Take A Walk On Historys Wild Side!
Explore history's wild side with our curated list of thrilling books! Dive into untold stories, daring adventures, and fascinating eras that bring the past to life. Perfect for history buffs and adventure seekers alike.
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Violent Sands
by Sean Young
A Jewish zealot who watched Roman soldiers kill his father and pillage his homeland is charged with a mission that could destroy or free Israel.
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Roma
by Steven Saylor
Critically acclaimed historical novelist Saylor tells the epic saga of the ancient city of Rome, from its mythic beginnings to its emergence as the center of the most powerful empire in the ancient world.
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The Aeneid
by Virgil
Recounts the adventures of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who helped found Rome, after the fall of Troy.
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Imperium
by Robert Harris
In his "most accomplished work to date" (Los Angeles Times), master of historical fiction Robert Harris lures readers back in time to the compelling life of Roman Senator Marcus Cicero. The re-creation of a vanished biography written by his household slave and right-hand man, Tiro, Imperium follows Cicero's extraordinary struggle to attain supreme power in Rome. On a cold November morning, Tiro opens the door to find a terrified, bedraggled stranger begging for help. Once a Sicilian aristocrat, the man was robbed by the corrupt Roman governor, Verres, who is now trying to convict him under false pretenses and sentence him to a violent death. The man claims that only the great senator Marcus Cicero, one of Rome's most ambitious lawyers and spellbinding orators, can bring him justice in a crooked society manipulated by the villainous governor. But for Cicero, it is a chance to prove himself worthy of absolute power. What follows is one of the most gripping courtroom dramas in history, and the beginning of a quest for political glory by a man who fought his way to the top using only his voice -- defeating the most daunting figures in Roman history.
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Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
by Diana Gabaldon
From the exquisitely talented and award-winning author of the Outlander saga comes this latest addition as Lord John Grey, an 18th-century Englishman, pursues a deadly family secret as well as a clandestine love affair.
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Katherine
by Anya Seton
A biographical novel concerning the love affair between Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, in fourteenth-century England.
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Gates of Fire
by Steven Pressfield
NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą âSteven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life.ââPat Conroy At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in historyâone that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .
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The Queen's Fool
by Philippa Gregory
#1 New York Times bestselling author and âqueen of royal fictionâ (USA TODAY) Philippa Gregory weaves a spellbinding tale of a young woman with the ability to see the future in an era when destiny was anything but clear. Winter, 1553. Pursued by the Inquisition, Hannah Green, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, is forced to flee with her father from their home in Spain. But Hannah is no ordinary refugee; she has the gift of âSight,â the ability to foresee the future, priceless in the troubled times of the Tudor court. Hannah is adopted by the glamorous Robert Dudley, the charismatic son of King Edwardâs protector, who brings her to court as a âholy foolâ for Queen Mary and, ultimately, Queen Elizabeth. Hired as a fool but working as a spy; promised in wedlock but in love with her master; endangered by the laws against heresy, treason, and witchcraft, Hannah must choose between the safe life of a commoner and the dangerous intrigues of the royal family that are inextricably bound up with her own yearnings and desires. Teeming with vibrant period detail and peopled by characters seamlessly woven into the sweeping tapestry of history, The Queenâs Fool is a rich and emotionally resonant gem from a masterful storyteller.
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The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson
Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. Thatâs me. This is the story of Skip Sandsâspy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcongâand the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature. Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnsonâs first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date. Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.
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The Sanctuary
by Raymond Khoury
More than 250 years after a pretender marquis escapes the decimated palazzo of his vengeful prince, an American Army unit discovers a secret lab in Baghdad where dozens of victims have been subjected to torturous experiments, a finding that places two bold women on the trail of an ancient mystery. By the author of The Last Templar. 150,000 first printing.
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Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon
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The Foreign Correspondent
by Alan Furst
From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls âAmericaâs preeminent spy novelist,â comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedomâthe story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their heartsâ passion to fight in the war against tyranny. By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussoliniâs fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of Ă©migrĂ© life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story. Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet loversâ hotel. But this is no romantic tragedâit is the work of the OVRA, Mussoliniâs fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine Ă©migrĂ© newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor. Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French SĂ»retĂ©, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder. The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as âColonel Ferrara,â who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weiszâs life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin. The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute bestâtaut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.
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The Interpretation of Murder
by Jed Rubenfeld
The search for a serial killer during Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to New York City, his one visit to the U.S., propels the plot of Yale law professor Rubenfeld's ambitious debut in this well-researched and thought-provoking novel.
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Pale Horse Coming
by Stephen Hunter
Pale Horse Coming, featuring Stephen Hunterâs beloved sniper heroes Earl and Bob Lee Swagger, the first Swagger thriller from the Pulitzer Prizeâwinning author. The time is 1951. A smooth-talking Chicago lawyer comes to chat with Sam Vincent, the former prosecutor of Polk County, Arkansas, about a dangerous subjectâa big prison for violent black convicts near Thebes, Mississippi, up the Yaxahatchee River from Pasagoula. Thebes seems to have dropped out of the Unionâletters and phone calls go unanswered, and the lawyer has questions that need answers. Would Samâan ex-lawman, a white man and a Southernerâagree to go up there and find out what he can? The ex-prosecutor takes on the job, but first he goes to see his old friend Earl Swagger, and tells him that if he isnât back in a week, Earl is to come looking for him. When Sam vanishes into the mists and swamps around Thebes, Mississippi, Earl packs his gun, explains to a distraught Junie that duty is duty and a promise is a promise, and sets off for Thebes, Mississippi to track his friend down. Soon enough, Earlâwho approaches Thebes and its sinister prison with the stealth of a good Marine on a recon missionârealizes that something very strange indeed is going on there, that the prison is more than just a place that chills the blood of even the most hardened convict, that in fact the whole town of Thebes is hiding a secretâand itâs a place where people disappear all too easily, particularly inquisitive strangers, for whom burial in the swamps follows torture.
