Kate Atkinson

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Pennsylvania

A Novel

A dramatic story of WWII espionage, betrayal, and loyalty, by the #1 bestselling author of Life After Life In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence. Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of the best writers of our time.

Transcription

23e2e4de-bf43-455e-9a08-d7a5a278be0d-1

#hardcover #fiction #youngadult #ya #middlegrade #historical #refugees #family #india #1940s 

Ex-library 

Shy twelve-year-old Nisha, forced to flee her home with her Hindu family during the 1947 partition of India, tries to find her voice and make sense of the world falling apart around her by writing to her deceased Muslim mother in the pages of her diary.

The Night Diary

8ae5929c-0871-4e00-9d1d-462857e7a4d5-1

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Missouri

A story told from five different points of view chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.

When the Emperor Was Divine

e05e9604-f730-4a30-80e4-9802af59f07b-1

Great condition for its age, see all pics! Has a name written inside front cover.

Signet Classic 

Animal Farm

Frances Liardet

Mississippi

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A powerful story that proves how love itself requires courage." --Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing Spanning World War II and the sweep of the twentieth century, We Must Be Brave explores the fierce love that we feel for our children and the power of that love to endure. Beyond distance, beyond time, beyond life itself. A woman. A war. The child who changed everything. December 1940. As German bombs fall on Southampton, England during World War II, the city's residents flee to the surrounding villages. In Upton village, amid the chaos, newly married Ellen Parr finds a girl asleep, unclaimed at the back of an empty bus. Little Pamela, it seems, is entirely alone. Ellen has always believed she does not want children, but when she takes Pamela into her home, the child cracks open the past Ellen thought she had escaped and the future she and her husband Selwyn had dreamed for themselves. As the war rages on, love grows where it was least expected, surprising them all. But with the end of the fighting comes the realization that Pamela was never theirs to keep. Spanning the sweep of the twentieth century, We Must Be Brave explores the fierce love that we feel for our children and the power of that love to endure. Beyond distance, beyond time, beyond life itself.

We Must Be Brave

e7580b10-b9ee-4c98-b7e1-da97cd3c78ff-1

Michigan

Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, and Anthony Burgess have shaped our perceptions of Malaysia. In Tash Aw, we now have an authentic Malaysian voice that remaps this literary landscape.

The Harmony Silk Factory traces the story of textile merchant Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant living in British Malaya in the first half of the twentieth century. Johnny's factory is the most impressive structure in the region, and to the inhabitants of the Kinta Valley Johnny is a hero--a Communist who fought the Japanese when they invaded, ready to sacrifice his life for the welfare of his people. But to his son, Jasper, Johnny is a crook and a collaborator who betrayed the very people he pretended to serve, and the Harmony Silk Factory is merely a front for his father's illegal businesses. This debut novel from Tash Aw gives us an exquisitely written look into another culture at a moment of crisis.

The Harmony Silk Factory won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award and also made it to the 2005 Man Booker longlist.

 

The Harmony Silk Factory

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Mercer Boys at Woodcrest (The Mercer Boys book 2)

Anita Shreve

Kentucky

!AIn October 1947, after a summer long drought, fires break out all along the Maine coast and are soon racing out of control from town to village. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband, Gene, joins the volunteer firefighters. Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie's two young children, Grace watches helplessly as their houses burn to the ground, the flames finally forcing them all into the ocean as a last resort. The women spend the night frantically protecting their children, and in the morning find their lives forever changed.

The Stars Are Fire

da1fb612-0ffe-42fc-ab57-0e30ff0cd8c1-1

Oregon

#lovestory #feminists #1940s #historicalfiction #nyc

New York

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and The Signature of All Things, a delicious novel of glamour, sex, and adventure, about a young woman discovering that you don't have to be a good girl to be a good person. "A spellbinding novel about love, freedom, and finding your own happiness." - PopSugar "Intimate and richly sensual, razzle-dazzle with a hint of danger." -USA Today "Pairs well with a cocktail...or two." -TheSkimm "Life is both fleeting and dangerous, and there is no point in denying yourself pleasure, or being anything other than what you are." Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress, a lady-killer writer, and no-nonsense stage manager. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest. Now eighty-nine years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it. "At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time," she muses. "After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is." Written with a powerful wisdom about human desire and connection, City of Girls is a love story like no other.

