AP+Supplemental+Book



** Supplemental Reading AP World History **

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**Princess & Trilogy **
Jean Sasoon The Princess Trilogy consists of Princess, A True Story; Princess Sultana's Daugthers; and Princess Sultana's Circle. Sultana is a Saudi Arabian princess, born to uncountable wealth but no freedom nor control over her own life. Although Sultana lives with constant fear of retribution, her passion to provide her daughters a better life transcends her fear and fuels her desire for change.

Pretty Birds
Scott Simon In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a hoop, loves Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a battleground. When the violence and terror of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city. She learns to be a sniper, biding her time, never returning to the same perch, and searching her targets for the “mist” that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena’s new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and those she loves.

**How Soccer Explains the World**
Franklin Foer Soccer is much more than a game, or even a way of life. It's a perfect window into the crosscurrents of today's world, with all its joys and sorrows. In this remarkably insightful, wide-ranging work of reportage, Franklin Foer takes us on a surprising tour through the world of soccer, shining a spotlight on the clash of civilizations, the international economy, and just about everything in between. How Soccer Explains the World is an utterly original book that makes sense of our troubled times.

**Lexus & the Olive Tree**
Thomas Friedman In this vivid portrait of the new business world, Thomas L. Friedman shows how technology, capital, and information are transforming the global marketplace, leveling old geographic and geopolitical boundaries. With bold reporting and acute analysis, Friedman dramatizes the conflict between globalizing forces and local cultures, and he shows why a balance between progress and the preservation of ancient traditions will ensure a better future for all. The Lexus and the Olive Tree is an indispensable look at power and big change in the age of globalization.

**The World is Flat** Thomas Friedman The World Is Flat 3.0 is an essential update on globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks—environmental, social, and political, powerfully illuminated by the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

**A Long Way Gone**
Beah By now, nearly every habitual news watcher knows that child soldiers are being used as human pawns in dozens of conflicts around the world. Indeed, the figures are staggering: As many as 300,000 children are currently fighting in wars. Behind these distressing figures, of course, are real-life children, some as young as 8. Journalistic reconstructions can take us only so far into the lives of these boys; we had to wait for this firsthand account by Sierra Leone native Ishmael Beah to truly understand this ghastly, life-shattering practice. Beah was only 13 when he was handed an AK-47 and sent off to the killing fields. A bracing memoir about a survivor in a world gone mad.

**Memoirs of a Geisha**
Arthur Golden A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it.

**Bread Winner**
Debra Elli In this powerful and realistic tale, eleven-year-old Parvana lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city during the Taliban rule. Parvana's father- a history teacher until his school was bombed and his health destroyed- works from a blanket on the ground in the marketplace, reading letters for people who cannot read or write. One day he is arrested for the crime of having a foreign education, and the family is left without someone who can earn money or even shop for food. As conditions in the family grow desperate, only one solution emerges. Forbidden by the Taliban government to earn money as a girl, Parvana must transform herself into a boy and become the breadwinner.Because the Taliban rulers of Kabul, Afghanistan, impose strict limitations on women's freedom and behavior, eleven-year-old Parvana must disguise herself as a boy so that her family can survive after her father's arrest.

**Women of the Silk**
Gail Tsukiyama- about China in the 1920’s In Women of the Silk Gail Tsukiyama takes her readers back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amidst the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk. Leading the first strike the village has ever seen, the young women use the strength of their ambition, dreams, and friendship to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own. Tsukiyama's graceful prose weaves the details of "the silk work" and Chinese village life into a story of courage and strength.

