For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

In the first novel of the New York Times bestselling Temeraire series, a rare bond is formed between a young man and a dragon, and together they must battle in the Napoleonic Wars.

"A terrifically entertaining fantasy novel."--Stephen King

Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise to Britain's defense by taking to the skies . . . not aboard aircraft but atop the mighty backs of fighting dragons.

When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes its precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Capt. Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future-and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France's own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte's boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire.

"Just when you think you've seen every variation possible on the dragon story, along comes Naomi Novik. . . . Her wonderful Temeraire is a dragon for the ages."--Terry Brooks

Don't miss any of Naomi Novik's magical Temeraire series
HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON - THRONE OF JADE - BLACK POWDER WAR - EMPIRE OF IVORY - VICTORY OF EAGLES - TONGUES OF SERPENTS - CRUCIBLE OF GOLD - BLOOD OF TYRANTS - LEAGUE OF DRAGONS

Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness."

"My baby boy..." she whispers before dying.

Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.

When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, "henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose..." Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.

Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The first novel in the renowned Thursday Next series, which “combines elements of Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (The Wall Street Journal).

“A literary wonderland [that] recalls Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker series [and] the works of Lewis Carroll.”—USA Today

Meet Thursday Next, “part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times), a literary detective without equal, fear, or boyfriend—and welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wadsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature.
 
When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter a novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.

Don’t miss any of Jasper Fforde’s delightfully entertaining Thursday Next novels:
THE EYRE AFFAIR • LOST IN A GOOD BOOK • THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS • SOMETHING ROTTEN • FIRST AMONG SEQUELS • ONE OF OUR THURSDAYS IS MISSING • THE WOMAN WHO DIED A LOT

In this Hugo Award-winning alternative history classic--the basis for the Amazon Original series--the United States lost World War II and was subsequently divided between the Germans in the East and the Japanese in the West.

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In this world, we meet characters like Frank Frink, a dealer of counterfeit Americana who is himself hiding his Jewish ancestry; Nobusuke Tagomi, the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco, unsure of his standing within the bureaucracy and Japan's with Germany; and Juliana Frink, Frank's ex-wife, who may be more important than she realizes.

These seemingly disparate characters gradually realize their connections to each other just as they realize that something is not quite right about their world. And it seems as though the answers might lie with Hawthorne Abendsen, a mysterious and reclusive author, whose best-selling novel describes a world in which the US won the War... The Man in the High Castle is Dick at his best, giving readers a harrowing vision of the world that almost was.

"The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick's career."--New York Times

A haunting, provocative novel, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a fictional autobiography in an alternate twentieth century that chronicles one woman's unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save.

Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family. Devastated by grief and loneliness, she emotionally exiles herself, avoiding relationships or allegiances, and throws herself into her work--disengagement that serves her when the war finally ends, and The New Society arises.

To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to--disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, endangering her own life.

But is her "confession" honest--or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?

A jarring and uncanny tale of loss, trauma, and the power of human connection and deception, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a portrait of a disturbing alternate world eerily within reach, and an examination of the difficult choices we must make to survive in it.

A small group of scientists and historians, carefully trained, spend their days viewing the human past through a machine, the TruSiteII. It takes a particular talent to search the past for moments of significance, to focus the machines and track individuals through the depths of time. But a woman named Tagiri is more that just talented - she has a knack for finding interesting lives.
But the world Tagiri lives in is a tragic place, the human race reduced to a population of less than one billion after a century of war and plague, of drought and flood and famine. There have been too many extinctions; too much land has been poisoned. The remaining people strive to renew the Earth, while they search the past for the causes of their plight.
Then one day, while watching the slaughter of the Caribe tribes by the Spanish led to Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus, Tagiri makes a discovery that will change everything; she discovers that the woman she is watching is seeing her, too, as a vision sent by her Gods.
Can the past by changed? Can the Earth be restored?
Can it be right for a small group of people to take action that, if it succeeds, will wipe out the entire time line in which they live? Even if, by their action, the death of an entire planet will be averted?
And even if the answer is yes, where do they begin?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Now an original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Look for Colson Whitehead’s best-selling new novel, Harlem Shuffle!

