During a summer spent at Rockaway Beach in 1944, Lily's friendship with a young Hungarian refugee causes her to see the war and her own world differently.

"The relationship [between Aubrey and Maturin]...is about the best thing afloat....For Conradian power of description and sheer excitement there is nothing in naval fiction to beat the stern chase as the outgunned Leopard staggers through mountain waves in icy latitudes to escape the Dutch seventy-four." —Stephen Vaughan, Observer

Commissioned to rescue Governor Bligh of Bounty fame, Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend

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Captain Jack Aubrey is ashore on half pay without a command--until Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders for Aubrey to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant, there to mount an expedition against the French-held islands of Mauritius and La Reunion. But the difficulties of carrying out his orders are compounded by two of his own captains--Lord Clonfert, a pleasure-seeking dilettante, and Captain Corbett, whose severity...

        
Empire, the fourth novel in Gore Vidal's monumental six-volume chronicle of the American past, is his prodigiously detailed portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century as it begins to emerge as a world power.
———While America struggles to define its destiny, beautiful and ambitious Caroline Sanford fights to control her own fate. One of Vidal's most in-spired creations,...

"Four mystery novellas follow the trail of a priceless pocket watch from the mid-1700s until the Great War as it crosses the lives of four couples who seek to contain its mysterious force"--

Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Dorothy bought her freedom, and that of her sister and her mother, from her Irish planter father. Rising above the harsh realities of slavery and colonialism, she built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur, merchant, hotelier, and planter. Leveraging the competing attentions of the men in her, life, Doll answered to no one but herself as she rose to power and autonomy against...

"When Adebimpe is ten, she is sold with her mother, Sanite, to plantation owner John du Marche. He soon renames her Ady but Sanite never lets her daughter forget who she really is - a person who can read and write and understand numbers. Most importantly, Sanite reminds Ady that she must never reveal these abilities to a white person, especially not her true name. Tasked with maintaining du Marche's home in vibrant New Orleans, Ady takes in the city...

"An NYRB Classics Original After leaving the Mainland for Hong Kong in 1952, Eileen Chang was commissioned by the United States Information Service to write two books, one of which was her magnificent novel Naked Earth. Far from being a simplistic exercise in anti-Communist propaganda (two previous novels Chang wrote were pro-Communist), Naked Earth is a powerfully moving, Balzacian tale that follows two young students, Liu Ch'uen and Su Nan, who...

As the only girl in a Finnish American family of seven brothers, May Amelia Jackson resents being expected to act like a lady while growing up in Washington state in 1899.

Magician, Mr. Norrel of Hurtfew Abbey, uses his powers against Napoleon and the French in 1806 and is soon challenged by Jonathan Strange, a novice magician, who becomes obsessed with the Raven King, the twelfth-century founder of English magic and bizarre forms of magic.