**The Language of Thread**
Gail Tsukiyama- about China in 1930’s (continuation of Women of the Silk) Readers of Women of the Silk never forgot the moving, powerful story of Pei, brought to work in the silk house as a girl, grown into a quiet but determined young woman whose life is subject to cruel twists of fate, including the loss of her closest friend, Lin. Now we finally learn what happened to Pei, as she leaves the silk house for Hong Kong in the 1930s, arriving with a young orphan, Ji Shen, in her care. Her first job, in the home of a wealthy family, ends in disgrace, but soon Pei and Ji Shen find a new life in the home of Mrs. Finch, a British ex-patriate who welcomes them as the daughters she never had. Their idyllic life is interrupted, however, by war, and the Japanese occupation. Pei is once again forced to make her own way, struggling to survive and to keep her extended family alive as well. In this story of hardship and survival, Tsukiyama paints a portrait of women fighting the forces of war and time to make a life for themselves.

**Samurai’s Garden**
Gail Tsukiyama- Japan 1930’s The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.

**Left to Tell (Rwanda)** Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them. It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers. The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

**The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette **
(Ericson)- historical fiction Imagine that, on the night before she is to die under the blade of the guillotine, Marie Antoinette leaves behind in her prison cell a diary telling the story of her life—from her privileged childhood as Austrian Archduchess to her years as glamorous mistress of Versailles to the heartbreak of imprisonment and humiliation during the French Revolution. Carolly Erickson takes the reader deep into the psyche of France’s doomed queen: her love affair with handsome Swedish diplomat Count Axel Fersen, who risked his life to save her; her fears on the terrifying night the Parisian mob broke into her palace bedroom intent on murdering her and her family; her harrowing attempted flight from France in disguise; her recapture and the grim months of harsh captivity; her agony when her beloved husband was guillotined and her young son was torn from her arms, never to be seen again. Erickson brilliantly captures the queen’s voice, her hopes, her dreads, and her suffering. We follow, mesmerized, as she reveals every detail of her remarkable, eventful life—from her teenage years when she began keeping a diary to her final days when she awaited her own bloody appointment with the guillotine.

**Sarah’s Key **
(de Rosnay)- Holocaust in France Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

**The Four Queens**
(Goldstone)-historical fiction on European royalty 1200’s. Set against the backdrop of the turbulent thirteenth century, a time of chivalry and crusades, poetry, knights, and monarchs comes the story of the four beautiful daughters of the count of Provence whose brilliant marriages made them the queens of France, England, Germany, and Sicily. From a cultured childhood in Provence, each sister was propelled into a world marked by shifting alliances, intrigue, and subterfuge. Marguerite, the eldest, whose resolution and spirit would be tested by the cold splendor of the Palais du Roi in Paris; Eleanor, whose soaring political aspirations would provoke her kingdom to civil war; Sanchia, the neglected wife of the richest man in England who bought himself the crown of Germany; and Beatrice, whose desire for sovereignty was so acute that she risked her life to earn her place at the royal table. A compulsively readable narrative, Four Queens shatters the myth that women were helpless pawns in a society that celebrated physical prowess and masculine intellect.

