Historical Direction

Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan: they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. One must play the piano; if staying at Claridge’s, one must regrettably install a Clavinova in the suite so that the necessary hours of practice will not be inflicted on fellow guests.

In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man who gives them dark powers: they can steal people's happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or death. They are all in danger of the stake.

A forested property on a Brandenburg lake outside Berlin lies at the heart of this darkly sensual, elegiac novel. Encompassing over 100 years of German history, from the 19th century to the Weimar Republic, from World War II to the Socialist German Democratic Republic, and finally reunification and its aftermath, Visitation offers the life stories of 12 individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants.

War crimes investigator and ex-CIA officer Joe Johnson is more than intrigued when he learns of a link between the financing for the presidential candidate's 2012 campaign, the Nazi train, and a ruthless blackmail plot. But the investigation becomes bigger and more deeply personal than Johnson expects when it turns out the SS Holocaust killer escaped his net years earlier. Soon, there are high-level intelligence agencies and criminal networks combining across three continents against Johnson and his two female colleagues.

From the New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 12 Maps, this is the revelatory history of the four cardinal directions that have oriented and defined our place on the globe for millennia. North, south, east, and west: almost all societies use these four cardinal...

A British police chief joins the list of high-profile Northern Ireland sniper victims. Tension rises as the US president prepares to visit. And the 29-year mystery around an IRA killer's gruesome death deepens. Ex-CIA war crimes investigator Joe Johnson is called in as the sniper's body count rises. But with the motive unknown, the clock is ticking down as the president and UK prime minister prepare for a G8 world summit near Belfast.

A Cold War attack by Soviet helicopters on an Afghan village. A knife-edge CIA operation that goes wrong. And a vengeful mujahideen tribesman, armed with Stinger missiles. When CIA officer Joe Johnson is handed the tough task by his boss of capturing a Soviet helicopter and forging better contacts among the mujahideen, he unknowingly finds himself up against a sinister KGB rival who wants him dead.

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books", each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early 20th-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband.

Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew.

War crimes investigator Joe Johnson is drawn into a search for a dossier of secret documents that disappeared 20 years ago from the president's office in Sarajevo - but which have damaging links to the White House. Johnson finds himself hunting a Bosnian army officer who vanished, along with the dossier, after a series of horrific killings. The search takes him from Dubrovnik to New York City and London.