John Julius Norwich

Huge Hardcover (6 to 8 lbs)

Pennsylvania

A History of the Mediterranean

Spanning more than five thousand years of history, a vivid, accessible narrative chronicles the growth of culture, commerce, political alliances and enmities, and religious movements throughout the Mediterranean world, ranging from the sea-trading Phoenicians and the wonders of ancient Egypt, to the classical world, to the rise of Islam, to the Renaissance and beyond. 25,000 first printing.

The Middle Sea

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Martin Gilbert

Huge Paperback (6 to 8 lbs)

Volume Three: 1952-1999

A History of the 20th Century

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A history of the most powerful nation in Europe for over 1000 years during the Dark and Middle Ages recaps its intrigue, madmen, conquests, religious schism, and eventual decline, and profiles the major personalities

A Short History of Byzantium

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Lonnie Johnson

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Enemies, Neighbors, Friends

Throughout the ages, small nations struggled valiantly against a series of imperial powers - Ottoman Turkey, Habsburg Austria, imperial Germany, czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union - and they lost regularly. Johnson's account is present-minded in the best sense: in describing actual historical events, he illustrates the ways they have been remembered, and how they contribute to the national assumptions that still drive European politics today.

Central Europe

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Tim Parks

Takes a lighthearted look at Italian family life with an eye for detail and character that reveals the nature of relationships and culminates in a beach holiday epitomizing the best in Italian life

An Italian Education

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Dominique Lapierre

Witness to History

From Mother Teresa and the slums of Calcutta to a legendary matador in the bull rings of Spain to the final days of the British Raj in India, A Thousand Suns tells of the extraordinary individuals and events that have shaped the 20th century.

A Thousand Suns

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Solomon Volkov

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

A Cultural History

Long considered to be the mad dream of an imperious autocrat—the "Venice of the North," conceived in a setting of malarial swamps—St. Petersburg was built in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia's gateway to the West. For almost 300 years this splendid city has survived the most extreme attempts of man and nature to extinguish it, from flood, famine, and disease to civil war, Stalinist purges, and the epic 900-day siege by Hitler's armies. It has even been renamed twice, and became St. Petersburg again only in 1991. Yet not only has it retained its special, almost mystical identity as the schizophrenic soul of modern Russia, but it remains one of the most beautiful and alluring cities in the world. Now Solomon Volkov, a Russian emigre and acclaimed cultural historian, has written the definitive cultural biography of this city and its transcendent artistic and spiritual legacy. For Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, Petersburg was a spectral city that symbolized the near-apocalyptic conflicts of imperial Russia. As the monarchy declined, allowing intellectuals and artists to flourish, Petersburg became a center of avant-garde experiment and flamboyant bohemian challenge to the dominating power of the state, first czarist and then communist. The names of the Russian modern masters who found expression in St. Petersburg still resonate powerfully in every field of art: in music, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich; in literature, Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Nabokov, and Brodsky; in dance, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and Balanchine; in theater, Meyerhold; in painting, Chagall and Malevich; and many others, whose works are now part of the permanent fabric of Western civilization. Yet no comprehensive portrait of this thriving distinctive, and highly influential cosmopolitan culture, and the city that inspired it, has previously been attempted.

St Petersburg

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Genevieve Barlow

William N. Stivers

Book does have some translations in it with cursive writing in several areas 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A representative collection of simplified tales from all cultural backgrounds and geographical regions of Spain.

Stories from Spain

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Michael Ondaatje

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Three individuals--nurse Hana, thief Caravaggio, and Kip--are brought together in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II by a nameless and hideously burned English patient. Reprint.

The English Patient

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Andrea Barrett

At the age of 80, Brendan Auberon has one wish: to see his 200 acres of wooded ridge overlooking what was Paradise Valley before the villages were drowned to provide water for Boston. When he tricks his nephew into highjacking the nursing home van and taking him there, Brendan's family thinks he's been kidnapped.

The Forms of Water

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Alaa Al Aswany

A Novel

August Book Sense Pick

A fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed 'scientist of women.' A purring, voluptuous siren. A young shop-girl enduring the clammy touch of her boss and hating herself for accepting the modest banknotes he tucks into her pocket afterward. An earnest, devout young doorman, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism. A cynical, secretly gay newspaper editor, helplessly in love with a peasant security guard. A roof-squatting tailor, scheming to own property. A corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify taking a mistress.

All live in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor slowly decaying in the smog and hubbub of downtown Cairo, Egypt. In the course of this unforgettable novel, these disparate lives converge, careening inexorably toward an explosive conclusion. Tragicomic, passionate, shockingly frank in its sexuality, and brimming with an extraordinary, embracing human compassion, The Yacoubian Building is a literary achievement of the first order.

The Yacoubian Building

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Patrick Süskind

John E. Woods

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

An unobtrusive Paris bank guard, his life's plan clearly laid out, finds a pigeon on his doorstep one morning and begins a day of destruction and resurrection

The Pigeon

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Aravind Adiga

When he relocates to New Delhi to take a new job, Balram Halwai is disillusioned by the city's materialism and technology-spawned violence, a circumstance that forces him to question his loyalties, ambitions, and past.

