This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters, since it is the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the 20th century.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, a father, a neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946, he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell.

Elliot Rosenzweig, a respected civic leader and philanthropist, is attending a fundraiser when he is suddenly accosted and accused of being a former Nazi SS officer named Otto Piatek, the Butcher of Zamosc. Although the charges are denounced as preposterous, his accuser is convinced he is right and engages attorney Catherine Lockhart to bring Rosenzweig to justice.

Welcome to the fabled Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America. Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world.

He is a good man, a brilliant corporate executive, an honest, handsome family man admired by men and desired by women. But a lifetime ago Ben Tyson was a lieutenant in Vietnam.There the men under his command committed a murderous atrocity -- and together swore never to tell the world what they had done. Now the press, army justice, and the events he tried to forget have caught up with Ben Tyson.

Reba Freeman has loved two men in her life. Her current husband, Carl, has supported her through their 20-year marriage and given her all the material wealth a suburban wife could hope for. Reba is comfortable, if not necessarily content, in her life with Carl and their blossoming teenage daughter, Marisa, until she learns that her first love and first husband, Joseph Thomas, has been detained by the World Court of Human Rights.

Buried deep within the consciousness of Sergeant Raymond Shaw is the mechanism of an assassin, a time bomb ticking toward explosion, controlled by the delicate skill of its Communist masters. Shaw returns from the Korean War to an idolizing and unsuspecting country. What follows is at once a spy story, a love story, and a sobering, yet outrageously funny satire on demagoguery in American politics.

American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In Queen's Bench Courtroom Number Seven, famous author Abraham Cady stands trial. In his book The Holocaust - born of the terrible revelation that the Jadwiga Concentration camp was the site of his family's extermination - Cady shook the consciousness of the human race. He also named eminent surgeon Sir Adam Kelno as one of Jadwiga's most sadistic inmate/doctors. Kelno has denied this and brought furious charges. Now unfolds Leon Uris' riveting courtroom drama - one of the great fictional trials of the century.

Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.

Hans Fallada wrote this stunning novel in only 24 days - just after being released from a Nazi insane asylum. Based on a true story, Every Man Dies Alone tells of a German couple who try to start an uprising by distributing anti-fascist postcards during World War II. But their dream ultimately proves perilous under the tyranny that dominates every corner of Hitler’s Germany.

Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore, a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York".

Nicknamed “the Nazi Hunter,” Marek Cain has for 10 years been the point man for tracking down ex-Nazis who have fraudulently entered the United States since World War II and bringing them to justice. Late one afternoon, a distraught German woman eludes security and slips into Cain’s office. “I have documents,” she says, “important documents only for the Nazi Hunter.” She promises to bring them the next day. When she doesn’t show, he dismisses her as just another crackpot - until he discovers that she has been brutally murdered.