City of Girls

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Mild cover wear, marks and dings. Has a few pages that seem to have been bent or maybe gotten damp at one point and make a line when the book is shut, pictured. Still very readable. 

 #paperback #history #1940s #the40s #culture #literature #anthology #nonfiction #americana 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Colorado

This captivating anthology gathers historic New Yorker pieces from a decade of trauma and upheaval--as well as the years when The New Yorker came of age, with pieces by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Joseph Mitchell, Vladimir Nabokov, and George Orwell, alongside original reflections on the 1940s by some of today's finest writers.
 
In this enthralling book, contributions from the great writers who graced The New Yorker's pages are placed in historical context by the magazine's current writers. Included in this volume are seminal profiles of the decade's most fascinating figures: Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Here are classics in reporting: John Hersey's account of the heroism of a young naval lieutenant named John F. Kennedy; Rebecca West's harrowing visit to a lynching trial in South Carolina; and Joseph Mitchell's imperishable portrait of New York's foremost dive bar, McSorley's. This volume also provides vital, seldom-reprinted criticism, as well as an extraordinary selection of short stories by such writers as Shirley Jackson and John Cheever. Represented too are the great poets of the decade, from William Carlos Williams to Langston Hughes. To complete the panorama, today's New Yorker staff look back on the decade through contemporary eyes. The 40s: The Story of a Decade is a rich and surprising cultural portrait that evokes the past while keeping it vibrantly present.

Including contributions by W. H. Auden * Elizabeth Bishop * John Cheever * Janet Flanner * John Hersey * Langston Hughes * Shirley Jackson * A. J. Liebling * William Maxwell * Carson McCullers * Joseph Mitchell * Vladimir Nabokov * Ogden Nash * John O'Hara * George Orwell * V. S. Pritchett * Lillian Ross * Stephen Spender * Lionel Trilling * Rebecca West * E. B. White * Williams Carlos Williams * Edmund Wilson
 
And featuring new perspectives by Joan Acocella * Hilton Als * Dan Chiasson * David Denby * Jill Lepore * Louis Menand * Susan Orlean * George Packer * David Remnick * Alex Ross * Peter Schjeldahl * Zadie Smith * Judith Thurman

The 40s: the Story of a Decade

36870c44-c44e-4a32-8b40-26d6ba5b50a4-1

#hardcover #fiction #historicalfiction #ya #youngadult #histfic #shanghai #1940s #ww2 #jewish 

From the author of Blind, a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story set during World War II in Shanghai, one of the only places Jews without visas could find refuge.

Warsaw, Poland. The year is 1940 and Lillia is fifteen when her mother, Alenka, disappears and her father flees with Lillia and her younger sister, Naomi, to Shanghai, one of the few places that will accept Jews without visas. There they struggle to make a life; they have no money, there is little work, no decent place to live, a culture that doesn't understand them. And always the worry about Alenka. How will she find them? Is she still alive?

    Meanwhile Lillia is growing up, trying to care for Naomi, whose development is frighteningly slow, in part from malnourishment. Lillia finds an outlet for her artistic talent by making puppets, remembering the happy days in Warsaw when her family was circus performers. She attends school sporadically, makes friends with Wei, a Chinese boy, and finds work as a performer at a "gentlemen's club" without her father's knowledge.

But meanwhile the conflict grows more intense as the Americans declare war and the Japanese force the Americans in Shanghai into camps. More bombing, more death. Can they survive, caught in the crossfire?

Someday We Will Fly

3846ca23-6f73-430c-8257-2c560700ba59-1


"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" is a historical novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Set in 1946, it follows Juliet Ashton, a London-based writer, who begins exchanging letters with residents of Guernsey, a Channel Island that was occupied by the Germans during World War II. Intrigued by their stories of wartime life and the unique book club formed as a cover for illicit pig roasting, Juliet visits Guernsey. There, she discovers a community scarred by war but bound by resilience, friendship, and the power of books, transforming her life in unexpected ways.

