The Shadows Behind Me

Willie Sterner's skill as a painter brought him to a fateful meeting with the renowned Oskar Schindler and helped him evade death at the hands of the Nazis.

For six desperate years, Willie Sterner's skill as a painter saved him from death at the hands of the Nazis. Faced with inhumane conditions in slave labour camps and grieving the loss of his close-knit family, Sterner relied on courage and ingenuity to hold onto his dignity. Through almost random luck, he came under the protection of the famed Oskar Schindler and became his personal art restorer. An unvarnished account of what he experienced and what he lost, The Shadows Behind Me, also follows the story of Willie and Eva - the woman he met on a death march - as they rebuilt their lives and regained hope in Canada. Gripping and moving, this is a tribute to one man's remarkable determination to survive.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020 A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, GUARDIAN, ELLE, TIME, SPECTATOR ‘DEVASTATING’ Marlon James, ‘BRILLIANT’ Salman Rushdie, ‘MAGNIFICENT’ Aminatta Forna, ‘WONDERFUL’ Laila Lalami, ‘UNFORGETTABLE’ The Times, ‘REMARKABLE’ New York Times Ethiopia, 1935. With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade. Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers? The Shadow King is a gorgeously crafted and unputdownable exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.

A New York Times Notable Book A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists. Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise.

In Patricia Potter’s seductive and chilling novel of romantic suspense, a young woman trying to prove that she and an heiress were switched at birth steps into a privileged world where a killer is watching and waiting to silence her forever Kira Douglas’s mother, Katy, will die unless she receives a new kidney. Kira is the likely donor candidate . . . until blood tests reveal that she isn’t Katy’s biological daughter. If she isn’t Kira Douglas, then who is she? And how can she save her mother? The only answer is to find Katy’s true daughter by birth. Kira’s search leads to Leigh Howard, an heiress to a $50 million trust fund, and her formidable protector, Max Payton, a charismatic attorney who doesn’t trust Kira or her theory that she and Leigh were accidentally switched at birth. When Kira’s life is threatened, it becomes clear that someone doesn’t want the truth to come out or allow Kira to lay claim to the legendary Westerfield fortune. Now Max is torn between his loyalty to Leigh and his powerful desire for the woman who has upset their privileged world. But he may be too late to stop a legacy of hate and greed that was set in motion decades ago—and is about to come full circle.

Heed this warning, mortal: stay far away from the three sister Fates. For if they come to love you, they might bring about the end of the world.