Mary Johnston

The world would end in 1492-so the prophets, soothsayers, and stargazers said. They were right. Their world did end. Ours began.In this extraordinary, sweeping history, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto traces key elements of the modern world back to that single, fateful year. Everything changed in 1492: the way power and wealth were distributed around the globe, the way major religions and civilizations divided the world, and the increasing interconnectedness of separate economies that we now call globalization. Events that began in 1492 transformed the whole ecological system of the planet. Our individualism and the very sense we share of inhabiting one world, as partakers in a common humanity, took shape and became visible in 1492.In search of the origins of modernity, 1492 takes readers on a journey around the globe of the time, in the company of real-life travelers, drawing together the threads that came to bind the planet. The tour starts in Granada, where the last Islamic kingdom in Europe collapsed, then moves to Timbuktu, where a new Muslim empire triumphed. With Portuguese explorers, we visit the court of the first Christian king in the southern hemisphere. We join Jews expelled from Spain as they cross the Mediterranean to North Africa, Italy, and Istanbul. We see the flowering of the Renaissance in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent and go to the corrupt Rome of Alexander Borgia. We see the frozen frontiers of the dynamic, bloody Russia of Ivan the Great and hear mystical poets sing on the shores of the Indian Ocean. We sail the Atlantic with Columbus. In the depths of an old volcanic crater in the Canary Islands, we witness the start of the first European overseas empire. We observe the Aztecs and Incas laying the foundations of a New World in the Americas.Wars and witchcraft, plagues and persecutions, poetry and prophecy, science and magic, art and faith-all the glories and follies of the time are in this book. Everywhere, new departures marked the start of a new configuration for humankind, revealing how and why the modern world is different from the worlds of antiquity and the Middle Ages.History seems a patternless labyrinth-but a good guide can trace our paths through it back to the moment when some of the most striking features of today's world began.

The Wanderers is a loosely plotted, autobiographical novel, in which author Ezekiel Mphahlele, through the protagonist Timi Tabane, continues the story of his life from the point at which his autobiography Down Second Avenue (1959) ends. Down Second Avenue describes Mphahlele{u2019}s years in the black townships and urban ghettos of South Africa, but The Wanderers concentrates on the period of exile in Nigeria and Kenya that followed his escape from South Africa in 1957. --www.enotes.com.

A stirring saga of a nurse who only wants to do her duty in World War Two – and who ends up having to make an agonising choice. Set in Ireland and Birmingham, this is the latest from emerging star of the genre Anne Bennett.Carmel Duffy is the eldest child of a brutal and abusive marriage, and she can't wait to leave home. She's equally determined to have no husband or children of her own – what she wants more than anything is to be a nurse. As soon as she turns eighteen, she heads for Birmingham and begins her training.With her beautiful auburn curls, she draws plenty of attention and her resolve to concentrate on her career is tested when Dr Paul Connolly comes onto her ward and into her life. Gradually he wins her heart, and they agree to marry, both certain that they want no children. They have valuable jobs to do – all the more so when World War Two looms. But those years will change everything: their relationship, their priorities, their very characters. Carmel will find that the future is very different to the one she thought she wanted for so long...

Adam Larey thinks he kills brother and wanders about in the desert for ten years.

The Witch begins: It was said that the Queen was dying. She lay at Richmond, in the palace looking out upon the wintry, wooded, March-shaken park, but London, a few miles away, had daily news of how she did. There was much talk about her-the old Queen-much telling of stories and harking back. She had had a long reign-Not far from fifty years, my masters!- and in it many important things had happened. The crowd in the streets, the barge and wherry folk upon the wind-ruffled river, the roisterers in the taverns drinking ale or sack, merchants and citizens in general talking of the times in the intervals of business, old soldiers and seaman ashore, all manner of folk, indeed, agreed upon the one most important thing. The most important thing had been the scattering of the Armada fifteen years before.

Mary Johnston's Cease Firing concludes the sweeping narrative of the Civil War begun in The Long Roll, also available from Johns Hopkins. Cease Firing continues the story of Richard Cleave of Virginia, Confederate artillery commander, following him as the war effort of the Confederacy begins to falter. Also featured prominently is the Confederate commander General Joseph E. Johnston, the author's own grandfather. From the siege of Vicksburg, through the battles of Gettysburg, Chickamauga, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania, to the surrender at Appomattox, Johnston tells an epic story of the war while giving that terrible conflict a human scale. Using a variety of narrative voices to tell her tale, many drawn from actual memoirs and transcripts, Johnston produces skilled prose to evoke the emotions felt on both sides as the tide of victory turned against the Confederacy.