Paris, 1943. German soldiers drag me out onto the cobbled street and push me toward the waiting truck. I force myself to face forward as tears stream down my cheeks. If I look back, they’ll know. I can’t let them find my baby girl....

In Nazi-occupied Poland, Sofia cannot look her father in the eye. Sofia’s mother, her papa’s cherished wife, is Jewish—how dare he work as a doctor for the SS? She cannot forgive him, even if the bargain was made to spare their lives. In the middle of the night, Isaac emerges from a packed train with hundreds of others. Beneath Auschwitz’s barbed wire, the SS decide prisoners’ fates on the spot—and Isaac is chosen to work. Every breath feels like it could be Isaac’s last, so when he sees a beautiful auburn-haired girl peering out of the farm window, it feels like a dream.

Amelia - 1942: The inside of my closet held the last bit of my freedom before I was torn from my home and shoved onto a dark train. Our destination was even darker. "Women and children to the right. Men to the left," they shouted at us. Everything was taken from me, leaving only the smoke-filled air, piercing screams, and soul-burning cries. I was slowly starved and weakened to the bone, but there was a man - a Nazi - who brought me extra food. He called himself a prisoner too, but he scared me, and I wondered if he was the enemy I should fear the most.

1941, Poland. Though war rages around her and occupying German forces march steadily onward, 16-year-old Aleksandra has lived her life sheltered from danger. Until one day, she goes to school—never to return. Pushed roughly into a truck with other schoolgirls like her, a single ominous word tells her all she needs to know about her fate: Lebensborn.

“Women and children to the right. Men, to the left,” I once said. From 1942 to 1944 I was what some called a Jew killer. Though, I have never hurt a soul, I was responsible for separating Jewish families, ensuring they would never see each other again. Those who were sick, were sent to their death...by me because I was forced to follow the enemy. The war stole my right of beliefs, my goals for a future, my left arm, and the love of my life.

When Matilda’s childhood sweetheart, Hans, is in danger, she doesn’t hesitate to hide him in her attic. Protecting him from her parents and the soldiers downstairs, she smuggles him food and communicates in whispers. For months, they exist by candlelight. But how long can they survive?

She steps into the room and it’s like going back in time. Catapulting her right into the heart of the 1940s. The spindle of the record player frozen and ready to play. The flowery wallpaper faded but intact. A soldier’s uniform pressed and hung on a door, coal still in the fireplace.

Germany, 1939. A tumbledown farmhouse, on the outskirts of a close-knit village in the heart of the rolling hills of Bavaria. A once happy family home torn apart by Nazi rule. And one young girl who refuses to give up on what she believes in...London, 2018: When 94-year-old Imogen receives a letter addressed to her in neat, unfamiliar handwriting, she notices the postmark is stamped from Germany - and it sends shivers down her spine....

Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left-their lives, and those of their unborn babies.

Juliette and her husband have finally made it to France on the romantic getaway of her dreams—but as the days pass, all she discovers is quite how far they’ve grown apart. She’s craving a new adventure, so when she happens across a tiny, abandoned shop with a for-sale sign in the window, it feels fated. And she’s about to learn that the forgotten bookshop hides a lot more than meets the eye.

On one extraordinary day in 1940, Miriam Talan’s comfortable life is shattered. While she gives birth to her second child, a son she and her husband, Max, name Monya, the Soviets invade the Baltic state of Latvia and occupy the capital city of Riga, her home. Because the Talans are Jewish, the Soviets confiscate Max’s business and the family’s house and bank accounts, leaving them with nothing.

A powerful, moving memoir - and a practical guide to healing - written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experiences as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients and allow them to escape the prisons of their own minds. The Choice weaves Eger's personal story with case studies from her work as a psychologist. Her patients and their stories illustrate different phases of healing and show how people can choose to escape the prisons they construct in their minds and find freedom, regardless of circumstance.

Londoner Madeleine Grant is studying at the Sorbonne in Paris when she marries charismatic French journalist Giles Martin. As they raise their son, Olivier, they hold on to a tenuous promise for the future. Until the thunder of war sets off alarms in France. Staying behind to join the resistance, Giles sends Madeleine and Olivier to the relative safety of England, where Madeleine secures a job teaching French at a secondary school. Yet nowhere is safe. After a devastating twist of fate resulting in the loss of her son, Madeleine accepts a request from the ministry to aid in the war effort.

Germany, 1941: “We live together, or we die together.” A novel that will stay with you forever, The Girl Who Survived tells the inspiring true story of Ilse Stein, a German Jew who was imprisoned in a ghetto - and who fell in love with the man she was supposed to loathe.

Berlin, 1930—When a wave of change sweeps a radical political party to power, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes’s academic husband benefits from the ambitions of its newly elected chancellor. Although Sofie and Jürgen do not share the social views growing popular in Hitler’s Germany, Jürgen’s position with its burgeoning rocket program changes their diminishing fortunes for the better. But as Sofie watches helplessly, her beloved Berlin begins to transform, forcing her to consider what they must sacrifice morally for their young family’s security, and what the price for their neutrality will be.

The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates.

>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.

In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country's violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the "bastard" of the title, Asya, a 19-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul.

Mary Doyle arrives in Dublin in 1913, doomed, she fears, to a life of domestic service. Instead, however, she finds herself deeply affected by the social and political turmoil of a fledgling nation struggling for independence. Suddenly, all that was once inevitable is no longer a certainty as she is embroiled in the very heart of the Easter Rising.

When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. A ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela's shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves - even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes.

On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated. A thousand children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt.

Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.

It is 1947, and Beit Daras, a quiet village in Palestine surrounded by olive groves, is home to the Baraka family. Eldest daughter Nazmiyeh looks after her widowed mother, prone to wandering and strange outbursts, while her brother, Mamdouh, tends to the village bees. Their younger sister, Mariam, with her striking mismatched eyes, spends her days talking to imaginary friends and writing.

Meet Barbara Reichmann, once known as Gucia Gomolinska: smart, determined, independent, and steadfast in the face of injustice. A Jew growing up in predominantly Catholic Poland during the 1920s and ’30s, Gucia studies hard, makes friends, falls in love, and dreams of a bright future. Her world is turned upside down when Nazis invade Poland and establish the first Jewish ghetto of World War II in her town of Piotrko´w Trybunalski.

Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to her grandmother's stories about how the people of the small Greek island Erikousa hid a Jewish family - a tailor named Savvas and his daughters - from the Nazis during World War II. Nearly 2,000 Jews from that area died in the concentration camps, but even though everyone on Erikousa knew Savvas and his family were hiding on the island, no one ever gave them up, and the family survived the war. Years later, Yvette decided to track down the man's descendants - and eventually found them in Israel.

Zainab Salbi was 11-years-old when her father was chosen to serve as Saddam Hussein's personal pilot, her family often forced to spend weekends with Saddam where he watched their every move. As a palace insider, Zainab offers a singular glimpse of what it is like to come of age under a dictator and provides an intimate portrait of the man she was taught to call "uncle". She watched as Saddam pitted friends, spouses, and even children against each other to compete for his approval.

Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a foreword by Nicholas Kristof.

During World War II, Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, organized a rescue network of fellow social workers to save 2,500 Jewish children from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto. Incredibly, after the war her heroism, like that of many others, was suppressed by communist Poland and remained virtually unknown for 60 years.

In "Books and Roses", one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers' fates. In "Is Your Blood as Red as This?", an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" involves a "house of locks", where doors can be closed only with a key - with surprising unobservable developments. And in "If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think", a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).

Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.