**Glass Blower of Murano **
Marina Fiorato <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Venice, 1681. Glassblowing is the lifeblood of the Republic, and Venetian mirrors are more precious than gold. Jealously guarded by the murderous Council of Ten, the glassblowers of Murano are virtually imprisoned on their island in the lagoon. But the greatest of the artists, Corradino Manin, sells his methods and his soul to the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, to protect his secret daughter. In the present day his descendant, Leonora Manin, leaves an unhappy life in London to begin a new one as a glassblower in Venice. As she finds new life and love in her adoptive city, her fate becomes inextricably linked with that of her ancestor and the treacherous secrets of his life begin to come to light.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Madame Toussaud **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Michelle Moran <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The world knows Madame Tussaud as a wax artist extraordinaire. . . but who was this woman who became one of the most famous sculptresses of all time? In these pages, her tumultuous and amazing story comes to life as only Michelle Moran can tell it. The year is 1788, and a revolution is about to begin. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Smart and ambitious, Marie Tussaud has learned the secrets of wax sculpting by working alongside her uncle in their celebrated wax museum, the Salon de Cire. From her popular model of the American ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, to her tableau of the royal family at dinner, Marie’s museum provides Parisians with the very latest news on fashion, gossip, and even politics. Her customers hail from every walk of life, yet her greatest dream is to attract the attention of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI; their stamp of approval on her work could catapult her and her museum to the fame and riches she desires. After months of anticipation, Marie learns that the royal family is willing to come and see their likenesses. When they finally arrive, the king’s sister is so impressed that she requests Marie’s presence at Versailles as a royal tutor in wax sculpting. It is a request Marie knows she cannot refuse—even if it means time away from her beloved Salon and her increasingly dear friend, Henri Charles. As Marie gets to know her pupil, Princesse Élisabeth, she also becomes acquainted with the king and queen, who introduce her to the glamorous life at court. From lavish parties with more delicacies than she’s ever seen to rooms filled with candles lit only once before being discarded, Marie steps into a world entirely different from her home on the Boulevard du Temple, where people are selling their teeth in order to put food on the table. Meanwhile, many resent the vast separation between rich and poor. In salons and cafés across Paris, people like Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre are lashing out against the monarchy. Soon, there’s whispered talk of revolution. . . . Will Marie be able to hold on to both the love of her life and her friendship with the royal family as France approaches civil war? And more important, will she be able to fulfill the demands of powerful revolutionaries who ask that she make the death masks of beheaded aristocrats, some of whom she knows? <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Spanning five years, from the budding revolution to the Reign of Terror, Madame Tussaud brings us into the world of an incredible heroine whose talent for wax modeling saved her life and preserved the faces of a vanished kingdom.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Books by James Michener

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Things Fall Apart **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Chinua Achebe-post-colonial <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Tom Holland <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In 49 B.C., the seven hundred fifth year since the founding of Rome, Julius Caesar crossed a small border river called the Rubicon and plunged Rome into cataclysmic civil war. Tom Holland’s enthralling account tells the story of Caesar’s generation, witness to the twilight of the Republic and its bloody transformation into an empire. From Cicero, Spartacus, and Brutus, to Cleopatra, Virgil, and Augustus, here are some of the most legendary figures in history brought thrillingly to life. Combining verve and freshness with scrupulous scholarship, Rubicon is not only an engrossing history of this pivotal era but a uniquely resonant portrait of a great civilization in all its extremes of self-sacrifice and rivalry, decadence and catastrophe, intrigue, war, and world-shaking ambition.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**The Rape of Nanjing**
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Iris Chang <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered—a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written what will surely be the definitive history of this horrifying episode. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Among these was the Nazi John Rabe, an unlikely hero whom Chang calls the "Oskar Schindler of China" and who worked tirelessly to protect the innocent and publicize the horror. More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, The Rape of Nanking analyzes the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. Finally, it tells the appalling story: about how the advent of the Cold War led to a concerted effort on the part of the West and even the Chinese to stifle open discussion of this atrocity. Indeed, Chang characterizes this conspiracy of silence, that persists to this day, as "a second rape."

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Stolen Continents: The New World through Indian Eyes **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ronald Wright <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Presents native accounts--some translated for the first time from native American languages--of the plunder and persecution wrought by white settlers and explorers on the one hundred million people already living in the Americas in 1492.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror & Heroism in Colonial Africa**
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Adam Hochschild <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Blood Secret **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Kathryn Lasky Fourteen-year-old Jerry Luna, mute since her mother's disappearance, is sent to her great-great aunt Constanza's house, where she discovers a trunk that draws her into the world of her ancestors during the Spanish Inquisition. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Dante's Daughter **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Kimberley Heuston In fourteenth-century Italy, Antonia, the daughter of Dante Alighieri, longs for a stable family and home while developing her artistic talent and seeking a place for herself in a world with limited options for women. FIC

