Carry Me Home

Twelve-year-old Lulu, burdened with caring for her sister, Serena, since their father disappeared, must learn to trust her new friends and community when secrets and lies catch up with her.

Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation. "The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America’s second emancipation. In a new afterword—reporting last encounters with hero Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and describing the current drastic anti-immigration laws in Alabama—the author demonstrates that Alabama remains a civil rights crucible.

The love of family. The heartbreak of war. The triumph of coming home. 1940. Rural Wisconsin. Sixteen-year-old Earl “Earwig” Gunderman is not like other boys his age. Fiercely protected by his older brother, Earwig sees his town and the world around him through the prism of his own unique understanding. He sees his mother’s sadness and his father’s growing solitude. He sees his brother, Jimmy, falling in love with the most beautiful girl in town. And while Earwig is unable to make change for customers at his family’s store, he is singularly well suited to understand what other people in his town cannot: that life as they know it is about to change; the coming war will touch them all. For Jimmy will enlist in the military. And Earwig will watch his parents’ marriage buckle under the strain of a family secret. And when Jimmy returns–a fractured shadow of his former self–it is Earwig’s turn to care for him. His struggles to right the wrongs visited upon his revered older brother by war, women, and life are at once heartwarming and riotously funny. Their family and town irrevocably altered, Earwig and Jimmy fight to find their own places in a world changed forever.

Ireland, 1971, John Egan is a misfit, 'a twelve year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant who insists on the ridiculous truth'. With an obsession for the Guinness Book of Records and faith in his ability to detect when adults are lying, John remains hopeful despite the unfortunate cards life deals him. During one year in John's life, from his voice breaking, through the breaking-up of his home life, to the near collapse of his sanity, we witness the gradual unsticking of John's mind, and the trouble that creates for him and his family.

In this powerful and poignant epic, Del Vecchio transports the soldiers of the Viet Nam experience to their final battlefield—the home front. High Meadow Farm, in the fertile hill country of central Pennsylvania, would be their salvation. In Viet Nam they had fought side by side, brothers in arms. Now in the face of personal tragedy and bureaucratic deception, they would create a more enduring allegiance, an alliance of the spirit and the soil. Carry Me Home is the remarkable story of their struggle to find each other and themselves, a saga spanning fifteen years—fifteen years lost in a wilderness called America. In its scope, breadth, and brilliance, Carry Me Home is much more than a novel about Viet Nam and Viet Nam veterans. It is a testament to history and hope, to hometowns and homecomings, to love and loss, to faith and family. It is a novel about two decades in our collective lives and the cleansing of our spirit—an inspiring and unforgettable novel about America itself. “In this...final installment of his trilogy about America's war in Southeast Asia (The 13th Valley; For the Sake of All Living Things), Del Vecchio focuses on veterans who returned home in the late '60s only to find themselves viewed largely as lepers...the overall purpose of his powerful proletarian art demands such detail to underscore his characters' pain and, for a few, uplifting recovery.” —Publishers Weekly “Carry Me Home completes a trilogy begun by The 13th Valley, and deals, much like James Jones' Some Came Running, with veterans trying to adapt to civilian life....in the end they gain a frightening power from Del Vecchio's accretion of utterly authentic detail. And Wapinski, at least, comes to a hard-earned redemption through the example of one fine old man and a beautiful, communitarian idea.” —Booklist “Arresting, searing and shattering...the most eloquent novel ever to examine the American Viet Nam veteran and his return home to a nation that had failed him.” —International Review

Ben Cohen’s dad didn’t know anything about the sport his young son had taken up, but he was happy to drive him to practice, and was soon helping out at the club. When his business went bankrupt money was tight, but Ben’s hard working parents inspired their son to put his all into rugby. Then, when Ben was 20, his father intervened in a fight in the nightclub where he worked. He was viciously beaten and one month later he died in hospital. Ben was doing an England press conference at the time, and it was down to coach Clive Woodward to deliver the devastating news. But the ordeal was far from over. The inquest lasted five months before the funeral could be held, and it was a year before the family were in court, facing Peter’s assailants. Ben put all of the anger and pain from his father’s death into his rugby. Fast and powerful on the wing, he was soon the best in the world in his position and a cornerstone of the England team, culminating in the legendary World Cup win in Sydney in 2003. And yet he always felt like an outsider. Most people didn’t know that Ben is clinically deaf. His sixth sense for the game got him through on the pitch, but off it his poor hearing was often taken for arrogance. This is an inspirational story of passion and pain; of the highs of achieving your goals, and the grief of losing something you can never get back.

“This is a book of wonders, full of intricate beauty, and Giada Scodellaro is an extraordinary talent.” —Katie Kitamura Giada Scodellaro’s debut is a fiercely original collection of stories ranging in length, style, and tone—a collage of social commentary, surrealism, recipes, folklore, art— that centers Black women in moments of imminent change. In language that is lyrical, minimal, and often absurd, the diverse stories in Some of Them Will Carry Me deconstruct intimacy while building a surprising, unnerving new reality of language, culture, consumption, and loss.

A devastating novel of war, love, and escape from the award-winning author of The Law of Dreams and The O’Briens During childhood summers on the sunstruck Isle of Wight in the years before the First World War, Billy is entranced by Karin, the elusive daughter of a German-Jewish industrialist. Reunited on a Frankfurt estate in that war’s hungry aftermath, Karin and Billy become fascinated with tribal rituals found in the Wild West stories of Karl May, whose Winnetou tales are among the most popular books published in Germany. Coming of age in Frankfurt and Berlin, Karin and Billy share a passion for speed, jazz, and nightclubs. They also share a fantasy of escape—from darkening Germany, from history—to El Llano Estacado, the high plains of Texas and New Mexico, vividly reimagined in May’s fiction. Intriguing characters braid this intricate and harrowing story together, from golden Edwardian summers to London under Zeppelin attack, Ireland on the brink of its War of Independence, and Germany collapsing into the Hitler era. As a society loses its civic and moral bearings, a childhood friendship deepens into a love affair with extraordinarily high stakes. Brilliantly conceived and elegantly written, Carry Me is an epic for grown-ups, an unusual love story, and a lucid meditation on Europe’s violent twentieth century.