Akron Public Library

"After years of facing international threats, President Jack Ryan learns that the greatest dangers always come from within... It begins with a family dinner in Princeton, New Jersey. After months at sea, U.S. Navy Commander Scott Hagan, captain of the USS James Greer, is on leave when he is attacked by an armed man in a crowded restaurant. Hagan is shot, but he manages to fight off the attacker. Though severely wounded, the gunman reveals he is a...

It's the spring of 1862. The Confederate Army in the West teeters on the brink of collapse following the catastrophic loss of Fort Donelson. Commanding general Albert Sidney Johnston is forced to pull up stakes, abandon the critical city of Nashville, and rally his troops in defense of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Hot on Johnston's trail are two of the Union's best generals: the relentless Ulysses Grant, fresh off his career-making victory...

Published in 1926 to explosive acclaim, The Sun Also Rises stands as perhaps the most impressive first novel ever written by an American writer. A roman ̉clef about a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris's Left Bank to Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climactic bull fight, a journey from the center of a civilization spiritually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and...

In a rural village in December 2004 Chechnya, a failed doctor Akhmed harbors the traumatized 8-year-old daughter of a father abducted by Russian forces and treats a series of wounded rebels and refugees, while exploring the shared past that binds him to the child.

Featuring a previously published author introduction, a personal foreword by his son, and a new introduction by his grandson, a definitive edition of the lauded World War I classic collects all thirty-nine of the author's alternate endings to offer new insights into his creative process. A tragic wartime romance set against the brutal and chaotic backdrop of World War I is the classic story of a volunteer ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front...

"By July 1914, the ties between Kezia Marchant and Thea Brissenden, friends since girlhood, have become strained--by Thea's passionate embrace of women's suffrage, and by the imminent marriage of Kezia to Thea's brother, Tom, who runs the family farm. When Kezia and Tom wed just a month before war is declared between Britain and Germany, Thea's gift to Kezia is a book on household management--a veiled criticism of the bride's prosaic life to come....

"Twenty years ago, Dr. Cathy Ryan restored the eyesight of a young Bosnian girl who had been injured during an attack in the Balkan War. Today, her son, Jack Ryan Jr. has decided to surprise his mother by tracking down the young lady. What he finds shocks them both. The helpless child has grown into a remarkable woman. Aida Curic is a self-possessed beauty who runs a refugee agency that helps the children of her native Bosnia. Jack finds himself drawn...

"From New York Times bestselling author Jeff Shaara comes the riveting final installment in the Civil War series that began with A Blaze of Glory and continued in A Chain of Thunder and The Smoke at Dawn. November 1864: As the Civil War rolls into its fourth bloody year, the tide has turned decidedly in favor of the Union. A grateful Abraham Lincoln responds to Ulysses S. Grant's successes by bringing the general east, promoting Grant to command...

"Paris, 1941. The City of Light, occupied by the Nazis, is dark and silent at night. Streetlamps are painted blue and apartment windows draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the Germans. But when the clouds part, the silvery moonlight defies authority, and so does a leader of the French Resistance, known as Mathieu. In Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined...

"After being stolen from her wealthy German parents and raised in the unforgiving wilderness of eastern Europe, a young woman finds herself alone in 1941 after her kidnapper dies. Her solitary existence is interrupted, however, when she happens upon a group of Jews fleeing the Nazi terror. Stunned to learn what's happening in the outside world, she vows to teach the group all she can about surviving in the forest - and in turn, they teach her some...