Best friends Audrey Barrett and Eve Dawson are looking forward to celebrating Christmas in postwar America, thrilled at the prospect of starting new traditions with their five-year-old sons. But when the Sears Christmas Wish Book arrives and the boys start obsessing over every toy in it, Audrey and Eve realize they must first teach them the true significance of the holiday. They begin by helping Bobby and Harry plan gifts of encouragement and service...

Summer, 1951: Miranda Schuyler arrives on the elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in WWII. When her mother marries Hugh Fisher, Miranda is catapulted into a heady world of pedigrees and cocktails. Miranda's new stepsister, Isobel--all long legs and world-weary bravado--is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop. But beneath its patrician surface,...

Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city's biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can't let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy. Andy Fleming's newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He's barely...

On a school trip to France teenager Dominic Sheldrake begins to suspect his teacher Christian Noble has reasons to be there as secret as they're strange. Meanwhile a widowed neighbour joins a church that puts you in touch with your dead relatives,who prove much harder to get rid of. As Dominic and his friends Roberta and Jim investigate, they can't suspect how much larger and more terrible the link between these mysteries will become.

It?s 1955 in a world where the Nazis won WWII. While Britain and Germany exist in uneasy truce, a British spy and assassin continues his own stealth campaign against the men behind the deaths of his compatriots during the war. When the head of the Secret Service is assassinated, he goes AWOL to seek revenge, not knowing that his journey will bring him face-to-face with a secret German weapon that could change the course of history in more ways than...

It is August 15, 1953, the day of a street carnival in the Italian enclave of Elephant Park, Ohio, when Rocco LaGrassa receives an excruciating piece of news: his son has died in a POW camp in Korea. Against the background of immigration, broken loyalties, and racial hostility, the story presents everything Rocco sees through the eyes of various characters in the crowd.

New York City in 1954. The Cold War is heating up. Senator Joe McCarthy is running a witch hunt for Communists in America. The newly formed CIA is fighting a turf battle with the FBI to see who will be the primary US intelligence agency. And the bodies of murdered young men are turning up in the city. Michael Cassidy has an unusual background for a New York cop. His father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, is a successful Broadway producer. His godfather...

"Michael Cassidy, a New York cop plagued by dreams that sometimes come true, escorts a prisoner accused of murder to Havana on the cusp of Fidel Castro's successful revolution against the Batista dictatorship. After delivering the man to La Cabana prison and rescuing Dylan McCue, a Russian KGB agent and his now-married former lover, from her scheduled execution, Cassidy returns to New York and retreats into the comforts of alcohol and sex. The arrival...

"London, 1958. By crafting magical outfits for his friend, Princess Katherine, cloth mage Paul Gallagher is getting ahead. It's not a seamless path. Not since the Virtuis Party came to power. The far-right faction is using criminals to create a protective barrier around England. The enchanted uniforms the prisoners wear may beget a demand for mages, but using luckless convicts as tools for warmongering reactionaries isn't Paul's dream for cloth magic....

Winner of the Alfaguara Prize, Guelfenbein's novel revolves around four characters. 80-old Vera Sigall, who has achieved cult status for her fiction, is in a Santiago hospital after a fall, in a "locked-in" paralyzed state. Daniel, a young man hobbled by a foundering career and a failing marriage, addresses Vera directly in the portions of the novel he narrates and does not believe her fall was accidental. The second narrator, Emilia, is a young woman...