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**The Lost Childhood : A World War II Memoi**r
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Yehuda Nir <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Describes six years in the life of a daring and resourceful Polish Jewish boy and his family, who survived the Holocaust by using false papers and posing as Catholics.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Lost Hero : Raoul Wallenberg's Dramatic Quest to Save the Jews of Hungary **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Danny Smith <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Tells the story of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who was personally responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the waning days of World War II, and who was arrested by the Soviet Government.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Interpreter of Maladies **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jhumpa Lahiri <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Thomas Cahill <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In this entertaining and compelling narrative, Thomas Cahill tells the story of how Europe evolved from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era. Without Ireland, the transition could not have taken place. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization — copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost — they brought their uniquely Irish world-view to the task.As Cahill delightfully illustrates, so much of the liveliness we associate with medieval culture has its roots in Ireland. When the seeds of culture were replanted on the European continent, it was from Ireland that they were germinated.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Dava Sobel <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day—and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution—a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the Time of the Butterflies **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Julia Alvarez <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.” In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Over a Thousand Hills I Walk With You **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Hanna Jansen <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jeanne, the only member of her family not murdered in the Rwandan genocide, struggles to start a new life without her family while coping with the violent memories that haunt her. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Daniel Pool <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For every frustrated reader of the great nineteenth-century English novels of Austen, Trollope, Dickens, or the Brontës who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell "Tally Ho!" at a fox hunt, or how one landed in "debtor's prison," here is a "delightful reader's companion that lights up the literary dark" (The New York Times).This fascinating, lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules, regulations, and customs that governed everyday life in Victorian England. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the "plums" in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life — both "upstairs" and "downstairs."

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Mark Mathabane <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">David Starkey <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Six Wives is a masterful work of history that intimately examines the rituals of diplomacy, marriage, pregnancy, and religion that were part of daily life for women at the Tudor Court. Weaving new facts and fresh interpretations into a spellbinding account of the emotional drama surrounding Henry's six marriages, David Starkey reveals the central role that the queens played in determining policy. With an equally keen eye for romantic and political intrigue, he brilliantly recaptures the story of Henry's wives and the England they ruled.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Chanda’s Secrets **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Allan Stratton <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Chandra Kabelo, a sixteen-year-old in a small South African town, faces down shame and stigma in her efforts to help friends and family members who are dying of AIDS. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Three Cups of Tea **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Greg Mortenson <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">One day in 1993, high up in the world's most inhospitable mountains, Greg Mortenson wandered lost and alone, broken in body and spirit, after a failed attempt to climb K2, the world's deadliest peak. When the people of an impoverished village in Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya took him in and nursed him back to health, Mortenson made an impulsive promise: He would return one day and build them a school. Although he was a homeless "climbing bum" living out of his aging Buick in Berkeley, California, Mortenson sold what few possessions he had to launch one of the most remarkable humanitarian campaigns of our time." "Three Cups of Tea traces Mortenson's decade-long odyssey to build schools, especially for girls, throughout the region that gave birth to the Taliban and sanctuary to Al Qaeda. While he wages war with the root causes of terrorism - poverty and ignorance - by providing both girls and boys with a balanced, nonextremist education. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life Jon Lee Anderson Combining unprecedented access to the personal archives maintained by Guevara's widow, carefully guarded Cuban government documents, and extensive interviews with both Che's comrades and the CIA men and Bolivian officers who hunted him down, this acclaimed biography stands as "an enduring achievement" ("The Boston Globe"), illuminating as never before this mythic figure who embodied the greatest moment of revolutionary communism as a force in history

