Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
I am looking through a lace curtain at a dead man's feet. I am ten years old, the mist is rising on a fall morning in 1944 in Sawyer, Georgia, and I am standing on a front porch painted gray with whit...
I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday's Departure
So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's rain had finally lifted, and a shaft of red sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we ent...
Two hundred and fifty years of nameless, faceless, forgotten individuals. Yes, they were America's founding fathers and mothers as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whips upon their backs. W...
If you can write, you can read. And if you can read, you can better understand the world and its different societies. Knowledge is the key to destroying prejudice and individual hate, which always cul...
Where are these fucking guns coming from?
Where have they gone? Wherever magicians used to go. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.
Even the most egregious captive state, bound and gagged on her damp bunk, felt eerily familiar to her. With nothing to do but lie there and think of things, she reflected that captivity took many diff...
En ese momento se dio la vuelta, como movida por una ráfaga de viento.
Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots and search for wild grass. We'll eat anything, and we have...
Dragons don't ask for maidens, he said. Dragons are offered maidens. Alys shook her head to show she didn't understand.Is a king likely to be a maiden? Or a village headman? It's the men who make the...
This regiment was formed last fall, back in Maine. There were a thousand of us then. There’s not three hundred of us now. He glanced up briefly. But what is left is choice.He was embarrassed. He spoke...
The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte had been banished to the island of Elba. However His Imperial Majesty had some doubts wheter a quiet island life would suit him - he was, after all, accustomed to gover...
All the characters in this book are fictional, but they are as real to me as the members of my own family. I had to tell their story because they could not.
Up and up they went, still a cable's length apart; but slowly, for the ape was footsore and despondent. As for Stephen, by the sixth-hundred step his calves and thighs were ready to burst, and at each...
How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.
French Revolution- all them fellas the figgered her out got their heads chopped off. Always that way, jus as natural as rain. You didn't do it for fun no way. Doin' it cause you have to. Cause it's yo...
Words had failed us that night, and I'd welcomed the silence. Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the res...
Six wives the King's had now.' Barak's words dragged me from my reverie. 'We can't even get one between us.