A New York Times Notable Book: A man sorts through the secret life of his troubled, reclusive brother in this "powerful, moving personal history" ( Entertainment Weekly).Every family has its odd character, the one who never seems right with the world. When a grieving John Vernon was charged with settling his brother's affairs, he came face to face with a life he had never suspected. His brother's house in southern New Hampshire was in a state of squalid, s...

A myth-busting novel about America's most infamous and beloved outlaw, Billy the Kid, from a critically acclaimed historical novelistAccording to legend, Billy the Kid killed twenty-one men, one for every year of his short life; stole from wealthy cattle barons to give to the poor; and wooed just about every senorita in the American Southwest.In Lucky Billy, John Vernon digs deeply into the historical record to find a truth more remarkable than the legend, and draws a fresh, ...

“Both gritty and sublime” (Seattle Times), The Last Canyon tells the story of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 voyage of exploration through the Grand Canyon, the last great expedition of discovery in United States history. In this vivid novel, John Vernon intertwines two stories – that of Powell and his crew, and that of a band of Paiute Indians, known as the Shivwits, who lived on the north rim of the canyon. As the novel moves inexorably toward a violent encounter between the two groups, Verno...

On St. Helena island in 1821 a mysterious doctor removes Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis from his corpse while in the next room his loyal lieutenants brag about their dead emperor’s merciless cruelty. Fifty years later the search for this itinerant appendage leads through Victorian London to ante-bellum New York, Amherst, Massachusetts, and finally Colorado Territory, dragging in its path a promiscuous mix of French counts, love-sick poets, dandies, shady antiquarians, utopian dreamers, con men...

All this began long before I died,” says the brain in a jar that narrates John Vernon’s second novel. The brain once belonged to Charles Cooper, a 55-year-old water engineer in upstate New York, and has been kept alive by a perfusion pump invented by the man who may have been Coop’s fatherCharles Lindbergh. Then again, maybe not. Coop’s suspicion that he is the kidnaped Lindbergh baby who never really died but instead was stolen as a child and raised by gangsters begins when, on a day li...

Adventuress, miner, home-wrecker, pauper, dreamer—the drama of Colorado legend Baby Doe’s life has inspired several biographies, a 1932 film starring Edward G. Robinson, even an opera, but never before a novel. Few lives have been so dramatic—leaving Oshkosh, WI and heading toward Colorado’s mining territory in 1879, she ditched her husband and snared silver magnate Horace Tabor, who divorced his wife to marry Baby in the “wedding of the century.” “A furiously bubbling stew of a manner of ...

A university lecturer and his PhD student embark on a research trip to a remote village in England to write about its dark history.They think they know some of the stories. A burglar shot dead; a tragedy on the train tracks; and remnants of psychological experiments from the Cold War. But as they meet the inhabitants of Renslow, and try to make sense of their sometimes-odd behaviour, they wonder how much of this is connected, and how much is just them seeing patterns.‘A fan...

Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs’s hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.33,000 PAGES44 MILLION WORDS10 BILLION YEARS OF HISTORY1 OBSESSED MANTo fill the ever-widening gaps in his Ivy League education, A.J. Jacobs sets for himself the daunting task of reading all thirty-two volumes o...

Two families are united—and torn apart—by the Civil War in these three dramatic novels by the #1 New York Times –bestselling master of the historical epic.North and SouthIn the years leading up to the Civil War, one enduring friendship embodies the tensions of a nation. Orry Main from South Carolina and George Hazard from Pennsylvania forge a lasting bond while training at the United States Military Acade...

**Now a mini-series on National Geographic!A Washington Post Best Book of the Year & a New York Times Notable BookFrom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world’s forests.**“Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy…the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx’s distinguished care...

**Quite possibly the GREATEST science-fiction collection of ALL TIME—past, present, and FUTURE! • "Nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors." —**The New York Times Book ReviewWhat if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-h...

This in-depth collection, unchanged since the 1940s, tells of the most legendary heroes and villains of the Old West. Get swept back to a time when sheriffs did their best to keep order in a lawless land. Read about the likes of Tom Horn, the “Apache Kid,” “Bucky” O’Neill, Tom Nickson, and many more!Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws is a classic for everyone interested in history and what is was like in the Old West. The detail of every story grabs the attention of the r...