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The Secret Supper
by Javier Sierra
Milan, 1497: Leonardo da Vinci is completing his masterpiece, The Last Supper. Pope Alexander VI is determined to execute him after realizing that the painting contains clues to a baffling -- and blasphemous -- message, which he is determined to decode. The Holy Grail and the Eucharistic Bread are missing, there is no meat on the table and, shockingly, the apostles are portraits of well-known heretics -- none of them depicted with halos. And why has the artist painted himself into the scene with his back turned toward Jesus? The clues to Leonardo's greatest puzzle are right before your eyes....
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Illuminated
by Matt Bronleewe
A rare-books dealer must unravel a secret that has been hidden in the illuminations of the Gutenburg Bible for hundreds of years in order to save his son.
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The Thieves of Ostia
by Caroline Lawrence
With a stunning command of the Greek language and a mastery of poetic nuance, this translation of Euripides' play breathes unparalleled life into an ancient masterpiece. Using vocabulary that gives the sense that the play was written with an appreciation of and application to the 20th and 21st centuries, this adaptation goes beyond the timeless plot of the consequences of war and the fate of both the victors and the losers and focuses on the modern-day issues of feminism and women's rights. Also included in this volume are two long poemsâ"Helen" and "Orestes"âby contemporary Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize.
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His Majesty's Dragon
by Naomi Novik
"Just when you think you've seen every variation possible on the dragon story, along comes Naomi Novik. . . . Her wonderful Temeraire is a dragon for the ages."--Terry Brooks Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise to Britain's defense by taking to the skies . . . not aboard aircraft but atop the mighty backs of fighting dragons. When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes its precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Capt. Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future-and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France's own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte's boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire. "Terrifically entertaining."--Stephen King
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Temeraire: Empire of Ivory
by Naomi Novik
An epidemic of unknown origins has decimated the noble dragons' ranks and only Temeraire and a pack of newly recruited dragons stand as the only means of an airborne defense against France's ever bolder armies.
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The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst
September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitlerâs Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal.
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Night Soldiers
by Alan Furst
Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalinâs purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-creates the European world of 1934â45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand scale.
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Dark Voyage
by Alan Furst
âIn the first nineteen months of European war, from September 1939 to March of 1941, the island nation of Britain and her allies lost, to U-boat, air, and sea attack, to mines and maritime disaster, one thousand five hundred and ninety-six merchant vessels. It was the job of the Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy to stop it, and so, on the last day of April 1941 . . .â May 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter steams up the Tagus River to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the Santa Rosa, she flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines, and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmö. But she is not the Santa Rosa. She is the Noordendam, a Dutch freighter. Under the command of Captain Eric DeHaan, she sails for the Intelligence Division of the British Royal Navy, and she will load detection equipment for a clandestine operation on the Swedish coastâa secret mission, a dark voyage. A desperate voyage. One more battle in the spy wars that rage through the back alleys of the ports, from elegant hotels to abandoned piers, in lonely desert outposts, and in the souks and cafĂ©s of North Africa. A battle for survival, as the merchant ships die at sea and Britainâthe last opposition to Nazi Germanâslowly begins to starve. A voyage of flight, a voyage of fugitivesâfor every soul aboard the Noordendam. The Polish engineer, the Greek stowaway, the Jewish medical officer, the British spy, the Spaniards who fought Franco, the Germans who fought Hitler, the Dutch crew itself. There is no place for them in occupied France; they cannot go home. From Alan Furstâwhom The New York Times calls Americaâs preeminent spy novelistâhere is an epic tale of war and espionage, of spies and fugitives, of love in secret hotel rooms, of courage in the face of impossible odds. Dark Voyage is taut with suspense and pounding with battle scenes; it is authentic, powerful, and brilliant.
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The Power of One
by Bryce Courtenay
âThe Power of One has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama.â âThe New York Times âUnabashedly uplifting . . . asserts forcefully what all of us would like to believe: that the individual, armed with the spirit of independenceââthe power of oneââcan prevail.â âCleveland Plain Dealer In 1939, as Hitler casts his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, the seeds of apartheid take root in South Africa. There, a boy called Peekay is born. His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives heroic dreamsâwhich are nothing compared to what life actually has in store for him. He embarks on an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice where he will learn the power of words, the power to transform lives, and the power of one. âTotally engrossing . . . [presents] the metamorphosis of a most remarkable young man and the almost spiritual influence he has on others . . . Peekay has both humor and a refreshingly earthy touch, and his adventures, at times, are hair-raising in their suspense.â âLos Angeles Times Book Review âMarvelous . . . It is the people of the sun-baked plains of Africa who tug at the heartstrings in this book. . . . [Bryce] Courtenay draws them all with a fierce and violent love.â âThe Washington Post Book World âImpressive.â âNewsday âA compelling tale.â âThe Christian Science Monitor
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Lords of the North
by Bernard Cornwell
Cornwells third and most dramatic volume in the Saxon Chronicles is the story of the creation of modern England, as the English and the Danes become one people by sharing language and fighting side by side.