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Florida

the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society 

Veera Hiranandani

Cornell Woolrich

On a mild midwestern night in the early 1940s, Johnny Marr leans against a drugstore wall. He's waiting for Dorothy, his fianc#65533;e, and tonight is the last night they'll be meeting here, for it's May 31st, and June 1st marks their wedding day. But she's late, and Johnny soon learns of a horrible accident--an accident involving a group of drunken men, a low-flying charter plane, and an empty liquor bottle. In one short moment Johnny loses all that matters to him and his life is shattered. He vows to take from these men exactly what they took from him. After years of planning, Johnny begins his quest for revenge, and on May 31st of each year--always on May 31st--wives, lovers, and daughters are suddenly no longer safe.

Rendezvous in Black

6b4b0101-3960-46da-9248-159e76dac23a-1

Arthur Miller

Wisconsin

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. "By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times "So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time

Death of a Salesman

e35edb26-f433-44da-b152-db5ec29caaa1-0

Anthony Marra

California

The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini's Italy to 1940s Los Angeles--a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

"A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that's a true joy to read."--Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--BookPage

Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest.

Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won't speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can't escape the studio's narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria's only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.

Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father's past threatens Maria's carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father's fate--and her own.

Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life's bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls "a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles."

Mercury Pictures Presents

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#adventure #hardcover #family #fiction #amybloom #luckyus #sisters #1940s 

Forging a life together after being abandoned by their parents, half sisters Eva and Iris share decades in and out of the spotlight in golden-era Hollywood and mid-20th-century Long Island. By the author of the National Book Award finalist, Come to Me. 125,000 first printing.

Lucky Us

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Lois Lowry

I have other books available by this author

Number the Stars

975433df-6ee3-443b-ba36-2d56d72de9bf-1

#paperback #americantheater #drama #play #1940s #classic #fiction #arthurmiller #deathofasalesman

Maryland

This vintage book is in good condition with firm binding and clean pages except for an inscription at the bottom of the title page. The covers are clean. There is a small bump at the top of the boards. Please see the photos.

TWO BRIDGETS by Cynthia Hathaway. Illustrated by Pelagie Doane. 10" X 7 1/8". Colorful pictorial boards, blue cloth spine, colorful  pictorial end papers. The copyright date is 1941. The gift inscription from Aunt to niece is dated 1952.
"Every little girl who has ever wished she had another name will appreciate this story of two little girls named Bridget...A little girl of today and one of a hundred years ago."

New Mexico

Two Bridgets ~ Vintage 

1948 first edition children’s book by author/illustrator Robert Lawson of “Ferdinand” fame. 
Condition: very good vintage, cover wear as shown; clean flat pages; no marks. No jacket. 

Robbut: A tale of tails

#paperback #fiction #clairedelune #jettacarlrton #romance #comingofage #ww2 #1940s #contemporary #women

With its atmospheric story of small-town dreams and romance, Clair de Lune weaves an irresistible spell of longing, hope, love, and nostalgia. A newly discovered novel by Jetta Carleton, Clair de Lune will delight the legions of readers who have treasured her first--and, until now, only--published novel, The Moonflower Vine. A book of unsurpassable literary fiction, Clair de Lune is sure to strike a chord with readers of Nancy Turner's These Is My Words, Alice McDermott's After This, and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife.



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Kate Atkinson

Transcription

Veera Hiranandani

The Night Diary

Julie Otsuka

When the Emperor Was Divine

George Orwell

Animal Farm

Frances Liardet

We Must Be Brave

Tash Aw

The Harmony Silk Factory

Capwell Wyckoff

The Mercer Boys at Woodcrest (The Mercer Boys book 2)

Anita Shreve

The Stars Are Fire

Kate Atkinson

Transcription

Elizabeth Gilbert

City of Girls

Elizabeth Bishop (Contribution by); The New Yorker Magazine; Henry Finder (Editor); David Remnick (Introduction by); W. H. Auden (Contribution by)

The 40s: the Story of a Decade

Rachel DeWoskin

Someday We Will Fly

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie barrows

the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society

Veera Hiranandani

The Night Diary

Cornell Woolrich

Rendezvous in Black

Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman

Anthony Marra

Mercury Pictures Presents

Amy Bloom

Lucky Us

Lois Lowry

Number the Stars

Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman

Cynthia Hathaway

Two Bridgets ~ Vintage

Robert Lawson

Robbut: A tale of tails

Jetta Carleton

Clair de Lune (1st Edition)