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Power of One **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Bryce Courtenay <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">First with your head and then with your heart…So says Hoppie Groenewald, boxing champion, to a seven-year-old boy who dreams of being the welterweight champion of the world. For the young Peekay, it is a piece of advice he will carry with him throughout his life. Born in a South Africa divided by racism and hatred, this one small boy will come to lead all the tribes of Africa. Through enduring friendships with Hymie and Gideon, Peekay gains the strength he needs to win out. And in a final conflict with his childhood enemy, the Judge, Peekay will fight to the death for justice. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A Thousand Splendid Suns **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Khaled Hosseini <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">First They Killed My Father **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Loung Ung Loung Ung, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official in Phnom Penh, tells of her experiences after her family was forced to flee from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, discussing her training as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, and telling of how her surviving siblings were eventually reunited.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">When I was a Soldier **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Valerie Zenatti <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Like all young Israelis, Valerie Zenatti enlisted in the national defense service on her 18th birthday, where for the next two years she endured rigorous training and harsh living conditions, ultimately participating in top-secret missions with the secret service.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sophie’s World **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jostein Gaarder <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The protagonists are Sophie Amundsen, a 14-year-old girl, and Alberto Knox, her philosophy teacher. The novel chronicles their metaphysical relationship as they study Western philosophy from its beginnings to the present. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">One Hundred Years of Solitude **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Gabriel Garcia Marquez <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Pope’s Rhinoceros **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Lawrence Norfolk <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Pope's Rhinoceros is a vivid, antic, and picaresque novel spun around one of history's most bizarre chapters: the sixteenth-century attempt to procure a rhinoceros as a bribe for Pope Leo X. In February 1516, a Portuguese ship sank off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora de Ajuda had sailed fourteen thousand miles from the Indian kingdom of Gujarat. Her mission: to bribe the "pleasure-loving Pope" into favoring expansionist Portugal over her rival Spain with the most exotic and least likely of gifts -- a living rhinoceros. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Long Walk to Freedom **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Nelson Mandela <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Simon Winchester <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham—the brilliant Cambridge scientist, freethinking intellectual, and practicing nudist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, once the world's most technologically advanced country.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Snow Flower and the Secret Fan **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Lisa See <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “old sames,” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What is the What **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Dave Eggers <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. FIC

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**People of the Book**
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Geraldine Brooks <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called "a tour de force"by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding-an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair-only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Reading Lolita in Tehran **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Azar Nafisi <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Thomas Cahill In the city-states of Athens and Sparta and throughout the Greek islands, honors could be won in making love and war, and lives were rife with contradictions. By developing the alphabet, the Greeks empowered the reader, demystified experience, and opened the way for civil discussion and experimentation—yet they kept slaves. The glorious verses of the Iliad recount a conflict in which rage and outrage spur men to action and suggest that their “bellicose society of gleaming metals and rattling weapons” is not so very distant from more recent campaigns of “shock and awe.” Granting equal time to the sacred and the profane, Cahill rivets our attention to the legacies of an ancient and enduring worldview.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Swerve: How the World Became Modern **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Stephen Greenblatt Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Salt: A World History **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Mark Kurlansky <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Salt is common, easy to obtain and inexpensive. It is the stuff of kitchens and cooking. Yet trade routes were established, alliances built and empires secured – all for something that filled the oceans, bubbled up from springs, formed crusts in lake beds, and thickly veined a large part of the Earth’s rock fairly close to the surface. From pre-history until just a century ago – when the mysteries of salt were revealed by modern chemistry and geology – no one knew that salt was virtually everywhere. Accordingly, it was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history. Even today, salt is a major industry. Canada, Kurlansky tells us, is the world’s sixth largest salt producer, with salt works in Ontario playing a major role in satisfying the Americans’ insatiable demand.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**A History of the World in 6 Glasses**
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Tom Standage <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century through the lens of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Beer was first made in the Fertile Crescent and by 3000 B.C.E. was so important to Mesopotamia and Egypt that it was used to pay wages. In ancient Greece wine became the main export of her vast seaborne trade, helping spread Greek culture abroad. Spirits such as brandy and rum fueled the Age of Exploration, fortifying seamen on long voyages and oiling the pernicious slave trade. Although coffee originated in the Arab world, it stoked revolutionary thought in Europe during the Age of Reason, when coffeehouses became centers of intellectual exchange. And hundreds of years after the Chinese began drinking tea, it became especially popular in Britain, with far-reaching effects on British foreign policy. Finally, though carbonated drinks were invented in 18th-century Europe they became a 20th-century phenomenon, and Coca-Cola in particular is the leading symbol of globalization.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**1491**
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Charles Mann <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Traditionally, Americans have learned in school that the ancestors of the American Indians crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago, existed in small, nomadic bands, and lived so lightly on the land that much of the Americas was wilderness when Columbus set sail. But as Charles Mann makes clear, in the last 20 years archaeologists and anthropologists using new research tecniques have proven these and other long-held assumptions to be false. He shows us how a new generation of researchers came to the persuasive conclusion that more people lived in the Americas in 1491 than in Europe; that certain of their cities, including the Azetc capital, Tenochtitlan, were greater in size than any European city; that these much learger societies were also older and far more advanced than had been thought (the Indian development of corn is still the most complex and far-reaching example of genetic engineering known); that the Native Americans managed their environments in ways that, if replicated today, could revolutionize local agriculture.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">David Grann <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett ventured into the Amazon jungle, in search of a fabled civilization. He never returned. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of his party and the place he called “The Lost City of Z.” In this masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, journalist David Grann interweaves the spellbinding stories of Fawcett’s quest for “Z” and his own journey into the deadly jungle, as he unravels the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf In January 2006, after the Republic of Liberia had been racked by fourteen years of brutal civil conflict, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—Africa's "Iron Lady"—was sworn in as president, an event that marked a tremendous turning point in the history of the West African nation. In this stirring memoir, Sirleaf shares the inside story of her rise to power, including her early childhood; her experiences with abuse, imprisonment, and exile; and her fight for democracy and social justice. This compelling tale of survival reveals Sirleaf's determination to succeed in multiple worlds: from her studies in the United States to her work as an international bank executive to her election campaigning in some of Liberia's most desperate and war-torn villages and neighborhoods. It is also the story of an outspoken political and social reformer who, despite danger, fought the oppression of dictators and championed change.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Dai Sijie <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. FIC

