Even though it is now 1901, the people of Buxton, Canada (originally a settlement of runaway slaves) and Chatham, Canada are still haunted by two events of half a century before--the American Civil War, and the Irish potato famine, and the lasting damage those events caused to the survivors.

In 1932, twelve-year-old Cal must stop being a hobo with his father and go to a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, where he begins learning about his history and heritage as a Creek Indian. --

"The fragile, 1952 postwar tranquility of a five-year-old boy's world explodes one summer day when a leopard escapes from the zoo, throwing all of Oklahoma City into dangerous excitement, in this evocative story of a child's confrontation with his deepest fears. For Grady McClarty, an ever-watchful but bewildered five-year-old boy, World War II is only a troubling, ungraspable event that occurred before he was born. But he feels its effects all around...

It's time to bring out the old patriotic spirit when three lively World War II vets check in at Grace Chapel Inn and march in the annual Veterans Day parade. However, another guest, Gulf War veteran Nathan Delhomme, suffers from guilt for surviving the war when his friend didn't make it. Can Alice help this troubled young man march proudly in memory of his friend? And will the Franklin High Patriots be victorious in the Thanksgiving Day football game...

When twelve-year-old Lyndie and her parents must move to her grandparents' home in small-town Tennessee in 1985, having to keep all family problems private only adds to their problems.--

"Phoenix, 1933: A young city with big dreams and dark corners. Great War veteran and rising star Gene Hammons lost his job as a homicide detective when he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder to protect a well-connected man. Now a private investigator, Hammons makes his living looking for missing persons--a plentiful caseload during the Great Depression, when people seem to disappear all the time. But his routine is disrupted...

America's elite task force must take down a group of ruthless domestic terrorists determined to paralyze the country through extreme acts of violence. They are known as the Black Order. Self-proclaimed patriots and survivalists, they refuse to surrender their values and beliefs to the left-leaning cultural and progressive forces threatening their nation. Military veterans and high-tech specialists, they've begun a savage war from public assassinations...

Tim O'Brien offers us fiction in a unique form: a kind of "faction" presented as a collection of related stories that have the cumulative effect of a unified novel. The "things they carry"--literally--are prosaic things: amphetamines, M-16s, grenades, good-luck charms, Sterno cans, toilet paper, photographs, C-rations. But the men in O'Brien's platoon--Curt Lemon, Rat Kiley, Henry Dobbins, Kiowa, and the rest--also carry less tangible but more palpable...

It's 1946 in the hardscrabble industrial city of Trenton, New Jersey, a woman made strong by wartime factory work kills her army veteran husband in a domestic brawl, disposes of his body, and assumes his identity. The family life Abe has so carefully constructed is crumbling under the intolerable pressures of his long ruse. Desperate to hold on to what he has left, Abe searches for solutions in the dying city. Written in brilliantly stylized prose,...

"Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin, " is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly...