Three Musketeers - second hand

Galicia, Austria-Hungary, 1913. In the castle of a frontier town, on the border between Europe and the East, the worldly, corrupt Count-Governor Wiladowski watches helplessly while a wave of assassinations sweeps the empire, and his province. When a member of his own family is murdered, the count gives broad police powers to his spymaster, Jakob a brilliant young Jew whose ruthless war on terror extends into every corner of the province and beyond, enlisting union organizers, financiers, aristocrats and their servants, and a young novelist and playwright, newly arrived in the Vienna of Franz Josef and Freud, hungry for literary success.

In the wake of new terrorist attacks, a mysterious preacher appears in the provincial capital--one of the so-called "wonder rabbis" from the shtetls of the East-trailing a band of fanatical disciples who proclaim him the messiah. Word of the charismatic leader spreads quickly from the Jewish quarter to the castle itself, and soon Tausk finds himself serving two the count and the richest man in the province, Moritz Rotenburg, who has a private interest in the wonder rabbi and whose only son has returned from university, burning for revolution, to gather disciples of his own.

Moving from underground meetings and makeshift synagogues to the bedrooms of country estates and the secret high councils of the ailing thousand-year-old Habsburg Empire, Michael André Bernstein's compelling first novel evokes a densely believable world on the edge of collapse, full of the haunting suggestiveness of a fable or nightmare, and the erotic, mystical, and apocalyptic passions of an age.

From the acclaimed author of The Ash Garden —“an illuminating searchlight on the terra incognita where the personal and the political intersect” (Newsday) —an even more ambitious novel that follows a doctor from the trenches of the Great War into subsequent conflicts whose horrors would soon envelop the world.

The historical Norman Bethune—legendary in both his native Canada and China—was a visionary whose dedication touched millions, and as the narrator of this novel he springs to vivid life even as he approaches its end. Rebelling in childhood against his father’s religion, he finds a calling himself, saving lives on the battlefield, only after nearly losing his own in the trenches in France. In Republican Spain he fulfills his idealism, yet before long politics destroy a romance, compromise his achievement, and drive him to seek refuge and purpose in the vast expanse of China. Here, in the service of the man eventually known as Mao Zedong, Bethune contends with Nationalist and Japanese enemies and begins this account of failed loves, cherished beliefs, discoveries, and reversals for the only person who still makes a future seem the daughter he has never seen.
 
Storytelling at its best—passionate, wrenching, compelling—about a complex, contradictory man caught in the relentless sweep of history.

In Canadian short-story writer Bonnie Burnard's deeply moving novel, we meet the Chambers family: Bill and Sylvia and their three children, an ordinary family from Ontario. Beginning in 1949, we follow the Chambers for the next fifty years through the many joys and disappointments of their lives: a childhood accident, a tragic illness ending in death, and a remarriage for Bill. Some of the children choose a traditional route, marrying and having children of their own. One forges her own very new path. The clan expands and changes; marriages fail and careers bloom. But despite the heart-aches and difficulties each member of the family faces, there is never a lack of love to be found. With writing so clear and crisp it rings with honesty and grace, Burnard's characters work their way under your skin and into your heart-an auspicious debut.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, a mesmerizing new novel from the award-winning author of Old God's Time

A first-person narrative of Lilly Bere’s life, On Canaan’s Side opens as the eighty-five-year-old Irish émigré mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. Lilly, the daughter of a Dublin policeman, revisits her eventful past, going back to the moment she was forced to flee Ireland at the end of the First World War. She continues her tale in America, where—far from her family—she first tastes the sweetness of love and the bitterness of betrayal.

Spanning nearly seven decades, Sebastian Barry’s extraordinary fifth novel explores memory, war, family ties, love, and loss, distilling the complexity and beauty of life into his haunting prose.