"Winter Work is an exhilarating spy thriller set in East Germany after the fall of Berlin Wall, about a Stasi officer investigating the murder of a colleague who is helped by Claire Saylor. Emil Grimm, a Stasi colonel, has decamped to his dacha in the woods outside of Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. On a walk one morning, he discovers the body of a fellow intelligence officer with whom he was involved in a clandestine mission. Now Emil is...

"A teenage girl living in 1960s China becomes Mao Zedong's protégée and lover--and a poster child for the Cultural Revolution--in this provocative, poignant novel from the bestselling author of A River of Stars On the eve of China's Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished...

"From Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of existence, history, philosophy, and mathematics. On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms...

One of the most chilling novels ever written about the oppression of totalitarian regimes--and the first to open Western eyes to the terrors of Stalin's prison camps, this book allowed Solzhenitsyn, who later became Russia's conscience in exile, to challenge the brutal might of the Soviet Union.

"When 17-year-old Pavol fatally sets himself on fire in Prague in 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, his three best friends must figure out how to survive an oppressive regime without him"--

When Tai Shan and his father, Baba, are separated during China's Cultural Revolution, they are able to stay close by greeting one another every day with flying kites until Baba, like the kites, is free. Includes historical note.

"A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich--Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. 1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on...

"In a gripping World War II mystery set in Washington, D.C., a young naval intelligence officer goes undercover to solve a murder and prevent the Soviets from stealing the secrets of America's atomic bomb project. Washington D.C., 1945. Victory in the war looms, but a new fear transfixes the wartime capital. Fear of communist spies and the atomic secrets they covet. When the corpse of a Navy Intelligence officer is found on a cobblestone back alley,...

"During the summer of 1953, thirteen-year-old Marty's parents are suspected of communist sympathies, upending his life and causing him to question what it really means to be a patriotic American"--