“A sprawling fantasy saga . . . Caleb Carr boldly goes where he’s never gone before.”—USA Today Legend meets history in this mesmerizing novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Caleb Carr. Demonstrating the rich storytelling, skillful plotting, and depth of research he showcased in The Alienist, Carr has written a wildly imaginative, genre-bending saga that redefines the boundaries of literature. Some years ago, a remarkable manuscript long rumored to exist was discovered: The Legend of Broken. It tells of a prosperous fortress city where order reigns at the point of a sword—even as scheming factions secretly vie for control of the surrounding kingdom. Meanwhile, outside the city’s granite walls, an industrious tribe of exiles known as the Bane forages for sustenance in the wilds of Davon Wood. At every turn, the lives of Broken’s defenders and its would-be destroyers intertwine: Sixt Arnem, the widely respected and honorable head of the kingdom’s powerful army, grapples with his conscience and newfound responsibilities amid rumors of impending war. Lord Baster-kin, master of the Merchants’ Council, struggles to maintain the magnificence of his kingdom even as he pursues vainglorious dreams of power. And Keera, a gifted female tracker of the Bane tribe, embarks on a perilous journey to save her people, enlisting the aid of the notorious and brilliant philosopher Caliphestros. Together, they hope to exact a ruinous revenge on Broken, ushering in a day of reckoning when the mighty walls will be breached forever in a triumph of science over superstition. Breathtakingly profound and compulsively readable, Caleb Carr’s long-awaited new book is an action-packed, multicharacter epic of a medieval clash of cultures—in which new gods collide with old, science defies all expectation, and virtue comes in many guises. Brimming with adventure and narrative invention, The Legend of Broken is an exhilarating and enthralling masterwork. Praise for The Legend of Broken “An excellent and old-fashioned entertainment . . . The Legend of Broken seamlessly blends epic adventure with serious research and asks questions that men and women grappled with in the Dark Ages and still do today.”—The Washington Post “[A] colossal effort . . . a fantasy epic . . . meant as an allegory, a cautionary tale for our precarious times. To make his points, Carr has summoned a dream team of soldiers, wizards, and tiny forest folk.”—The New York Times Book Review “Carr keeps the action hurtling along with a steady diet of gruesome murders and political betrayals. And he clearly wants modern readers to see something of their own world in the political corruption and greed that ultimately doom Broken.”—The Boston Globe

This book examines why a woman who was firmly labeled an unbeliever would take up the cause of Judaism and its promise of nationhood and statehood.

"A bold feat of imagination . . . . Intriguing and moving: a fictional recovery of the woman's interior experience . . . and a powerful meditation upon the nature of creativity. Both an arresting interpretation of George Eliot's work and a compelling fiction in its own right." —Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch In an astonishing unsent love letter, a 19th-century Englishwoman looks back at her formative years, when she fell in love with one man but married another—the richest bidder—to save her family Gwendolen Harleth, an exceptionally beautiful upper-class Englishwoman, is gambling boldly at a resort when she catches the eye of a handsome, pensive gentleman. His gaze unnerves her, and she loses her winnings. The next day, she learns that her widowed mother and younger sisters, for whom she is financially responsible, have lost their family's fortune. As a young woman in the 1860s with only her looks to serve her, Gwendolen's options are few, so when Henleigh Grandcourt, a wealthy aristocrat, proposes to her, she accepts, despite her discovery of an alarming secret about his past. During their marriage, Grandcourt is psychologically and physically brutal to her, shattering her confidence. Gwendolen begins to encounter the alluring gentleman from the resort—Daniel Deronda—in her social circles, but Grandcourt, cold and calculating, takes pains to isolate her from everything she loves. Gwendolen's desperation nearly overcomes her, until an unexpected turn of events suddenly liberates her from Grandcourt's tyranny and leaves her financially independent. Newly free, but riddled with insecurity and desire, Gwendolen must take painful steps to shape a life that has not gone according to plan. Gwendolen and her world, originally creations of George Eliot, are inhabited and brought to sympathetic and nuanced life in this irresistible debut novel by Diana Souhami, an award-winning British biographer.

The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.

Leah Abramovitz, a cossetted member of the upper echelons of Odessan society, has high hopes for a brilliant future-that is until Fate takes a hand. When confronted with alarming changes in political and societal mores, the family decide to flee and chart a course that will forever alter their lives. Will her dreams be washed away on the shores of Buenos Aires or will Leah finally achieve the freedom to design her own destiny?