Arcadia Public Library

This is the testament of Paul Baümer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of work, duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but...

"Sweeping between Prague during World War II and modern day Los Angeles, this deeply moving debut follows a young Jewish man in 1934 who falls in love and joins the circus as the country descends into war. Decades later, a young boy seeks out the now cynical, elderly magician in the hopes that his spells might keep his family together. Prague, 1934: The fifteen-year-old rabbi's son Moshe Goldenhirsch marvels at the legendary circus magician known...

"The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier. Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son -- the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel -- is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story...

A multi-generational family story set in the Germany of the early twentieth century that reveals the devastating effect of war on the human heart.

During the closing months of World War II, a fifteen-year-old German girl must decide whether or not to help an escaped Russian prisoner of war, despite the serious consequences if she does so.

A Swiss orphan is heartbroken when she must leave her beloved grandfather and their happy home in the mountains to go to school and to care for an invalid girl in the city.

"Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany"--

"Inspired by the author's family history, this...story transports us to the aftermath of World War II where her father, Josef Helfer, after returning from the war an amputee, managed a convalescent home for the war-wounded and became obsessed with the home's unlikely and remarkable library"--

"Abandoned by her parents, Olga is raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village around the turn of the 20th century. Smart and precocious, endearing but uncompromising, she fights against the prejudices of the time to find her place in a world that sees women as second-best. When Olga falls in love with Herbert, a local aristocrat obsessed with gaining all the power, glory and greatness the modern age can provide, her life is irremediably changed....

Germany, 1659: When a dying boy is pulled from the river with a mark crudely tattooed on his shoulder, hangman Jakob Kuisl is called upon to investigate whether witchcraft is at play in his small Bavarian town. Whispers and dark memories of witch trials and the women burned at stake just seventy years earlier still haunt the streets of Schongau. When more children disappear and an orphan boy is found dead, marked by the same tattoo, the mounting hysteria...