John Curless

The best-selling author of The Plantagenets traces the 15th-century civil wars that irrevocably shaped the British crown, particularly evaluating the roles of strong women including Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret Beaufort in shifting power between two ruling families. Includes six maps and four genealogies.

Johnson brings the gentleman-scientist and his times brilliantly into focus. From Darwin's birth into great fortune to his voyage aboard the Beagle, to the long-delayed publication of his masterpiece, Johnson delves into what made this Victorian gentleman into a visionary scientist--and into the tragic flaws that later led Darwin to support the burgeoning eugenics movement.

In his highly acclaimed style, historian Johnson masterfully disentangles centuries of scarce sources to offer a riveting account of a homely but charismatic middle-class man living in Athens in the Fifth Century B.C., and how what this man thought still shapes the way people decide how to act, and how the notion of body and soul is understood.

"In the fifth novel in the critically acclaimed John Madden series, the former Scotland Yard detective returns in a gripping post-World War II mystery that will delight fans of Philip Kerr On a hot summer day in 1938, a beautiful actress is murdered on the grand Kent estate of Sir Jack Jessup, close friend of the Prince of Wales. The arrest of an ex-convict and his subsequent confession swiftly bring the case to a close, but in 1949, the reappearance...

Love is deadly. Adrian Carthallow, a dramatic and talented artist, is no stranger to controversy. But this time it's not his paintings that have provoked a blaze of publicity -- it's the fact that his career has been suddenly terminated by a bullet to the head. Not only that, but his wife has confessed to firing the fatal shot. Inspector Penross of the town constabulary is less than convinced by Helen Carthallow's story, but has no other explanation...

"I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice." So notes Salman Rushdie in his first work of nonfiction, a book as imaginative and meaningful as his acclaimed novels. In The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie paints a brilliantly sharp and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the terrain, and the poetry of "a country in which the...

"A myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade that reveals how an industry founded by farmers and village healers became dominated by cartels and kingpins. The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, white and brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real...

In To the Far Blue Mountains, Louis L'Amour weaves the unforgettable tale of a man who, after returning to his homeland, discovers that finding his way back to America may be impossible. Barnabas Sackett was leaving England to make his fortune in the New World. But as he settled his affairs, he learned that a royal warrant had been sworn out against him and that men were searching for him in every port. At issue were some rare gold coins Sackett...

Salman Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands" is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal oddyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects - the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism, in America, racial prejudice; and the...

Filled with exciting tales of the frontier, the chronicle of the Sackett family is perhaps the crowning achievement of one of our greatest storytellers. In The Warrior’s Path, Louis L’Amour tells the story of Yance and Kin Sackett, two brothers who are the last hope of a young woman who faces a fate worse than death.

When Yance Sackett’s sister-in-law is kidnapped, he and Kin race north from Carolina to find...