Kirjahaku

A Venetian noblewoman and an Italian sailor are captured by Turkish pirates and sold into slavery in the 16th century Ottoman Empire. "Sofia" begins a brilliant new historical series featuring the women of the Ottoman Empire.

In this revealing family memoir, best-selling author Ann Chamberlin explores the history of her Mormon grandmother Frances Lyda and her seven sisters who grew up desperately poor in Bradford, Yorkshire, in the early years of the twentieth century. Chamberlin's narrative follows these eight daughters of Mary Jane Jones and Ralph Robinson Whitaker, a remarkably gifted yet poor and blind piano tuner. Most of the girls were forced by necessity to abandon school at age twelve and find work in terrible conditions at a local factory. When their mother converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1901, she became the backbone of the Mormon community in Yorkshire. Her daughters followed their mother into her faith, while navigating their own, sometimes tragic, ways into adulthood, family, and the world beyond industrial England. Though they were exploited and undereducated, the girls maintained a steadfast belief in a brighter future for the Mormon faithful, a mindSet that, despite their many differences, forged an unshakable togetherness between them. All gifted and strong individuals in their own right, many of the Whitaker sisters overcame long odds and incredible hardships to carry on and prosper in Salt Lake City.Chamberlin interviewed her grandmother and six of her surviving great-aunts for Clogs and Shawls, the relatives who had made their way to Mormon Zion. She weaves novelistic passages with their first-person narratives to create a singular work of oral immigrant family history that is both lively and revealing.

In 1974, a young Israeli student of archaeology takes charge of her first dig-to find the lives she digs up impinging on her own. In 1950, Hammama Madmoni, a new Yemeni Jewish immigrant to Israel, gives birth to a daughter in a hospital in Jerusalem. The child disappears, and she is told the child died. Twenty-four years later to the day, Orit Nussbaum sits beside the Holocaust-survivor who raised her in the same hospital. Orit is an archaeologist in graduate school neglecting her dig at Gibeah to do her duty by a mother who suffered too much from the horrors she saw in Auschwitz to be much of a nurturer. Orit, having visions of the ancient lives she is uncovering, struggles with the patriarchy of the field of her study and of the myths created then and now, colonization and her place in the world.

As a young girl, Brynhild of the Peoples of the North, the tribe of the Angles, is doomed to die in the Spring Thaw ritual to save her people. She skirts this death to become a warriormaiden destined to ride with Odin into battle, choosing which men should die, which live. But what if she should want to make her own choices?

As a young girl, Brynhild of the Peoples of the North, the tribe of the Angles, is doomed to die in the Spring Thaw ritual to save her people. She skirts this death to become a warriormaiden destined to ride with Odin into battle, choosing which men should die, which live. But what if she should want to make her own choices?

The saga of the Choosers of the Slain continues.Odin the One-Eyed Wanderer has dismissed Brynhild from the sisterhood of the Valkyries for disobedience. Stabbing her with the sleep-thorn, he condemns her to sleep until "sons are sires" and a man comes who will be her equal. But if she loses her maidenhood, she will lose both her magical youth and her strength.Brynhild opens her eyes in a strange, icy land to see Siegfried, a man who seems half-God himself.If he is a sending of Odin, does Siegfried's outstretched hand mean a hopeful future? Or divine revenge?

The saga of the Choosers of the Slain continues.Odin the One-Eyed Wanderer has dismissed Brynhild from the sisterhood of the Valkyries for disobedience. Stabbing her with the sleep-thorn, he condemns her to sleep until "sons are sires" and a man comes who will be her equal. But if she loses her maidenhood, she will lose both her magical youth and her strength.Brynhild opens her eyes in a strange, icy land to see Siegfried, a man who seems half-God himself.If he is a sending of Odin, does Siegfried's outstretched hand mean a hopeful future? Or divine revenge?

Madame Toussaint leads the drab life of the concierge in a fashionable building in the glittering Paris of La Belle poque in 1895. On a drizzly January morning, the housemaid of the apartment directly over her head runs down to the loge in terror. Monsieur d'Ermenville, the building's owner, has been brutally murdered, and Madame Toussaint and Jeanne-Marie the housemaid are soon in a Les Mis rables prison as suspects. Imprisonment causes flashbacks to the Terrible Year. In 1870-71, Paris endured the Prussian siege, then conquest, then revolt of the Paris Commune which was brutally put down, Frenchman against Frenchman. Madame Toussaint is a survivor of this time when Parisians were reduced to eating rats and died by the tens of thousands. Glittering life and indulgence may have returned to the City of Lights, but under the gilding, hatred and violence linger, living cheek by jowl. The murderer must be another tenant of the building, and all their histories must be uncovered.