An American woman plays a redeeming role amidst America's duplicity and betrayal of the Philippine struggle for independence during the revolution against Spain, which culminated in the Spanish-American and Philippine American wars. The fiction/nonfiction novel highlights the military and romantic exploits of the dashing and legendary hero, 23-year old General Gregorio Del Pilar, then the youngest in the Philippine army and American Christine Kelcher's intimate relationship with him and her allegiance to his country. Aide-de-camp to Philippine president Emilio Aguinaldo in exile in Hong Kong, the young general was euphoric over the coming of the Americans, espousing to his president acceptance of their offer of help in liberating Manila from the Spanish. When Commodore George Dewey and General Wesley Merritt betrayed the insurgency in a secret agreement with the Spanish to wage a mock battle to liberate the city to the exclusion of the insurgents "to protect the pride and honor of Spain," the general vowed to protect the president from capture, "or else the Republic dies." Military maneuvers by Major Peyton March and Colonel Charles Gilbert and their well-armed and well-trained soldiers are matched by surprise maneuvers by the insurgent general, making his last stand in Tirad Pass with 60 soldiers against 600 Texas Volunteers of the 33rd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Expeditionary Force. The president avoided capture for 11 months more after the battle.

Jim Mathews is a high school senior in a small town near Little Rock, Arkansas, and his future doesn't look bright. He works a variety of odd jobs to help support his mother. His grades aren't exemplary, but at least he graduates. On a whim, he joins the US Marine Corps, and on the last day of August in 1940, he ships out to boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. At the time, talk of war is on the horizon, but Mathews has no idea of what he will eventually face.

"Brave Are the Lonely" follows the course of his military career-from boot camp to advanced infantry training and Officer's Candidate School Training at Quantico, Virginia, to tours of duty in four fierce, major battles, including Roi-Namur, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima, where he is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. It also shares the story of his personal life-how he meets his wife Helen and how he spends his postwar years crisscrossing the country on behalf of the government, recalling his retirement from the military and his life as an educator in a relatively obscure small town in Georgia.

This historical novel provides insight into the battles in the Pacific during World War II and pays tribute to the men who gave their lives.

From The Times bestselling author of The Other Mrs Walker - Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2017 - comes Mary Paulson-Ellis's second stunning historical mystery, The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing. Solomon knew that he had one advantage. A pawn ticket belonging to a dead man tucked into his top pocket - the only clue to the truth . . . An old soldier dies alone in his Edinburgh nursing home. No known relatives, and no Will to enact. Just a pawn ticket found amongst his belongings, and fifty thousand pounds in used notes sewn into the lining of his burial suit . . . Heir Hunter, Solomon Farthing - down on his luck, until, perhaps, now - is tipped off on this unexplained fortune. Armed with only the deceased's name and the crumpled pawn ticket, he must find the dead man's closest living relative if he is to get a cut of this much-needed cash. But in trawling through the deceased's family tree, Solomon uncovers a mystery that goes back to 1918 and a group of eleven soldiers abandoned in a farmhouse billet in France in the weeks leading up to the armistice. Set between contemporary Edinburgh and the final brutal days of the First World War as the soldiers await their orders, The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing shows us how the debts of the present can never be settled unless those of the past have been paid first . . .

Book SummaryWINNER TAKE ALLC.W. SchulerThe novel begins in Czechoslovakia on the day the shooting stopped in the European Theater of Operations, May 8, 1945, and ends on August 8, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The narrative follows a U.S Army Infantry Battalion as it disengages from its combat mission and moves back across the border into Germany. Along the newly established Czech border the Battalion occupies an administrative district approximating the area of an American county where they are responsible for internal security within their zone of operation. In addition the Battalion is required to monitor the flood of refugees crossing the border as they attempt to escape the Czech police and the Soviet army advancing from the East. The former German forced labor camps in the area, whose occupants are now officially designated

Families are like snowflakes, in that no two are exactly alike. Each individual has a part to play on the stage of family drama, and those characters can be so different and yet so much alike as they share that clan identity. An individual can change the name or wear a mask, and move away to seek obscurity or fashion some other identity on near or distant frontiers or foreign shores, to dwell among strangers. Fame and fortune are calling, and for some a hermit's life is more attractive. The American traditions of love and romance, marriage and creation of another family institution have conventional conservative designs, but occasionally there is the unorthodox merger of opposites or the union of similar spirits in a compatible but unconventional connubial design. Children are born and grow up in these milieus to inaugurate their own family dramas, taking with them into those relationships all the features that genetics, nature and nurture have provided to equip them for assuming their place to play their part in the drama of human life in the American family tradition. This story is about one of those resulting families of unconventional design.