"Thien's first memory isn't a sight or a sound. It's the sweetness of watermelon and the saltiness of fish. It's the taste of the foods he ate while adrift at sea as his family fled Vietnam. After the Pham family arrives at a refugee camp in Thailand, they struggle to survive. Things don't get much easier once they resettle in California. And through each chapter of their lives, food takes on a new meaning. Strawberries come to signify struggle as...

A pair of silver Regency candlesticks. Pieces of well-worn family jewelry. More than a thousand documents, letters, and photographs Lotte Meyerhoff's best friends risked their lives in Nazi Germany to safeguard these and other treasured heirlooms and mementos from her family and return them to her after the war. The Holocaust had left Lotte the lone survivor of her family, and these precious objects gave her back a crucial piece of her past. Four...

"This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019. Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht--the night their family lost everything. Samuel's mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport...

"A memoir by the highest-ranking covert warrior to lift the veil of secrecy and offer a glimpse into the shadow wars that America has fought since the Vietnam Era. Enrique Prado found himself in his first firefight at age seven. The son of a middle-class Cuban family caught in the midst of the Castro Revolution, his family fled their war-torn home for the hope of a better life in America. Fifty years later, the Cuban refugee retired from the Central...

"In an endless sea of sand drifts the Mud Whale, a floating island city of clay and magic. In its chambers a small community clings to survival, cut off from its own history by the shadows of the past. The promised land of Amonlogia has turned out to be a nightmare for the people of the Mud Whale. Suou and the Unmarked are being held hostage, and in order to save them Ouni and Chakuro agree to become captive soldiers for the duke. A battle is inevitable...

"Spanning two centuries and two continents, Dream Country is the story of five generations of young people caught in a spiral of death and exile between Liberia and the United States"-- "Dream Country is the story of five generations of young people from one African American family chasing an elusive dream across centuries and continents. Gibney conjures an ambitious, sinuous novel from a family tree twisted to its breaking point by slavery and colonialism...

"Set in Aba, a town perched at 12,000 feet on the Tibetan plateau in the far western reaches of China that has been the engine of Tibetan resistance for decades, Eat the Buddha tells the story of a nation through the lives of ordinary people living in the throes of this conflict. Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick illuminates a part of China and the aggressions of this superpower that have been largely off limits to Westerners who have long romanticized...

A young North Korean defector and activist describes her father's imprisonment by the regime of Kim Jong-Il, her enslavement in China, and her walk through the freezing Gobi Desert to freedom in South Korea.