Shy and unassuming, Eugene shuttles passengers up and down in a manual elevator while he discusses his work, his emigration from Chernobyl, the joys of fatherhood and his recent US citizenship. In a moment of sadness, he wonders whether leaving his job as a journalist in Kiev was really worth it. Then he reassures himself, revealing his dream that some day his self-published novel will become a Hollywood blockbuster. This poetic snapshot takes students...

"Sometimes life flips the script... Billy Walker is a North Carolina boy whose Hollywood star is beginning to shine. His rough past is in the rearview. Now seeing the world from the back seat of a limousine, Billy has no regrets about what he had to do, and the choices he made, to get there. But all it takes is one death-defying moment for Billy's world to shift. When an on-set accident leaves him shaken, plagued by haunting dreams, he's in desperate...

In 1943, ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs, she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.

In July 1944, as the Red Army drives the Nazis out of Poland, sixteen-year-old Maria Kamińska must work with a captured Ukrainian nationalist to find her brother, who is a special operations agent and leader of a Polish Resistance squad, when he disappears while on a mission.

Luka, a Ukrainian boy working in a slave labor camp, plays dead after an explosion at the factory and escapes, eventually joining a resistance group that opposes both the Nazis and the Soviets, and through the danger of the guerilla fighting he has two overriding goals--find out if his parents are still alive, and reunite with Lida, a girl who was a friend in the labor camp.

It is August of 1963, the year of the Taylor/Burton film epic Cleopatra, showcasing a passion too grand to be contained on the movie screen. The women of the Kalyna Beach cottage community gather for gin and gossip, trading the current racy bestsellers among themselves as they seek a brief escape from the predictable rhythms of children and chores. But dramatic change is coming this summer as innocence falters and the desire for change reaches

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"In the fall of 1961, a KGB agent defected to West Germany. The slim 30-year-old man in police custody had papers in the name of an East German, Josef Lehmann, but claimed that his real name was Bogdan Stashinsky, and he was a citizen of the Soviet Union. On the orders of his KGB bosses, he had traveled on numerous occasions to Munich, where he singlehandedly tracked down and killed two enemies of the communist regime. He used a new, specially designed...

The story of an immigrant family trying to build a life in an unforgiving new world, Under This Unbroken Sky is a mesmerizing and absorbing first novel of love and greed, pride and desperation. Award-winning writer Shandi Mitchell based this evocative and compelling narrative of struggle and survival on the Canadian prairie on her own family history.

"Summer 1941. War rages in Europe. The Germans march towards Ukraine. Halya, Liliya and Vika are no strangers to sorrow. They lost family during the Holodomor, loved ones in Stalin's purges, and war looms once more on the horizon. Vika lives in fear for her children. She and her sister survived the terror famine by leaving their whole family behind. Now, years later, many believe the Germans will free them from the Soviets, but she's not so sure....

With this wise, tender, and deeply funny novel, Marina Lewycka takes her place alongside Zadie Smith and Monica Ali as a writer who can capture the unchanging verities of family. When an elderly and newly widowed Ukrainian immigrant announces his intention to remarry, his daughters must set aside their longtime feud to thwart him. For their father's intended is a voluptuous old-country gold digger with a proclivity for green satin underwear and an...