NCW Libraries

From the author of Daughter of Australia comes a sweeping, heartfelt historical novel that follows a family of German immigrants who trade city living for the harsh realities of Pennsylvania farm life. In 1914, Andrew Houghton's family is one of hundreds eking out an existence in the coal mines of southwestern Pennsylvania. Though he longs to be a veterinarian, he's fated for a life underground, picking rock alongside his father. That destiny changes...

From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and As Bright as Heaven comes a novel about a German American teenager whose life changes forever when her immigrant family is sent to an internment camp during World War II.
 
In 1943, Elise Sontag is a typical American teenager from Iowa—aware of the war but distanced from its reach. Then her father, a legal U.S. resident for nearly two decades, is...

In 1939 Hangerstown, Maryland, eleven-year-old Frankie faces suspicion that her German-born father is a Nazi spy.

Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family's wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family's involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad...

"It's 1941, and tensions are rising in the United States as the Second World War rages in Europe. Eleven-year-old Gusta's life, like the world around her, is about to change. Her father, a foreign-born labor organizer, has had to flee the country, and Gusta has been sent to live in an orphanage run by her grandmother. Nearsighted, snaggletoothed Gusta arrives in Springdale, Maine, lugging her one precious possession: a beloved old French horn, her...

A family of four emigrates from Germany to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, traveling by wagon train and settling on a Nebraska farm more than a century before their descendants investigate their roots and visit Germany.

A thriller set in the Depression-era years before World War II finds fledgling FBI Special Agent Jimmy Nessheim dispatched to infiltrate the pro-Nazi German-American Bund organization and discovering a sinister plot targeting the White House.

Traces the story of nine different ethnic groups in American society, discussing their various reactions to the American experience, cultural and hisotrical backgrounds, patterns of difficulty, and modes of success.