Quality Used Books
It was more than an incident. It was a deadly assault across the 38th parallel. It was the Korean War. In the fear and frenzy of battle, those who had served with heroism before were called again by America to man the trenches and sandbag bunkers. From Pusan to the Yalu, they drove forward with commands too new and tanks too old: brothers in war, bonded together in battle as they had never been in peace…
( from the sleeve, 406 pages )
The gung-ho Marines familiar to readers of Griffin’s seven Corps novels (Behind the Lines, etc.) return for an eighth adventure–and not their best. Young Marine officers and enlisted men with high morale and low morals such as Ed Banning, Ken McCoy and Ernie Zimmerman are perfect for a secret (but remarkably improbable) OSS operation behind enemy lines in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia in 1943. Their mission: to establish a clandestine weather station and rescue a wayward group of Americans who fled China after the Japanese invasion in 1941 and have been lost in Mongolia for nearly two years. While the plot teases with a promise of suspense in an exotic and forbidding locale, the reality is that not a shot is fired, not a cliffhanger is encountered and three-fourths of the narrative is set safely back in the States, where the characters spend most of their time drinking, womanizing, disobeying orders and wringing their hands over how they can rejoin the war. Under the leadership of fatherly Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, a kind of Marine den daddy, they do return, although the result is anticlimactic. Numerous side plots provide color and historical perspective.
( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly, hardcover 549 pages )
For more than ten years, Dolores Masson has joined the women who march in Buenos Aires’ great square in memory of the Disappeared–the legions of family and loved ones who vanished without a trace at the hands of the military regime during Argentina’s Dirty War. And every week she visits the house where Carlos and Teresa Rueda sometimes offer mystical visions that locate the Disappeared. Dolores has nearly lost hope when Teresa one night utters the whereabouts of those Dolores has spent the last year in search of–the two infant grandsons who vanished without a trace when their mother was abducted.
This crystalline vision sets in motion an inexorable chain of events in which Dolores will regain custody of the boys, now teenagers, who have no memory of her or their parents; in which the general who masterminded their abduction will find his world imploding; and in which the only parents the boys have ever known will be torn apart by hatred, anger, and remorse. With the same breathtaking lyricism and emotional insight that made Imagining Argentina and Naming the Spirits unforgettable reading experiences for legions of readers, Tales from the Blue Archives shows one of our most gifted novelists at the height of his powers.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, 272 pages )
The Jukebox Queen of Malta is an exquisite and enchanting novel of love and war set on an island perilously balanced between what is real and what is not.
It’s 1942 and Rocco Raven, an intrepid auto mechanic turned corporal from Brooklyn, has arrived in Malta, a Mediterranean island of Neolithic caves, Copper Age temples, and fortresses. The island is under siege, full of smoke and rubble, caught in the magnesium glare of German and Italian bombs.
But nothing is as it seems on Malta. Rocco’s living quarters are a brothel; his commanding officer has a genius for turning the war’s misfortunes into personal profit; and the Maltese people, astonishingly, testify to the resiliency of the human spirit. When Rocco meets the beautiful and ethereal Melita, who delivers the jukeboxes her cousin builds out of shattered debris, they are drawn to each other by an immediate passion. And, it is their full-blown affair that at once liberates and imprisons Rocco on the island.
In this mesmerizing novel, music and bombs, war and romance, the jukebox and the gun exist in arresting counterpoint in a story that is a profound and deeply moving exploration of the redemptive powers of love.
( from the sleeve, 368 pages )
One morning in Singapore more than 50 years ago, a wealthy, respected, handsome Chinese patriarch, head of a large household of three wives and many children and grandchildren, takes a walk by a cemetery. There, a young village egg-seller, Silver Frond, is amusing herself with a comic song-and-dance act based on popular gossip—about him. The meeting instantly changes their lives. With characteristic verve and wit, Catherine Lim traces the struggles of an unusual couple through the jungle of human quandaries and predicaments created by the force of tradition, and celebrates the ultimate triumph of an even more extraordinary force—love.
( paraphrased from the sleeve by GoodReads, 392 pages )
Burning Bright follows the Kellaway family as they leave behind tragedy in rural Dorset and come to late 18th-century London. As they move in next door to the radical painter/poet William Blake, and take up work for a near-by circus impresario, the youngest family member gets to know a girl his age. Embodying opposite characteristics – Maggie Butterfield is a dark-haired, streetwise extrovert, Jem Kellaway a quiet blond introvert – the children form a strong bond while getting to know their unusual neighbor and his wife.
Set against the backdrop of a city nervous of the revolution gone sour across the Channel in France, Burning Bright explores the states of innocence and experience just as Blake takes on similar themes in his best-known poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, hardcover 311 pages )
Naturally, they do go further. Robert Radcliffe may be an old-fashioned writer, but he is not blind to the imperatives of modern fiction. But the tentativeness of their affair, and the calm way in which they end it when news comes that the schoolmistress’s husband is alive and well, is typical of a novel in which the principals want desperately to behave well.
For John Hooper, the airman with whom the schoolmistress falls in love, that means driving himself to the limits of his endurance. Having survived a crash in which all his fellow crew members died, he is so guilt-stricken that he cannot rest until he has led his new crew to victory and safety.
On paper, he has not got a chance. As US bombers carry the battle to Germany, flying deep into mainland Europe, attrition rates are terrifying. What hope for Misbehavin’ Martha, a battered Flying Fortress with a crew like something out of Sergeant Bilko: a navigator who cannot navigate; a co-pilot who cannot fly; an air-sick bombardier; and trigger-happy gunners who could not hit a fish in a barrel?
The descriptions of air combat are first-class. The author is an experienced pilot himself and, as well as knowing his way around an aeroplane, is able to capture the nervy comradeship of men at war. Humour and pathos are blended to superb effect. It is as vivid a recreation of the Second World War as I have read.
But the scenes on the ground are, if anything, even better. Everything rings so true: from bleak Suffolk winters to the rough-and-tumble of weekend trips to London. Radcliffe is not just a born storyteller, but one of those generous writers who look for the best in human nature; and if he allows himself a sentimental ending, straight out of Mills & Boon, he has earned it.
This marvellous feel-good debut will bring a glow to the most jaded cheeks.
( Courtesy of David Robson for The Telegraph, 440 pages )
It is 1790. After ten years’ training in the great medical schools of Europe, Alec Gordon has returned to Scotland to take up the post of physician in the Aberdeen Dispensary. Alec has ambitious plans for modernizing medical practice in the town, starting with the local midwives, whose ignorance and old-fashioned methods appal him.
But Alec’s dreams of progress are thrown into disarray when a mysterious disease suddenly strikes the town, attacking and killing every newly delivered mother for miles around. Alec alone recognizes it as childbed fever, a disease more deadly than the plague, a condition that has baffled the greatest physicians of the age, an illness with no known cause and no known cure.
Desperate to save his patients’ lives, Alec sets out on an astonishing medical quest to conquer the disease. But while Alec struggles to find solutions that lie far in the future, his wife Elizabeth is increasingly lost in the past, prey to terrifying memories of her childhood in Antigua. As she knows and he will learn, some diseases lie beyond the reach of reason.
Based on a true story, Touching Distance is a stunning historical novel that brings to life a fascinating period in world history, exploring the tragic limitations of knowledge and the deep-seated tension between reason and passion in the Age of Enlightenment.
( paraphrased by GoodReads, from the sleeve 308 pages )