Southern High

When he died suddenly at the age of 26, Otis Redding (1941-1967) had already become the conscience of a new kind of music. Sure, Berry Gordy might have built the first black-owned music empire at Motown, but Redding was doing something as historic: mainstreaming black music within the whitest bastions of the post-Confederate south. As a result, the Redding story - still largely untold - is one of great conquest but, sadly, grand tragedy.

Rescue Agent Ryland Stark has traveled all over the world with the Wild Animal Protection Agency, but a part of his heart has always remained in his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana. When the animals in the bayou are in jeopardy due to exotic animal traders, he knows he needs to protect the place he loves. What he doesn’t expect is to end up working with his high school sweetheart in the process. Josette Trudeau never really got over her first boyfriend, even though he took off for the Army when he was eighteen and never looked back. She’s dated, but no one ever measured up to the nearly...

A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen’s career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners); twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles. Lynne Cox, adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica (“gripping”—Sports Illustrated) and Grayson (“wondrous, and unforgettable”—Carl Hiaasen), gives us in South with the Sun a full-scale account of the explorer’s life and expeditions.

On a bright June day in 1965, a dozen girls - classmates at a Blue Ridge women's college - launch a ramshackle raft on a trip down the Mississippi. Their journey, inspired by Huckleberry Finn, is duly reported in the Paducah, Kentucky newspaper. 35 years later, four of the "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time, it's on the luxury steamboat The Belle of Natchez. This time, when they reach New Orleans, they'll give the River the ashes of a fifth rafter: Margaret ("Baby") Ballou.

A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the US slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection.

Denver is the capital city of Colorado in the United States. The city was founded in 1858 during the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, when a group of prospectors discovered gold in the area. The city was named after James W. Denver, the governor of the Kansas Territory at the time. In the early years, Denver was a rough-and-tumble mining town with saloons, gambling halls, and brothels. The city grew quickly, and by 1870 it had a population of over 4,700. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Denver developed into a major transportation hub for the region, with railroads and highways ...

A Hobby Shouldn't Be This Dangerous! Jack McCain's ex wife and current girlfriend are both trying to make him into something he doesn't want to be. When Jack becomes the chance owner of a customized import car—one that reminds him of the high-octane dreams of his youth—he joins a car club run by a bunch of twenty-something tuner enthusiasts who don't seem to know very much about cars—except for their only female member that is. She knows plenty. One night she follows Jack home after a meeting and Jack's staid life takes a sudden and unexpected turn. Soon, a screwball collection of ...

Saturday night for the boys from Calcutta High started out with a dare on a dark country road...a dare that went farther than it should've gone. That old white church just moldering there in the long dark shadows of the trees, was it really as haunted as everyone made it out to be? Stories had circulated. Legends at school had now grown to stifling degrees. What's a try at the doors going to hurt? What about a look inside the sanctuary, just for the sake of satisfying one's curiosity? That can't hurt, can it? Surely not...

An oral-history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a world-renowned scholar, professor of history and geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the Faculty of Modern History of Oxford University. The Americas, part of the acclaimed Modern Library Chronicles series, offers an intriguing history of the world's western hemisphere.

In a suburban LA neighborhood, neighbors keep wary distance and at times collide, propelled by desire, fury, and mischief. Precocious Korean-American sisters Mira and Rosemary find their world rocked by a suicide; a charismatic and creepy drama teacher grooms his students; an aging gay horror novelist fights loneliness; and a white mother and her adopted Vietnamese daughter deal with lifelong anger issues.

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People". His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.

In this bewitching debut novel, a sensitive teen, newly arrived in Alabama, falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. While his German parents don't know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives in the thick heat. Taken in by the football team, he learns how to catch a spiraling ball, how to point a gun, and how to hide his innermost secrets.

Ambientada en Carolina del Sur en 1964, La vida secreta de las abejas es la historia de Lily Owens, cuya vida ha sido formada alrededor del recuerdo confuso de la tarde en que su madre fue asesinada. Esta es una novela notable sobre el poder divino femenino, una historia que las mujeres compartiran y pasaran a sus hijas por generaciones.

A romantic adventure book set in the South Pacific during the late 19th century. Following a shipwreck, Mabel Miller, a disillusioned socialite from San Francisco, finds herself on the vibrant yet dangerous island of Kaahlanai with a small band of survivors, including Captain Gray and the Gray family. Initially seeking a break from her monotonous lifestyle, Mabel embarks on a journey that takes her far beyond her wildest dreams. Upon their ship's destruction by fire and subsequent arduous days at sea, the survivors finally land on Kaahlanai. They initially face both the harsh realities of ...

K.T. Tomb introduces three new heroines: bounty hunters Roberta, Riley, and Ricki Vaughan. All sisters. And all tough as nails. When a new client hires the streetwise Vaughan sisters to find and recover a stolen diamond that’s worth millions, the recovery fee alone could save their struggling business. However, their new client refuses to call the police, so the sisters have to keep this case on the down low. And when the prime suspect turns up dead, things really start to heat up in the Deep South. When an unexpected event threatens more than the recovery of the one-of-a-kind gem, all ...

Eight-year-old Tessa Lee and her little brother, Travis, are left at a campground by their mother and her boyfriend, a crooked-nosed man named Goose. All the two children have is a tent, their bags of clothes, the firefly cloak they'd used for covers the night before, and a phone number printed in magic marker on Travis' back. Tessa Lee knows that her momma and Goose have skedaddled in a car with recently changed license plates. She just doesn't know why.

Maurice Wilson lives in Salt River, a small town near Cape Town, South Africa. He is the son of a black father and a Caucasian mother. After the sudden death of his parents he makes the decision to move to High River, Alberta, Canada, the place of his mother’s birth in search of a sense of belonging. He becomes a Canadian citizen, is employed as a mail carrier for Canada Post. The morning of his first day on the job he meets Alison Pierce, a plain woman whose silent passions run deep. Shortly into her relationship with Maurice all her hopes for fulfillment plummet however she continues to...

As the 1980s draw to a close, South Africa is a maelstrom of political violence with the apartheid regime in its death throes. Young Martin Helger is the struggling odd duck at an elite private boys school in Johannesburg, with his father, a rough-handed scrap dealer, and his brother, a mysterious legend. When a beautiful and manipulative American arrives at the family home, Martin soon finds himself wrenched out of his isolated bubble and thrust into the raw heart of the struggle.

"Forget the Titanic; this sub wreck is hot," says the Wall Street Journal. Award-winning journalists Hicks and Kropf offer new insights into the dramatic history and mysterious disappearance of the Hunley, the first submersible to sink another ship. The Hunley represented one of the major technological breakthroughs of the Civil War, and it has fascinated many to the point of obsession ever since its disappearance.