The periodic table of the elements is a crowning scientific achievement, but it's also a treasure trove of passion, adventure, obsession, and betrayal. These tales follow carbon, neon, silicon, gold, and all the elements in the table as they play out their parts in human history. The usual suspects are here, like Marie Curie (and her radioactive journey to the discovery of polonium and radium) and William Shockley (who is credited, not exactly justly,...

Nicole Krauss presents a series of stories, all of which are connected by a desk. An American novelist has been using a desk inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared under shady circumstances. But when the poet's daughter claims possession of the desk, the writer is crushed. In London, a man discovers that his dying wife has been hiding a terrible secret. In 1944 Jerusalem, an antiques deal attempts to restore his father's study after it...

Scottish soldier Jamie Fraser and his wife, Claire Randall, a twentieth century doctor who has traveled two centuries back in time, find themselves in South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution, where they must fight to save a young girl. Now Claire has gone to find Jamie, the man she loved more than life, and has left half her heart behind with their daughter, Brianna. Claire gave up Jamie to save Brianna, and now Bree has sent her mother...

"Sybella's duty as Death's assassin in 15th-century France forces her return home to the personal hell that she had finally escaped. Love and romance, history and magic, vengeance and salvation converge in this sequel to Grave Mercy"--

"Once, in a house on Egypt Street there lived a china rabbit named Edward Tulane. The rabbit was very pleased with himself, and for good reason: he was owned by a girl named Abilene, who treated him with the utmost care and adored him completely. And then, one day, he was lost. Kate DiCamillo takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the depths of the ocean to the net of a fisherman, from the top of a garbage heap to the fireside of a hoboes' camp,...

After the Civil War sweeps away the genteel life to which she has been accustomed, Scarlett O'Hara sets about to salvage her plantation home.

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, 11-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to...

"From Kristin Hannah, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone, comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America's most defining eras-the Great Depression. Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens...

An American learns the true value of life while fighting with a guerrilla band during the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in...

A Russian epic, "Doctor Zhivago" traces the life of surgeon-poet Yuri Zhivago before and during the Russian Revolution. Married to an upper-class girl who is devoted to him, yet in love with an unfortunate woman who becomes his muse, Zhivago is torn between fidelity and passion.