Rice Bread I was a poor, hungry boy, going to school, on an early morning, of a chilly winter day, needing to grab a bite. You sat on your legs, on the bare kitchen floor, to build a fire with a few stagnant, wet twigs and damp roots, to heat the iron pan to bake a rice-bread for me. You vehemently fought with the heavy smoke for a long while until your eyes moistened; you failed to light the wood, and gave up. The steel pan didn't heat; the rice dough remained untouched. I went to school empty-stomached, shivering, without a bite. I never minded hunger if I only had a dinner last night. I didn't know building a fire was that hard or impossible in a country floating on a lake of oil and gas. Five long and hard decades had passed; with all the riches, plenty milk and honey America can afford, my silk shirts and ties, overseas travels, imported wine, my alms to the needy and exiled, my open house, I still keen for your naked rice bread, for your redolent hugs' warmth in the chilly winter days, under the generous eyes of the immortal sun. I was a tattered, poverty-stricken, half-naked, half-starved, bare-footed lad, yet far away from the savage clash of adamant, civilized swords, the aches of horrendous calamities and atrocities, the evil and hatred of my malevolent, villainous world. In the waterfall of waned memories, I often drown and weep like a hungry, orphan child keening to your cardamom, compassion, and rice-bread. In retrospect, that hunger, poverty, and deprivation taught me tolerance, endurance, to be human after all. I learned never to live for food; "Not only by bread a man lives." I rarely slept without nostalgically and pensively recalling your misfortunate, sorrowful face, your smoke-stifled, withered, tearful eyes, as you vehemently struggled to build a fire.

Sequel to The Shadow of Albion (1999), Sarah, the Duchess of Wessex, settled into her new life among the English nobility, "is suddenly yanked back to her home in America. Confronted with her old life, her old loves, familiar places, and rough-and-ready frontier life, Sarah must also face a political and religious conspiracy that challenges her every belief."--Jacket.

"Exile is a band with a diverse history. The group formed in 1963 looking to play small clubs in Richmond, Kentucky, but managed to top both the pop and the country charts during a ten-year span in the late 1970s and 1980s. "Kiss You All Over" was a major hit in 1978, spending four weeks at the top of Billboard's pop chart. After several less successful follow-up singles, the band decided to make a move to country music. This resulted in 10 number one country hits. All of this success led to an induction into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2013. The years leading up to the release of "Kiss You All Over" represent an important and often misunderstood period in the band's history. During this time they played on three of Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars tours, released a series of singles and two full-length albums, worked with Tommy James, and played all over the Central Kentucky area and beyond. This book pays close attention to that era. In addition, a talented group of Kentucky musicians helped to rejuvenate the band in the 1990s, and this book tells their stories as well."--Provided by publisher.

Austin Voronkov is many things. He is an engineer, an inventor, an immigrant from Russia to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1913, where he gets a job at a rifle factory. At the house where he rents a room, he falls in love with a woman named Julia, who becomes his wife and the mother of his three children. When Austin is wrongly accused of attending anarchist gatherings his limited grasp of English condemns him to his fate as a deportee, retreating with his new bride to his home in Russia, where he and his young family become embroiled in the Civil War and must flee once again, to Mexico. While Julia and the children are eventually able to return to the U.S., Austin becomes indefinitely stranded in Mexico City because of the black mark on his record. He keeps a daily correspondence with Julia, as they each exchange their hopes and fears for the future, and as they struggle to remain a family across a distance of two countries. Austin becomes convinced that his engineering designs will be awarded patents, thereby paving the way for the government to approve his return and award his long sought-after American citizenship. At the same time he becomes convinced that an FBI agent is monitoring his every move, with the intent of blocking any possible return to the United States. Austin and Julia's struggles build to crisis and heartrending resolution in this dazzling, sweeping debut. The novel is based in part on Vanessa Manko's family history and the life of a grandfather she never knew. Manko used this history as a jumping off point for the novel, which focuses on borders between the past and present, sanity and madness, while the very real U.S.-Mexico border looms. The novel also explores how loss reshapes and transforms lives. It is a deeply moving testament to the enduring power of family and the meaning of home.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A must-read for anyone who loves history and art.” --Kristin Hannah From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World. "Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden." To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century. As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists. Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.

In the year 2034, Theo Quderian, a French physicist, made an amusing but impractical discovery: the means to use a one-way, fixed-focus time warp that opened into a place in the Rhone River valley during the idyllic Pliocene Epoch, six million years ago. But, as time went on, a certain usefulness developed. The misfits and mavericks of the future—many of them brilliant people—began to seek this exit door to a mysterious past. In 2110, a particularly strange and interesting group was preparing to make the journey—a starship captain, a girl athlete, a paleontologist, a woman priest, and others who had reason to flee the technological perfection of twenty-second-century life. Thus begins this dazzling fantasy novel that invites comparisons with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula Le Quin. It opens up a whole world of wonder, not in far-flung galaxies but in our own distant past on Earth—a world that will captivate not only science-fiction and fantasy fans but also those who enjoy literate thrillers. The group that passes through the time-portal finds an unforeseen strangeness on the other side. Far from being uninhabited, Pliocene Europe is the home of two warring races from another planet. There is the knightly race of the Tanu—handsome, arrogant, and possessing vast powers of psychokinesis and telepathy. And there is the outcast race of Firvulag—dwarfish, malev-o olent, and gifted with their own supernormal skills. Taken captive by the Tanu and transported through the primordial European landscape, the humans manage to break free, join in an uneasy alliance with the forest-dwelling Firvulag, and, finally, launch an attack against the Tanu city of light on the banks of a river that, eons later, would be called the Rhine. Myth and legend, wit and violence, speculative science and breathtaking imagination mingle in this romantic fantasy, which is the first volume in a series about the exile world. The sequel, titled The Golden Torc, will follow soon.

Russian Nobel prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures—and perhaps the most important writer—of the last century. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, the first English translation of his memoir of the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 1, is being published. Fast-paced, absorbing, and as compelling as the earlier installments of his memoir The Oak and the Calf (1975), Between Two Millstones begins on February 13, 1974, when Solzhenitsyn found himself forcibly expelled to Frankfurt, West Germany, as a result of the publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn moved to Zurich, Switzerland, for a time and was considered the most famous man in the world, hounded by journalists and reporters. During this period, he found himself untethered and unable to work while he tried to acclimate to his new surroundings. Between Two Millstones contains vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn's journeys to various European countries and North American locales, where he and his wife Natalia (“Alya”) searched for a location to settle their young family. There are fascinating descriptions of one-on-one meetings with prominent individuals, detailed accounts of public speeches such as the 1978 Harvard University commencement, comments on his television appearances, accounts of his struggles with unscrupulous publishers and agents who mishandled the Western editions of his books, and the KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. There are also passages on Solzhenitsyn's family and their property in Cavendish, Vermont, whose forested hillsides and harsh winters evoked his Russian homeland, and where he could finally work undisturbed on his ten-volume dramatized history of the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel. Stories include the efforts made to assure a proper education for the writer's three sons, their desire to return one day to their home in Russia, and descriptions of his extraordinary wife, editor, literary advisor, and director of the Russian Social Fund, Alya, who successfully arranged, at great peril to herself and to her family, to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's invaluable archive out of the Soviet Union. Between Two Millstones is a literary event of the first magnitude. The book dramatically reflects the pain of Solzhenitsyn's separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western society.