Historical

This book is a story about a boy who goes to war but also fills you in on the wider picture. It's set on the western front in France, World War One. This was the Australians' bloodiest day at war.

This is the story of a vastly outnumbered force of poorly-trained and poorly-supplied Australian militia who stopped a huge but ill-conceived Japanese attack on Port Moresby, over the spine of New Guinea. The two villains in the piece, Australian general Thomas Blamey and US general Douglas MacArthur, should heave brought about defeat a dozen times over with their stupidity. Further down the chain, competent generals and competent soldiering undid the harm that the top generals attempted.

The Woeful Second World War presents the dire details of a war that affected almost everyone - from old men joining the Dad's Army to the 12 year olds defending Berlin to the bitter end. Find out who made a meal of maggots, or which soldiers were so smelly their enemies could sniff them out.

The details of the dreadful war that affected everyone, from peace-loving protesters to the suffering soldiers. There are ropey rhymes and sad songs, rotten rules and sinister superstitions. Here is the horror and the hardships of World War I, which lasted for four years.

The dark clouds returned and gathered about the boy. His eyes grew distant, and he began to tremble. He heard not only shells exploding, but the cries of dying men . . . He was stumbling over churned earth, looking into the face of an officer, bloodied red as the poppies, ripped apart in the Flanders mud . . .

The First World War was only meant to last six months.

When the Australians and New Zealanders arrived at the Western Front in 1916, the fighting had been going for a year and a half and there was no end in sight. The men took their place in a line of trenches that spread through Belgium and France from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps. Beyond the trenches was no-man's land, an eerie wasteland where rats lived in the ribs of the dead and the wounded cried for help. Beyond that was the German Army.

Can Lisa ever escape the shadows of Vietnam? The war has be en over for more than ten years, but its ramifications continue to haunt twelve-year-old Lisa Grey's life.

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid named Anna Firth emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, a her fellow villagers make and extraordinary choice: convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boudnaries to arrest the spread of the disease. But as death reaches into every household, faith frays.

Written in the form of a suspense novel, Emil & Karl draws readers into the dilemma faced by two young boys--one Jewish, the other not--when they suddenly find themselves without homes or families in Vienna on the eve of World War II. A taut, gripping page-turner, it offers a picture of life during the period and the moral challenges faced under Nazism--and a prescient glimpse of the early days of the Holocaust.

Dictionary of the Khazars is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.