The case of the deadly desperados

Five Russian families move through court, love, and the Napoleonic invasion as 1805 becomes Borodino and Moscow burns. Tolstoy’s epic is Napoleonic historical fiction on a national scale—ballrooms and battlefields, Pierre and Natasha, and the question of who makes history.

In the ninth century, a canon’s daughter hides her sex, takes her dead brother’s name, and rises from a Fulda monastery to Rome as scholar, healer, and—according to the legend—pope. Donna Woolfolk Cross’s international bestseller is medieval biographical historical fiction of learning, disguise, and a woman the church spent a thousand years denying.

A young American nurse serves in Vietnam and struggles to be seen when she comes home.

A girl steals books in Nazi Germany; Death narrates a story of words and survival.

Linked stories follow two half-sisters’ lineages across centuries of African and American history.

Death narrates the story of a girl who steals books in Nazi Germany—and the family that hides a Jewish man.