The White Tiger

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Amos Oz

In a psychological and metaphysical study of a man, Yoel Ravid, a retired Israeli secret service agent who lives a simple life at home, questions his life and his relationships with women

To Know a Woman

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Shmuel Yosef Agnon

This broad selection of the short stories of SY Agnon winner of the 1966 Nobel prize for literature presents a panoramic and probing vision of the writer as chronicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emergent society of modern Israel.

A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories

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Ivo Andric

Lovett F. Edwards

William H. Mcneill

The Bridge on the Drina is a vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late 16th century to the beginning of World War I. As we seek to make sense of the current nightmare in this region, this remarkable, timely book serves as a reliable guide to its people and history.

"No better introduction to the study of Balkan and Ottoman history exists, nor do I know of any work of fiction that more persuasively introduces the reader to a civilization other than our own. It is an intellectual and emotional adventure to encounter the Ottoman world through Andric's pages in its grandiose beginning and at its tottering finale. It is, in short, a marvelous work, a masterpiece, and very much sui generis. . . . Andric's sensitive portrait of social change in distant Bosnia has revelatory force."--William H. McNeill, from the introduction

"The dreadful events occurring in Sarajevo over the past several months turn my mind to a remarkable historical novel from the land we used to call Yugoslavia, Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina."--John M. Mohan, Des Moines Sunday Register

Born in Bosnia, Ivo Andric (1892-1975) was a distinguished diplomat and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. His books include The Damned Yard: And Other Stories, and The Days of the Consuls.

The Bridge on the Drina

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Umberto. Eco

William Weaver

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino narrates the story of his life, from his adoption by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and his education in Paris to his arrival in Constantinople during the turmoil of the Fourth Crusade.

Baudolino

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Frances Mayes

Journeys of a Passionate Traveller

The author details her travels to Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Turkey, Greece, southern Italy, and North Africa, interweaving personal insights with commentary on art, history, landscape, culture, and tradition.

A Year in the World

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Yashar Kemal

In the Taurus highlands of Anatolia in the 1930s life is harsh and the five small villages on Dikenli, the Plateau of Thistles, are ruled by the owner of the land, Abdi Agha. Ince Memed, the only son of a poor widow, plans to escape his servitude by fleeing Dikenli with his beloved, Hatche. The Agha catches the couple as they attempt their escape. Memed wounds the Agha and disappears into the night but Hatche is captured. Memed, still only a youth, becomes a brigand in the mountains, driven by his determination to rescue his beloved and settle accounts with the vindictive Abdi Agha. Yashar Kemal's first novel, originally published in 1952, combines a narrative of great excitement and drama with a strong and simple portrait of the rigours of peasant life, vivid in its detail and observation.

Memed, My Hawk

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Dave Barry

A Sort of History of the United States

The syndicated humor columnist and author of "Dave Barry's Greatest Hits" and "Babies and Other Hazards of Sex" offers simple and wildly humorous solutions to the problems of American education

Dave Barry Slept Here

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John Mortimer

The Rumpole renaissance continues to build, and now the beloved barrister's many followers have a special reason to rejoice: a sensational full-length Rumpole novel that at last relates the oft-mentioned but never revealed story of Rumpole's first case, the Penge Bungalow affair. Looking back half a century into a very different world, Rumpole recalls a man accused of murdering his father and his father's friend with a pistol taken from a dead German pilot. It was this trial and its outcome that put Rumpole on the map and shaped him into the cantankerous defender of justice that readers know and love. This is a must-read for every Rumpole fan and a compelling invitation to new readers.

Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

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Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.

In the Skin of a Lion

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The sixth lamentation 

Joseph O'Neill

Abandoned amid the offbeat inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel when his English wife and son return to London following September 11th, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands, struggles to find himself in his adopted country, until he stumbles upon a vibrant New York cricket subculture and the charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Reprint.

Browse by categories

John Julius Norwich

The Middle Sea

Martin Gilbert

A History of the 20th Century

John Julius Norwich

A Short History of Byzantium

Lonnie Johnson

Central Europe

Tim Parks

An Italian Education

Dominique Lapierre

A Thousand Suns

Solomon Volkov

St Petersburg

Genevieve Barlow; William N. Stivers

Stories from Spain

Michael Ondaatje

The English Patient

Andrea Barrett

The Forms of Water

Alaa Al Aswany

The Yacoubian Building

Patrick Süskind; John E. Woods

The Pigeon

Aravind Adiga

The White Tiger

Amos Oz

To Know a Woman

Shmuel Yosef Agnon

A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories

Ivo Andric; Lovett F. Edwards; William H. Mcneill

The Bridge on the Drina

Umberto. Eco; William Weaver

Baudolino

Frances Mayes

A Year in the World

Yashar Kemal

Memed, My Hawk

Dave Barry

Dave Barry Slept Here

John Mortimer

Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

Michael Ondaatje

In the Skin of a Lion

William Broderick

The sixth lamentation

Joseph O'Neill

Netherland

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