Adult

Vivid and entertaining, this sweeping tale of adventure and intrigue describes the essential role that pepper played in bringing both Americans and Europeans to Asia. From the abundance of wildlife on the islands of the Indian Ocean to colorful accounts of sultans entertaining their European visitors, this fascinating book reveals the often surprising story behind one of mankind's most common spices.

In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War. HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI presents the grizzly unadorned truth about the bombings, blurred for so long by postwar propaganda, and transforms our understanding of one of the defining events of the 20th century.

In INFIDEL KINGS AND UNHOLY WARRIORS, award-winning scholar Brian Catlos puts us on the ground in the Mediterranean world of 1050-1200. We experience the sights and sounds of the region just as enlightened Islamic empires and primitive Christendom began to contest it. We learn about the siege tactics, theological disputes and poetry of this enthralling time. And we see that people of different faiths coexisted far more frequently than we are commonly told.

After being run out of Boneville, the three Bone cousins, Fone Bone, Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone are separated and lost in a vast uncharted desert. One by one they find their way into a deep forested valley filled with wonderful and terrifying creatures.

It isn’t Christmas without a Richard Paul Evans novel. Ever since he wrote the book that inspired the genre, THE CHRISTMAS BOX, his bestselling holiday stories have become a beloved literary tradition. As the New York Journal of Books wrote, “Richard Paul Evans has proven to be one of America’s most precious gifts…an inspirational writer who has the ability to read our very souls and heal broken hearts…His books are the ones you can’t wait to finish, but when you do, you wish you hadn’t.”

In JOAN OF ARC: A LIFE TRANSFIGURED, Kathryn Harrison gives us a Joan for our time --- a shining exemplar of unshakable faith, extraordinary courage and self-confidence during a brutally rigged ecclesiastical inquisition and in the face of her death by burning. Deftly weaving historical fact, myth, folklore, artistic representations, and centuries of scholarly and critical interpretation into a compelling narrative, she restores Joan of Arc to her rightful position as one of the greatest heroines in all of human history.

Mma Ramotswe has her hands full both at home and in the office. To add to her current challenges, her devoted partner, Grace Makutsi, has decided to branch out on her own and open The Handsome Man's De Luxe Café. But even “Miss 97 Per Cent” can't quite meet all the demands of running a business --- not to mention those that a lightning strike makes on her building. Eventually, she'll have to accept all the help she can get --- even if it comes from a completely unexpected source.

Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, Azar Nafisi energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels, Nafisi invites us to join her as citizens of her “Republic of Imagination,” a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

Mega billionaire C. Linus Maxwell whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he proceeds, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed-of heights of orgasmic pleasure for days on end. Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the final development of a line of sex toys. So potent and effective are these devices that women by the millions line up outside the stores on opening day and then lock themselves in their room with them and stop coming out. Maxwell's plan for erotically enabled world domination must be stopped.