course—may be the only way to win.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A fiery tour de force... I could not put this book down. It truly was terrifying and unutterably beautiful." -Alison Borden, The Denver Post From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip--a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.

From an early age, author Paul Vincent has been drawn to the night. With hope and joy, he has looked forward to sunsets and oncoming nights, a attitude counter to a thousand common religious metaphors. In The Star at the End of the River, Vincent shares his important life experiences in order to illustrate how to transform conventional religious ideas about darkness. Bringing to bear his forty years' experience as an amateur astronomer, Vincent shows how sustained night-sky observation enhances the human receptivity to transcendent departure. He examines one of the many treasures of the heavens, a star-which, under the paradoxes of the mystical journey, is the most apt symbol of the human hope for eternal happiness. The Star at the End of the River proposes a new kind of mysticism-an ascent, not of a mountain, as in the traditional metaphor, but of an inclined plane. Vincent sketches a spiritual journey of marked gradualism and invites contemplation of the mystical power of such pedestrian experiences and objects as supermarket aisles, interior stairways, gooseflesh, and penmanship.

In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

With brokenness and humility, three generations of women return to their roots to discover who they are and who they are meant to be.

A man must confront a terrifying evil in this captivating horror novel that's "as much F. Scott Fitzgerald as Dean Koontz."* Haunted by memories of the Great War, failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family's old estate--the Savoyard Plantation--and the horrors that occurred there. At first their new life seems to be everything they wanted. But under the facade of summer socials and small-town charm, there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice. It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of the Savoyard Plantation still stand. Where a long-smoldering debt of blood has never been forgotten. Where it has been waiting for Frank Nichols....