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity**
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Katherine Boo <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.” But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Bookseller of Kabul **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Asne Seierstad] <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities—whether Communist or Taliban—to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world's darkest places.This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family—two wives, five children, and many relatives sharing a small four-room house in this war ravaged city. But more than that, it is a rare look at contemporary life under Islam, where even after the Taliban's collapse, the women must submit to arranged marriages, polygamous husbands, and crippling limitations on their ability to travel, learn and communicate with others.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Nujood Ali] & [|Delphine Minoui] Nujood Ali's childhood came to an abrupt end in 2008 when her father arranged for her to be married to a man three times her age. With harrowing directness, Nujood tells of abuse at her husband's hands and of her daring escape. With the help of local advocates and the press, Nujood obtained her freedom-an extraordinary achievement in Yemen, where almost half of all girls are married under the legal age. Nujood's courageous defiance of both Yemeni customs and her own family even inspired other young girls in the Middle East to challenge their marriages.Featuring a new epilogue that describes Nujood's life today, this is an unforgettable story of tragedy, triumph, and courage.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East**
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[|Sandy Tolan] <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In 1967, Bashir Al-Khayri, a Palestinian twenty-five-year-old, journeyed to Israel, with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house, with the lemon tree behind it, that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Ashkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust. On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and tested over the next thirty-five years in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967. Based on extensive research, and springing from his enormously resonant documentary that aired on NPR's Fresh Air in 1998, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, suggesting that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and reconciliation.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Broken Memory: A Novel of Rwanda **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Elisabeth Combres <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Hiding behind a chair, Emma can’t see her mother being murdered, but she hears everything. Eventually, Emma is taken in by a Hutu woman who risks her own life to hide the child. When the country establishes gacaca courts to allow victims to face their tormentors, Emma is uneasy and afraid. But through her growing friendship with a young torture victim and the encouragement of a man charged with helping child survivors, Emma finds the courage to begin the long journey to healing. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Revolution is Not a Dinner party: A Novel **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ying Chang Compestine <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed bourgeois, and people of laughter. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">God Grew Tired of Us **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">John Bul Dau <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Just 13 when he was driven from his village and separated from his family in the raging civil war in southern Sudan, John Bul Dau spent years in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, until he came to the U.S. as one of 4,000 Lost Boys of Sudan. He's funny about the culture shock in America and honest about his years in the camp. Although appreciative of this country and the chance for work and college, he never denies his connections to Africa.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Say You’re One of Them **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Uwem Akpan <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle's attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees-a microcosm of today's Africa-a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Last Empress **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Anchee Min <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The last decades of the nineteenth century were a violent period in China’s history, marked by humiliating foreign incursions and domestic rebellions and ending in the demise of the Ch’ing Dynasty. The only constant during this tumultuous time was the power wielded by one woman, the resilient, ever-resourceful Tsu Hsi—or Empress Orchid, as readers came to know her in Anchee Min’s critically acclaimed, best-selling novel covering her rise to power. The Last Empress is the story of Orchid’s dramatic transition from a strong-willed, instinctive young woman to a wise and politically savvy leader who ruled China for more than four decades. In this concluding volume Min gives us a compelling, very human leader who assumed power reluctantly and sacrificed all to protect those she loved and an empire that was doomed to die. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The God of Small Things **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Arundhati Roy <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Arundhati Roy's rich, humid fairy tale of a novel begins in June, when the monsoon rains send the province of Kerala, in southwestern India, into fecund frenzy: "The countryside turns an immodest green ... Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads." Behind this lush life, however, something festers. Rahel Kochamma, one of the novel's twin protagonists, returns to her family home in the Kerali town of Ayemenem, and decay slithers out to greet her. The house walls "bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against glistening stone." This slithering overripeness hints at what's really rotten in Ayemenem: the past, specifically a chain of events set in motion on "a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent)," when the twins' half-English cousin, Sophie Mol, came to visit. FIC

