NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE “If you read one debut novel in 2022, this should be it.” —Los Angeles Times In the bustling streets and cloistered homes of Lagos, a cast of vivid characters—some haunted, some defiant—navigate danger, demons, and love in a quest to lead true lives. As in Nigeria, vagabonds are those whose existence is literally outlawed: the queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits. They are those who inhabit transient spaces, who make their paths and move invisibly, who embrace apparitions, old vengeances and alternative realities. Eloghosa Osunde's brave, fiercely inventive novel traces a wild array of characters for whom life itself is a form of resistance: a driver for a debauched politician with the power to command life and death; a legendary fashion designer who gives birth to a grown daughter; a lesbian couple whose tender relationship sheds unexpected light on their experience with underground sex work; a wife and mother who attends a secret spiritual gathering that shifts her world. As their lives intertwine—in bustling markets and underground clubs, churches and hotel rooms—vagabonds are seized and challenged by spirits who command the city's dark energy. Whether running from danger, meeting with secret lovers, finding their identities, or vanquishing their shadowselves, Osunde's characters confront and support one another, before converging for the once-in-a-lifetime gathering that gives the book its unexpectedly joyous conclusion. Blending unvarnished realism with myth and fantasy, Vagabonds! is a vital work of imagination that takes us deep inside the hearts, minds, and bodies of a people in duress—and in triumph.

A “fascinating slice of rarely considered American history” (Booklist)—the story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—whose annual summer sojourns introduced the road trip to our culture and made the automobile an essential part of modern life. In 1914 Henry Ford and naturalist John Burroughs visited Thomas Edison in Florida and toured the Everglades. The following year Ford, Edison, and tire maker Harvey Firestone joined together on a summer camping trip and decided to call themselves the Vagabonds. They would continue their summer road trips until 1925, when they announced that their fame made it too difficult for them to carry on. Although the Vagabonds traveled with an entourage of chefs, butlers, and others, this elite fraternity also had a serious purpose: to examine the conditions of America’s roadways and improve the practicality of automobile travel. Cars were unreliable and the roads were even worse. But newspaper coverage of these trips was extensive, and as cars and roads improved, the summer trip by automobile soon became a desired element of American life. The Vagabonds is “a portrait of America’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile” (NPR) but it also sheds light on the important relationship between the older Edison and the younger Ford, who once worked for the famous inventor. The road trips made the automobile ubiquitous and magnified Ford’s reputation, even as Edison’s diminished. The automobile would transform the American landscape, the American economy, and the American way of life and Guinn brings this seminal moment in history to vivid life.

The riveting story of control over the mobility of poor migrants, and how their movements shaped current perceptions of class and status in the United States Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations. Vagrants and Vagabonds examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US. Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic.

A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this “thoughtful debut” (Kirkus Reviews) from Hugo Award–winning author Hao Jingfang. This “masterful narrative” (Booklist, starred review) is set on Earth in the wake of a second civil war…not between two factions in one nation, but two factions in one solar system: Mars and Earth. In an attempt to repair increasing tensions, the colonies of Mars send a group of young people to live on Earth to help reconcile humanity. But the group finds itself with no real home, no friends, and fractured allegiances as they struggle to find a sense of community and identity trapped between two worlds.

In September of 1937, Eagle Scout Tom Larson put a packsack on his back and set out to see the world. After two years at the University of Minnesota, he hitchhiked westward from his hometown of Aitkin, Minnesota. Eight months later as a seaman on a west coast oil tanker, he'd saved $250 dollars. After riding on freight cars and hitchhiking, he arrived in New York City. Luckily he was able to work passage on a Danish freighter to Antwerp, Belgium. Then on his bicycle "Napoleon" he traveled through Belgium and Holland and thence through England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Across the North Sea to Norway he cycled through Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, the three Baltic states into Poland and Nazi Germany. In Paris he met his friend, Eagle Scout Edwin Woolverton, of Albert Lea, Minnesota. After wild and hilarious adventures in France and Belgium, they crossed the Mediterranean to Algeria. They took refuge in the youth hostel in Sidi Bou Said, Tunesia. From there their vagabond travels took them to Sardinia, Italy, Switzerland, and back into Germany. Back in Paris they mingled with refugees before making one last journey into West German bordertowns and Holland. War threatened at any day. Luckily in late March of 1939, they worked their way home on a Norwegian freighter through a great North Atlantic storm to New York, just four months before the Nazis invaded Poland and began WWII. On December 7th, 1941, Tom ended up in the Battle of Pearl Harbor. Edwin Woolverton served on numerous merchant ships during the war. They survived on a shoe-string budget, good luck, oatmeal and Scout hospitality.

Two ex-Green Berets recount their missions after two decades in Special Forces, from running counter-terrorism training to rescuing kidnap victims & more. A lot of confusion, a lot of humor, a lot of broken dreams and broken promises, an occasional triumph . . . 1978—A chance meeting on a remote military airbase between two Green Berets involved in the same operation leads to a partnership that will last over forty years. Four years after that meeting, Nick Brokhausen and Jeff Miller leave the service within a few weeks of each other and begin an odyssey that takes them to dozens of countries on five continents. Along with a small coterie of fellow former Special Operations and intelligence community veterans like Penguini, Max, Reek, The Spider Woman, and a score of others—some heroes and some villains—they undertake a variety of missions for the government, other governments, large multinational corporations mostly in the aerospace or resource development industries, and occasionally just for suffering individuals who cannot find help anywhere else. In the process they lay the groundwork for an entire new industry of private military contractors. Two men sadly just a bit ahead of their time. Every episode in this book actually happened. Not always precisely as described herein, but close. Changes have been made sometimes to make the narrative flow more smoothly, some to obfuscate events that might be flirting with classification issues . . . Names have been changed, not always to protect the innocent. But the underlying story is, for the most part, the reality as they lived it. “A fascinating account of an extraordinary series of adventures.” —Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International