Recommendations based on "In Gallant Company"

A National Book Award Finalist A New York Times Bestseller A Guardian Best Fiction Pick Of 2021 One Of Barack Obama's Favourite Books Of 2021

Exiled to Jamaica after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Sir John Wedderburn made a fortune, alongside his three brothers, as a faux surgeon and sugar planter. In the 1770s, he returned to Scotland to marry and re-establish the family name. He brought with him Joseph Knight, a black slave and a token of his years in the Caribbean.Now, in 1802, Sir John Wedderburn is settling his estate, and has hired a solicitor's agent, Archibald Jamieson, to search for his former slave. The past has haunted Wedderburn ever since Culloden, and ever since he last saw Knight, in court twenty-four years ago, in a case that went to the heart of Scottish society, pitting master against slave, white against black, and rich against poor.As long as Knight is missing, Wedderburn will never be able to escape the past. Yet what will he do if Jamieson's search is successful? And what effect will this re-opening of old wounds have on those around him? Meanwhile, as Jamieson tries to unravel the true story of Joseph Knight he begins to question his own motivation. How can he possibly find a man who does not want to be found?James Robertson's second novel is a tour de force, the gripping story of a search for a life that stretches over sixty years and moves from battlefields to the plantations of Jamaica, from Enlightenment Edinburgh to the back streets of Dundee. It is a moving narrative of history, identity and ideas, that dramatically retells a fascinating but forgotten episode of Scottish history.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels“One of the greats. . . . Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon.” —Stephen King"Engrossing. . . . [Le Guin] is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscape of the mind." —Cincinnati EnquirerIn celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, a commemorative edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning classic, a profound and thoughtful tale of anarchism and capitalism, individualism and collectivism, and one ambitious man’s quest to bridge the ideological chasm separating two worlds. This special edition includes a new foreword by Karen Joy Fowler.The Dispossessed is the spellbinding story of anarchist Shevek, the “galactically famous scientist,” who single-handedly attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust.Anarres, Shevek’s homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic utopian civilization, where there is no government, and everyone, at least nominally, is a revolutionary. It has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—defined by warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to unify the two civilizations. In the face of great hostility, outright threats, and the pain of separation from his family, he makes an unprecedented trip to Urras. Greater than any concern for his own wellbeing is the belief that the walls of hatred, distrust, and philosophic division between his planet and the rest of the civilized universe must be torn down. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and explore differences in customs and cultures, determined to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he finds not the egotistical philistines he expected, but an intelligent, complex people who warmly welcome him. But soon the ambitious scientist and his gift is seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

A novel of dazzling wit and serious purpose. An extraordinary feat of storytelling and breathtaking invention on a grand scale, it is a tour de force from a writer who has turned science fiction on its head. "Unexpectedly savage, emotionally powerful, and impossible to forget." —The Times In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one — maybe two — people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, even without knowing the full truth, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever. Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has changed almost beyond recognition to become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilizations throughout the greater galaxy. Concealing her new identity — and her particular set of abilities — might be a dangerous strategy, however. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter. The Culture Series Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Excession Inversions Look to Windward Matter Surface Detail The Hydrogen Sonata

"Richly nuanced and beautiful. . . . An immersive and magical tale of loneliness, love, and finding hope.” (Buzzfeed)“A layered novel of many complex characters…To keep their worlds safe, Chava and Ahmad must access both their greatest supernatural powers and their deepest human impulses.” (Historical Novels Review)In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I— the long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Golem and the Jinni—Helene Wecker revisits her beloved characters Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world.Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, who can hear the thoughts and longings of those around her and feels compelled by her nature to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a restless creature of fire, once free to roam the desert but now imprisoned in the shape of a man. Fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and try to pass as human—just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Brought together under calamitous circumstances, their lives are now entwined—but they’re not yet certain of what they mean to each other.Both Chava and Ahmad have changed the lives of the people around them. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets Dima, a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele—not knowing that she’s about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector.Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their opposing natures and desires eventually tear them apart—especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other beings like themselves?

WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • In this stunning novel, one man traces the tangled histories of three very different families—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain“Boyle has emerged as one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation.”—The New York TimesHaunted by the burden of his family’s traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine, and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the 1960s back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940s to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families—the aristocratic Van Warts, the Native American Mohonks, and Walter’s own ancestors, the Van Brunts—will be revealed.

Abridged, 12 CDs, 14 hoursRead by TBAKen Follett's World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics. Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic.

The future is small. The future is nano ...And who could be smaller or more insignificant than poor Little Nell - an orphan girl alone and adrift in a world of Confucian Law, Neo-Victorian values and warring nano-technology? Well, not quite alone. Because Nell has a friend, of sorts.

When Henry Warren, director of an English bank, lands by chance in a hospital in a bleak Northern town that has been ruined by the closure of its shipyard, he discovers nothing less than a new purpose for his life. Moved by the fate of the town’s inhabitants, Warren risks his fortune and reputation to save the shipyard and restore the town to its former prosperity. In seeking to change the fate of the town, he radically changes his own.

The 1st instalment in the wildly popular Matthew Shardlake mystery series, now available from Vintage Canada. It is 1537, a time of revolution that sees the greatest changes in England since 1066. Henry VIII has proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church. The country is waking up to savage new laws, rigged trials and the greatest network of informers it has ever seen. And under the orders of Thomas Cromwell, a team of commissioners is sent throughout the country to investigate the monasteries. There can only be one outcome: dissolution. But on the Sussex coast, at the monastery of Scarnsea, events have spiralled out of control. Cromwell's commissioner, Robin Singleton, has been found dead, his head severed from his body. His horrific murder is accompanied by equally sinister acts of sacrilege. Matthew Shardlake, lawyer and long-time supporter of Reform, has been sent by Cromwell to uncover the truth behind the dark happenings at Scarnsea. But investigation soon forces Shardlake to question everything that he hears, and everything that he intrinsically believes...