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Book of Five Rings **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Miyamoto Musashi <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Miyamoto Musashi was a famous Japanese samurai, and is considered by many to have been one of the most skilled swordsmen in history. Musashi, as he is often simply known, became legendary through his outstanding swordsmanship in numerous duels, even from <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">a very young age. He is the founder of the Niten-ryū style of swordsmanship and the author of The Book of Five Rings, a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy that is still <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">studied today.

**<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Cleopatra **
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Stacy Schiff <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jack Weatherford\
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ken Follett A huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian brothers, whose plans to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution. In a plot of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, FALL OF GIANTS moves seamlessly from Washington to St Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Fall of Giants **

Ken Follett Berlin in 1933 is in upheaval. Eleven-year-old Carla von Ulrich struggles to understand the tensions disrupting her family as Hitler strengthens his grip on Germany. Into this turmoil steps her mother’s formidable friend and former British MP, Ethel Leckwith, and her student son, Lloyd, who soon learns for himself the brutal reality of Nazism. He also encounters a group of Germans resolved to oppose Hitler - but are they willing to go so far as to betray their country? Such people are closely watched by Volodya, a Russian with a bright future in Red Army Intelligence. The international clash of military power and personal beliefs that ensues will sweep over them all as it rages from Cable Street in London’s East End to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, from Spain to Stalingrad, from Dresden to Hiroshima. At Cambridge Lloyd is irresistibly drawn to dazzling American socialite Daisy Peshkov, who represents everything his left-wing family despise. But Daisy is more interested in aristocratic Boy Fitzherbert - amateur pilot, party lover and leading light of the British Union of Fascists. Back in Berlin, Carla worships golden boy Werner from afar. But nothing will work out the way they expect as their lives and the hopes of the world are smashed by the greatest and cruellest war in the history of the human race. Winter of the World is the second novel in Ken Follett’s uniquely ambitious and deeply satisfying trilogy 'The Century'. On its own or read in sequence with Fall of Giants, this is a magnificent, spellbinding epic of global conflict and personal drama.
 * Winter of the World **