With the power and assurance of a master storyteller and the scrupulous accuracy of a trained historian, Harry Turtledove has created an immense, meticulously detailed, and utterly plausible world in which history takes a most unexpected turn. In The Guns of the South, Turtledove takes one of the most dramatic, bloody, and tumultuous episodes in our life as a nation, the Civil War, and vividly imagines what might have been had the rebels prevailed. In the unusually cold winter of 1864, General Robert E. Lee finds himself and his Army of Northern Virginia huddled on the banks of the Rapidan, trying to fight a war despite meager rations and a terrible lack of equipment - indeed, some of his men do not even have shoes. But when Lee finds a way to arm his forces, the tide suddenly turns; the rebels win a decisive victory at the Battle of Wilderness. Lee presses his advantage, marching on Washington. But if Lincoln surrenders, and the Confederacy can negotiate independence from the Union, there remain many obstacles to peace. The disputed states of Kentucky and Missouri must be accommodated. And the matter of slavery itself will threaten the newly independent Confederate States with fresh factional strife. Indeed, with victory come difficult choices for Robert E. Lee. War has worn down his health. His invalid wife lives for the day the two of them can finally build a peaceful life together. His days of service should be drawing to a close. Yet set against Lee's personal desires is the prospect of watching his beloved land squander the freedom that he and his men fought so desperately to win. Not for his own ambition but because duty calls, Lee will find himself faced with the price oftriumph. Mixing masterfully drawn historical and fictional characters, Turtledove brings to life the turmoil of a people in crisis. Here are the details of what it was like to fight in a Confederate army transformed from ragged to victorious: letters written home on scraps of wallpaper, "coffee" brewed from chicory and burnt grain, the fiery Battle of Wilderness, the march into Washington City and the confrontation with Lincoln, the negotiations between the United States and the Confederate States of America. Turtledove also takes us into conversations between General Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis and fascinating exchanges between Lee and Grant in their roles as keepers of the peace in a land divided. A highly original and extraordinary vision of history as it both was and could have been, The Guns of the South will take its place alongside the most exciting historical fiction ever written about the War Between the States.

What is the Plot Against America? When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family-and for a million such families all over the country-during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.

With the incomparable vision and breathtaking detail that brought his now-classic Marstrilogy to vivid life, bestselling author KIM STANLEY ROBINSON boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know.... The Years of Rice and Salt It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur–the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if? What if the plague killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been–a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt. This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world’s greatest scientific minds–in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions and Christianity is merely a historical footnote. Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson renders an immensely rich tapestry. Rewriting history and probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power, and even love on such an Earth. From the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Western Hemisphere, from the age of Akbar to the present and beyond, here is the stunning story of the creation of a new world. From the Hardcover edition.

It is twenty years after Nazi Germany's triumphant victory in World War II and the entire country is preparing for the grand celebration of the FÜhrer's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as the imminent peacemaking visit from President Kennedy. Meanwhile, Berlin Detective Xavier March -- a disillusioned but talented investigation of a corpse washed up on the shore of a lake. When a dead man turns out to be a high-ranking Nazi commander, the Gestapo orders March off the case immediately. Suddenly other unrelated deaths are anything but routine. Now obsessed by the case, March teams up with a beautiful, young American journalist and starts asking questions ... dangerous questions. What they uncover is a terrifying and long-concealed conspiracy of such astonding and mind-numbing terror that is it certain to spell the end of the Third Reich -- if they can live long enough to tell the world about it.

This novel tells the story of Hank Morgan, the quintessential self-reliant New Englander who brings to King Arthur’s Age of Chivalry the “great and beneficent” miracles of nineteenth-century engineering and American ingenuity. Through the collision of past and present, Twain exposes the insubstantiality of both utopias, destroying the myth of the romantic ideal as well as his own era’s faith in scientific and social progress.

A central document in American intellectual history, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is at once a hilarious comedy of anachronisms and incongruities, a romantic fantasy, a utopian vision, and a savage, anarchic social satire that only one of America’s greatest writers could pen.

English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.

But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.

All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.

Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.