Historical Fiction
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year & a New York Times Notable Book From the Pulitzer Prize---winning author of The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain," comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world's forests: "Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy...the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx's distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written" (San Francisco Chronicle). In the late seventeenth century two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters--barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years--their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand--the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse. "A stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride through three hundred years of US and Canadian history...with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading" (Elle), Barkskins showcases Proulx's inimitable genius of creating characters who are so vivid that we follow them with fierce attention. "This is Proulx at the height of her powers as an irreplaceable American voice" (Entertainment Weekly, Grade A), and Barkskins "is an awesome monument of a book" (The Washington Post)--"the masterpiece she was meant to write" (The Boston Globe). As Anthony Doerr says, "This magnificent novel possesses the dark humor of The Shipping News and the social awareness of 'Brokeback Mountain.'"
The media calls it a "miracle" when air charter pilot Will Stewart survives an aircraft in-flight breakup, but Will's miracle pales beside the stunning aftereffect of the crash. After waking in a hospital with no memory of the crash, Will finds himself experiencing a morphine-induced hallucination in which he is floating weightless six feet above the hospital bed, and his body has vanished. Things become even crazier when he deduces that it was not, in fact, a hallucination.
Barely on his feet again, Will begins carefully exploring and learning to control his ability to vanish, and the potentially dangerous way in which gravity ceases to have an effect on him in the vanished state. In the midst of all this, an NTSB and FAA investigation into the crash threatens to end his career as a pilot, and worse--Will and his police sergeant wife Andy must race to rescue an innocent child from a heinous abduction.
Will penetrates the dark world of urban gangs in the opioid trade while struggling to control a fantastic tool for justice--and praying it doesn't kill him first.
DIVISIBLE MAN is a page-turning thriller laced with humor and heart told from a perspective seen only in your wildest dreams.
When the Essex County "Wedding of the Century" erupts in gunfire, a random shooting sends Will and Andy Stewart after a criminal element no one could have foreseen. A grisly discovery turns their pursuit into a mission to avenge innocent lives lost. Will explores the extraordinary aftereffect of surviving a devastating airplane crash - his ability to vanish - while Andy works a case obstructed by powerful people wielding the sinister influence of unlimited money in politics.
DIVISIBLE MAN - THE SIXTH PAWN takes you on a wild ride that pits Will, Andy and Essex County's best pilot, Pidge, against a murderer with a permanent perfect alibi. Gripping, yet spiced with humor, THE SIXTH PAWN proves that payback can be a beautiful bitch.
Author Howard Seaborne writes, flies airplanes and helicopters, and takes you on a twisted path in this, the second DIVISIBLE MAN novel.
The DIVISIBLE MAN Series in Order:
DIVISIBILE MAN is the origin story of Will Stewart and his ability to vanish.
DIVISIBLE MAN: THE SIXTH PAWN is the second heart-pounding thrill ride in the series.
DIVISIBLE MAN: THE SECOND GHOST goes to heart-stopping heights in high-rise Chicago.
DIVISIBLE MAN: THE SEVENTH STAR encounters the high cost of conspiracy believers.
DIVISIBLE MAN: TEN MAN CREW uncovers a long-forgotten Cold War mystery.
DIVISIBLE MAN: THE THIRD LIE puts Will and Andy at the heart of a national crime.
DIVISIBLE MAN: THREE NINES FINE launches a race against an attack on justice itself.
DIVISIBLE MAN - EIGHT BALL pits Will and Andy against a cold-blooded serial sniper.
DIVISIBLE MAN - ENGINE OUT & OTHER SHORT FLIGHTS - a short story collection.
DIVISIBLE MAN - NINE LIVES LOST a sweeps Will into the world of hoaxes and conspiracies.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
OPTIONED FOR TELEVISION BY BRUNA PAPANDREA, THE PRODUCER OF HBO'S BIG LITTLE LIES
"A tour de force of original thought, imagination and promise ... Kline takes full advantage of fiction -- its freedom to create compelling characters who fully illuminate monumental events to make history accessible and forever etched in our minds. -- Houston Chronicle
The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant novel about three women whose lives are bound together in nineteenth-century Australia and the hardships they weather together as they fight for redemption and freedom in a new society.
Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant land.
During the journey on a repurposed slave ship, the Medea, Evangeline strikes up a friendship with Hazel, a girl little older than her former pupils who was sentenced to seven years transport for stealing a silver spoon. Canny where Evangeline is guileless, Hazel--a skilled midwife and herbalist--is soon offering home remedies to both prisoners and sailors in return for a variety of favors.
Though Australia has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years, the British government in the 1840s considers its fledgling colony uninhabited and unsettled, and views the natives as an unpleasant nuisance. By the time the Medea arrives, many of them have been forcibly relocated, their land seized by white colonists. One of these relocated people is Mathinna, the orphaned daughter of the Chief of the Lowreenne tribe, who has been adopted by the new governor of Van Diemen's Land.
In this gorgeous novel, Christina Baker Kline brilliantly recreates the beginnings of a new society in a beautiful and challenging land, telling the story of Australia from a fresh perspective, through the experiences of Evangeline, Hazel, and Mathinna. While life in Australia is punishing and often brutally unfair, it is also, for some, an opportunity: for redemption, for a new way of life, for unimagined freedom. Told in exquisite detail and incisive prose, The Exiles is a story of grace born from hardship, the unbreakable bonds of female friendships, and the unfettering of legacy.