Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's family in England.

When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad’s leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can’t bear children. But as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.

Lottie Wilkinson, Rose Arbuthnot, Caroline Dester and Beverly Fisher each decide to take a break from their current lives to spend time at Hopewell Cottage, an old, pretty cottage on a small island. When they arrive, they are transformed by the salt air, the breathtaking views, and the long, lazy days. Gradually, the ladies begin to open up: to one another and to the possibilities of lives quite different from the ones they’ve been leading. Change can’t be that hard, can it?

Today it is the most valuable book in the world. Recently one sold for over five million dollars. It is the book that rescued the name of William Shakespeare and half of his plays from oblivion. THE MILLIONAIRE AND THE BARD tells the miraculous and romantic story of the making of the First Folio, and of the American industrialist whose thrilling pursuit of the book became a lifelong obsession.

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men --- John Chatterton and John Mattera --- are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister. Soon, however, they realize that cutting-edge technology and a willingness to lose everything aren’t enough to track down Bannister’s ship. They must travel the globe in search of historic documents and accounts of the great pirate’s exploits, face down dangerous rivals, and battle the tides of nations, governments and experts.

In the summer of 1938, Layla Beck’s father, a United States senator, cuts off her allowance and demands that she find employment on the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program. Within days, Layla has been assigned to cover the history of the remote mill town of Macedonia, West Virginia. But once she secures a room in the home of the unconventional Romeyn family, she is drawn into their complex world and soon discovers that the truth of the town is entangled in the thorny past of the Romeyn dynasty.

Judy Blume takes us back to the 1950s and introduces us to the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she herself grew up. Here she imagines and weaves together a vivid portrait of three generations of families, friends and strangers, whose lives are profoundly changed during one winter. At the center of an extraordinary cast of characters are 15-year-old Miri Ammerman and her spirited single mother, Rusty. Their warm and resonant stories are set against the backdrop of a real-life tragedy that struck the town when a series of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving the community reeling.

Livy arrives at her best friend Julia's flat for a lunch date only to find her dead. Though all the evidence supports it, Livy cannot accept the official ruling of suicide. The suspicious circumstances cause Livy to dig further, and she is suddenly forced to confront a horrifying possibility: that Julia was murdered, by the same man who killed Livy's sister, Kara, 18 years ago. When Livy finally faces her sister's killer, and he traps her with one horrible, impossible choice, she must finally decide: Is she strong enough to trust herself?

In HOLD STILL, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Sally Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men, and how was it that they achieved what they did? David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.