The Great Sea
David Abulafia
OXFORD
Abulafia relates and interprets the history of the Mediterranean from 22,000 B.C. to A.D. 2010 with authority, exactitude, and verve.
Time’s Shadow
Arnold J. Bauer
KANSAS
Bauer’s portrait of life in rural Kansas from the 1930s to the 1950s conjures with extraordinary thoughtfulness and grace a world we have lost.
Good Behaviour
Molly Keane
VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS
In this dark and tart novel of manners, Keane renders a complex, shriveled, and disturbing character with uncanny skill and nuance.
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel
HENRY HOLT
In prose at once lyrical and tightly clever, Mantel has written a brilliant study of character, and a rich portrait of 16th-century society, deftly revealing the ramifications of birth, alliance, and personality at a time when being on the wrong side in a political argument meant death.
Moscow, 1937
Karl Schlögel
POLITY
In this dazzling panorama, a feat of literary finesse and of meticulous historical reconstruction, Schlögel summons up the communists’ new Jerusalem in the grip of the Great Terror.
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