November 22nd
New Fiction
A man stands bewildered on a deserted beach on the Hebridean Isle of Harris, Scotland. He cannot remember who he is. The only clue to his identity is a folded map of a path named the Coffin Road. He does not know where this search will take him. Meanwhile, a detective from Lewis sits aboard a boat, filled with doubt. Homicide detective George Gunn knows that a bludgeoned corpse has been discovered on a remote rock twenty miles offshore. He does not know if he has what it takes to uncover how and why. At the same time, a teenage girl lies in her Edinburgh bedroom, desperate to discover the truth about her scientist father's suicide. Two years on, Karen Fleming still cannot accept that he would wilfully abandon her. She does not yet know his secret. Peter May’s Coffin Road follows three perilous journeys towards one shocking truth - and the realisation that ignorance can kill us.
As a young girl, Dita is imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Taken from her home in Prague in 1939, Dita does her best to adjust to the constant terror of her new reality. But even amidst horror, human strength and ingenuity persevere. When Jewish leader Fredy Hirsch entrusts Dita with eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak into the camp, she embraces the responsibility and so becomes the librarian of Auschwitz. The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe is an incredible story of a girl who risked everything to preserve the legacy and vital knowledge of books during the Holocaust.
Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them. Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone. The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell is a powerful and propulsive story of two families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.
New Non-Fiction
Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented, courageous, and strikingly attractive women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. With the war, both became pioneering test pilots and were awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Third Reich. But they could not have been more different and neither woman had a good word to say for the other. Hanna was middle-class, vivacious, and distinctly Aryan, while the darker, more self-effacing Melitta came from an aristocratic Prussian family. Both were driven by deeply held convictions about honor and patriotism; but ultimately, while Hanna tried to save Hitler’s life, begging him to let her fly him to safety in April 1945, Melitta covertly supported the most famous attempt to assassinate the Führer. Their interwoven lives provide vivid insight into Nazi Germany and its attitudes toward women, class, and race. Told with brio and great narrative flair, Clare Mulley’s The Women Who Flew for Hitler is an extraordinary true story, with all the excitement and color of the best fiction.
In story paintings and words Along the Road to Freedom follows the journeys of mothers and grandmothers, mostly widowed, who led or attempted to lead families out of the former Soviet Union to peace, freedom and safety in Canada – primarily during the chaotic aftermath of the Russian Revolution and in the midst of World War II.