Four women, Yael--whose father, an expert assassin, has never forgiven her for her mother's death during childbirth--Revka--a local baker's wife who witnessed the murder or her daughter by Roman soldiers--Aziza--a warrior's daughter who was raised like a son--and Shirah--a woman born with uncanny insight and knowledge of ancient magic--are drawn to Masada, a mountain the Judean desert where, in 70 CE, nine hundred Jews withheld for months against...

"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...

A child navigates a dangerous labyrinth full of monsters.

"A young workaholic avoiding home for the holidays discovers that you can't run away from who you are. Everly Lancaster always dreamed of leaving her hometown in rural Illinois. Now she helps run a burgeoning startup in Chicago, where her professional goals leave little time for friends ... or a vacation. When a massive snowstorm hits, Everly's mother urges her to come home for Christmas, but she hesitates to return to the life she's worked so hard...

A landmark of 20th Century literature about New York in the late 1960s, now in English for the first time. As a novel, Uwe Johnson's masterpiece, Anniversaries, is at once daringly simple in conception and wonderfully complex and engaging in effect. Late in 1967, Johnson, already one of the most celebrated German novelists of his generation, set out to write a book that would take the form of an entry for every day of the year that lay ahead. The...

"After leaving her position with Charlotte and Thomas Pitt to get married, Gracie thought her days as a maid were behind her. But when her good friend’s daughter, Millie, turns up on her doorstep just before the holidays, frantic because things are going missing from the kitchen in the household she serves, Gracie knows she has to find out what is happening. Millie, whose mother died years before, can’t risk being accused of theft and getting...

"A dazzling, edgy, laugh-out-loud memoir from the award-winning poet and novelist that reflects on writing, drinking, dating, and more, Kim Addonizio is used to being exposed. As a writer of provocative poems and stories, she has encountered success along with snark: one critic dismissed her as "Charles Bukowski in a sundress." ("Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu?" she muses.) Now, in this utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to...

For mother and daughter, it's a year of change. Much of it is expected, like Rory's graduation from Chilton and the anxiety of waiting for college acceptance letters. But much of it is not.