Ethan Wate has spent his whole life in Gatlin, South Carolina, dreaming of leaving. He has also spent months dreaming of a girl he has never met — the same girl, in the same burning field, in dreams that feel more real than his waking life. When Lena Duchannes arrives at Gatlin High as the…
Cassia Reyes lives in a Society that has solved the problem of choosing: officials called Matched select your career, your diet, your activities, and ultimately your spouse — the person with whom you are statistically most compatible. On the night of the Matching banquet, Cassia is Matched to her best friend Xander, a reassuring outcome…
Thomas Harris published The Silence of the Lambs in 1988, and the novel has never really left the cultural conversation since. It follows Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee from a working-class background in West Virginia, who is sent to interview the imprisoned psychiatrist and serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The assignment is not casual curiosity:…
In August 1914, Europe went to war in ways its leaders had not planned for, against opponents they had not fully calculated, with consequences none of them foresaw. Barbara Tuchman’s account of the first thirty days of World War I — the mobilizations, the miscalculations, the early battles along the Belgian and French frontiers —…
Niall Ferguson’s Empire is a revisionist account of the British Empire that takes seriously a question most historians have been reluctant to ask directly: on balance, was the British Empire a force for good or ill in the world? Ferguson’s answer — cautious, conditional, and certain to irritate — is that the Empire spread institutions…
The Looming Tower is an account of how the United States failed to prevent the September 11 attacks — not because intelligence was absent, but because the institutions responsible for acting on it were competing rather than cooperating. Lawrence Wright reconstructs the decade-long rise of al-Qaeda through meticulous reporting, following FBI counterterrorism agent John O’Neill,…
Salt is one of those substances so ordinary we no longer see it — the white crystals on every table, the invisible ingredient in almost every food. Mark Kurlansky’s project in this book is to make it visible again: to trace the way salt shaped human history from the earliest settlements through the modern industrial…
In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair that drew 27 million visitors and introduced the United States to, among other things, the Ferris wheel, Cracker Jack, and a vision of what a city could become. Erik Larson tells two stories in parallel: the construction of the fair, which was an engineering…
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in South African prisons — 18 of them on Robben Island, a former leper colony off the coast of Cape Town where political prisoners broke rock in a limestone quarry and were denied sunglasses despite the glare that damaged their eyes. He became president of South Africa in 1994. Long…
Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when the Hungarian gendarmerie rounded up the Jews of Sighet, his Transylvanian hometown, and loaded them onto cattle cars. He arrived at Birkenau in the spring of 1944. He survived Auschwitz and Buna. He arrived at Buchenwald after the death march from Buna in January 1945. He was liberated…