NCW Libraries

The Dragon Masters have defeated the evil wizard Maldred, but not before the Kingdom of Bracken was devastated by Naga, the earthquake dragon; now Drake and his dragon, Worm, must appeal to the spring dragon, Fallyn, who is their only hope of restoring Bracken before its people starve--but Fallyn lives deep inside a secret fairy world, and Drake must pass a series of tricky tests before he can even make his appeal.

"Mulan meets The Song of Achilles in Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun, a bold, queer, and lyrical reimagining of the rise of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty from an amazing new voice in literary fantasy. To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything. "I refuse to be nothing..." In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness......

A compelling new look at one of the worst disasters to strike humankind--the Great Irish Potato Famine--conveyed as lyrical narrative history from the acclaimed author of "The Great Mortality."

"Leon Uris captures the 'terrible beauty' of Ireland during its long and bloody struggle for freedom. It is the electrifying story of an idealistic young Catholic rebel and the valiant and beautiful Protestant girl who defied her heritage to join his cause. It is a tale of love and danger, of triumph at an unthinkable cost--a magnificent portrait of a people divided by class, faith, and prejudice. It is an unforgettable saga of the fires that devastated...

"The threads on Zlata's beautiful birthday blouse were knotted by her mother's hands. "Red is for love, and black is for sadness," her Papa says. Her Mama warns her not to show it off. Ever since the Communists came from Russia to Ukraine, they prohibited the teaching of Ukrainian culture. They've even taken the grain from Zlata's family's fields. But despite the danger, her parents refuse to give up their art, language, or beliefs. As Zlata works...

During a biblical seven years in the middle of the 19th century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated. In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland's best-known historian gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history.

"In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization--in effect a second Russian revolution--which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine,...

"An incredible memoir of North Korea by a woman who defied the government to keep her family alive. Born in 1970s North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household--her parents worked in the factories and the family scraped by on rationed rice and a small garden. Nightly, she bowed to her photo of Kim Il-Sung. But it was the beginning of a chaotic period with a decade-long famine resulting in more than a million deaths. In this harsh time, Jang...

"Bestselling, magisterial melding of global environmental history and global political history. Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three...