The Jamestown colony is one of the great survival stories of American history, and this book brings it fully to life for the first time. Drawing on extensive original documents, David A. Price paints intimate portraits of the major figures from the formidable monarch Chief Powhatan, to the resourceful but unpopular leader John Smith. Author…
This was the England of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King…
In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands noticed that normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in a frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this speculation was the tulip, an import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike. Rare bulbs changed hands for ever-increasing sums,…
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment. Author Toni Morrison (born Chloe…
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna’s eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666. Author Geraldine Brooks is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning March and the international bestsellers Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book,…
