National Network for Equitable Library Service

'A very accomplished novel' Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin 'Hard to put this book down' Sofka Zinovieff. Calliope Adham - young, strong-willed, and recently widowed - is schoolmistress in the village of Molyvos when Hitler's army invades Greece in 1941. Well-read and linguistically gifted, she is recruited by the Germans to act as their liaison officer. It is the beginning of a personal and national saga that will last for several decades.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 LEACOCK MEDAL FOR HUMOUR “A super-typhoon of a novel. A Babel of rogues, survivors, and shape-shifters. A polemic against corruption and greed. A sassy, swerving mini-series, touched by grace and beauty. A Filipino Bonfire of the Vanities for our beleaguered times. An uncompromising work of art.” —David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue “It’s a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author’s reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you . . .

An election sets the stage for Oedipal rivalry and civil revolt. An intimate novel about the levers of power and privilege that shape the lives of the people most affected by war and insurrection.

When the poet Eleanor Brandon dies, an apparent suicide, Peter Forrest, her former student, sometime lover and now a married professor, is asked to be her literary executor. He agrees, although he makes it clear that he is only interested in bringing her poetry to publication, not in dealing with the legacy of her social activism on behalf of Chinese dissidents. But after a trip to China, where he and his wife are adopting a third Chinese orphan, Peter finds himself drawn into not only the politics so dear to Eleanor, but a life-threatening plot.

The profound and moving novel from the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature is finally available on audio. Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism-these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.

An extraordinary true account of the enormous tragedy of the Syrian civil conflict. Since the revolution-turned-civil war in Syria began in 2011, over 500,000 civilians have been killed and more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced. Rania Abouzeid, one of the foremost journalists on the topic, follows two pairs of sisters from opposite sides of the conflict to give readers a firsthand glimpse of the turmoil and devastation this strife has wrought. Sunni Muslim Ruha and her younger sister Alaa withstand constant attacks by the Syrian government in rebel-held territory.

Michael's parents are leaders of a new anti-immigrant political party called Aussie Values which is trying to halt the flood of refugees from the Middle East; Mina fled Afghanistan with her family ten years ago, and just wants to concentrate on fitting in and getting into college--but the mutual attraction they feel demands that they come to terms with their family's concerns and decide where they stand in the ugly anti-Muslim politics of the time.

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens and to escape the dangers of the outside world. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we watch as these girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence.

When her lover Pietro Pante leaves for work in America, Nina Argenta is torn between joining him and her commitment to Italy and her mother as Mussolini's Fascists throw the country into chaos.

May 1941. Alenka, a young Greek woman, saves the lives of two soldiers during a Nazi attack against Crete. Both men fall in love with Alenka, and their friendship suffers under the strain of their rivalry.