Bent Northrop Memorial Library

From the Publisher: Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five...

Playwright Billy Gertz, having waited on 9/11 for news of her lover Gus, writes "The Lake Shore Limited," a play about a man waiting to hear whether his estranged wife has survived a terrorist bombing on a train that was just pulling into Chicago's Union Station, and finds the work has far-reaching effects, not just on her life, but on those of Gus's sister, the actor in the lead role, and a man who is attracted to Billy.

After modern science turns every human into a genetic time bomb with men dying at age twenty-five and women dying at age twenty, girls are kidnapped and married off in order to repopulate the world.

Mightier than the Sword opens with an IRA bomb exploding during the MV Buckingham's maiden voyage across the Atlantic - but how many passengers lose their lives? When Harry Clifton visits his publisher in New York, he learns that he has been elected as the new president of English PEN, and immediately launches a campaign for the release of a fellow author, Anatoly Babakov, who's imprisoned in Siberia. Babakov's crime? Writing a book called Uncle...

""New York Times bestselling author Lesley M.M. Blume reveals how a courageous reporter uncovered one of greatest and deadliest cover-ups of the 20th century-the true effects of the atom bomb-potentially saving millions of lives""-- Just days after the United States decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. But the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information suppression...

"The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz. On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000...

"From the legendary whistleblower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness expose of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that--chillingly--continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority...

"The year is 1944, and Harry Black, a London firefighter battling the blazes caused by constant bombing, awakes in the hospital to learn that his soldier brother, Ellis, has been killed. In the delirium of his wounded state, Harry's mind blurs the distinctions between the reality of war-torn London and the myth of Orpheus. Driven by visions of Ellis and a sense of poetic inevitability, Harry sets off on a journey that will lead him deep beneath the...

"Odder spends her days off the coast of central California, practicing her underwater acrobatics and spinning the quirky stories for which she's known. She's a fearless daredevil, curious to a fault. But when Odder comes face-to-face with a hungry great white shark, her life takes a dramatic turn, one that will challenge everything she believes about herself--and about the humans who hope to save her"--Provided by publisher.

"Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever...