Janis Spath

Love and friendship take a backseat to survival—especially to a young coyote/wolf hybrid on the outskirts of suburban Pittsburgh. Coda navigates the city and forest, fascinated by these strange creatures called the two-legs and the metal beasts that transport them. He hunts game, encounters new allies, while enduring the brutality of bitter rivals. His routine of blood and stealth is interrupted when a mysterious female from another land enters his world, then turns it upside down.

Priceless F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts stolen in a daring heist; a young woman recruited to recover them, and a beach-resort bookseller who gets more than he bargained for - all in one long summer on Camino Island.

In 1770s Boston, a prosperous merchant's daughter, Eliza Boylston, lives a charmed life - until war breaches the walls of the family estate and forces her to live in a world in which wealth can no longer protect her.

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, his beautiful and flamboyant daughter was transformed into "Princess Alice", arguably the century's first global celebrity. Thirty-two years later, her first cousin Eleanor moved into the White House as First Lady. Born eight months and 20 blocks apart from each other in New York City, Eleanor and Alice spent a large part of their childhoods together and were far more alike than most historians acknowledge.

What were the forces that thrust the British Empire to its extraordinary position of greatness and then just as powerfully drove it into decline? And why is nearly every nation on earth, in one way or another, the consequence of the British Empire?In these 36 lectures, Professor Allitt leads you through four centuries of British power, innovation, influence, and, ultimately, diminishment-four profound centuries that literally remade the world and bequeathed the complex global legacy that continues to shape your everyday life.