I may be a Yankee, but friends tell me that it hardly shows, except during the winter when all my "Yankee winter habits" have a tendency to come out of hiding--like baking pies and cranberry bread, stocking up on apples, coffee and hot chocolate, and curling up under fleece blankets with nice, long books. Of course, here in Wilmington it stays warm right through December, so I'm curling up on the deck chair, not the couch. I still have the coffee and hot chocolate though.

For fans of Dorothy Dunnett's rich Lymond Chronicles. Barry Unsworth always surprises and delights me with the way he packs so much meaning and emotional intensity into the simplest of sentences.--Nicki

Set in the Middle Ages during the brief yet glittering rule of the Norman kings, "The Ruby in Her Navel" is a tale in which the conflicts of the past portend the present. The novel opens in Palermo, in which Latin and Greek, Arab and Jew live together in precarious harmony. Thurstan Beauchamp, the Christian son of a Norman knight, works for Yusuf, a Muslim Arab, in the palace's central finance office, a job which includes the management of blackmail and bribes, and the gathering of secret information for the king. But the peace and prosperity of the kingdom is being threatened, internally as well as externally. Known for his loyalty but divided between the ideals of chivalry and the harsh political realities of his tumultuous times, Thurstan is dispatched to uncover the conspiracies brewing against his king. During his journeys, he encounters the woman he loved as a youth; and the renewed promise of her love, as well as the mysterious presence of an itinerant dancing girl, sends him on a spiritual odyssey that forces him to question the nature of his ambition and the folly of uncritical reverence for authority. With the exquisite prose and masterful narrative drive that have earned him widespread acclaim, Barry Unsworth transports the reader to a distant past filled with deception and mystery, and whose racial, tribal, and religious tensions are still with us today.

The Janissary Tree
by Goodwin, Jason

Another rich historical novel that feels less like a history lesson and more like a vivid, magical creation. Ostensibly a mystery set during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, this is also an exploration into how a culture does or doen't come to terms with modernity and changing times. --Nicki

When Jason Goodwin explored the Ottoman Empire in "Lords of the Horizons," "The New York Times Book Review" hailed it as "a work of dazzling beauty...the rare coming together of historical scholarship...with luminous writing." Now he returns to Istanbul, with a delicious mystery--"The Janissary Tree." It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Lastname, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch. He leads us into the palace's luxurious seraglios and Istanbul's teeming streets, and leans on the wisdom of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and a Creole-born queen mother. And he introduces us to the Janissaries. For 400 years, they were the empire's elite soldiers, but they grew too powerful, and ten years ago, the Sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback? "The Janissary Tree" is the first in a series featuring the most enchanting detective since Precious Ramotswe of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency." Splendidly paced and illuminating, it belongs beside Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" and the historical thrillers of Arturo Perez-Reverte.

Naked in the Marketplace: The Lives of George Sand
by Eisler, Benita

  Who was George Sand? She was the first famous Frenchwoman celebrated throughout Europe who wasn't either a saint or a king's mistress. She was also the first woman in Europe to become a best-selling novelist. But her fame is inseparable from her notoriety: the scandal of leaving a husband and child, setting up in Paris with an eighteen-year-old lover, liaisons and friendships with men of talent and even genius: de Musset, Chopin, Balzac, and Flaubert. Politically engaged, Sand was literally, "there at the revolution," those of 1831 and 1848, reporting, analyzing, denouncing, exhorting. She believed always in Progress as she did in Love, though she was doomed to be betrayed in both. Acclaimed literary biographer Benita Eisler sheds new light on the many roles, triumphs, and losses that together constituted Sand's overwhelming presence. With nearly ninety novels, 20,000 letters, and thousands of pages of autobiographical writings and political commentary, how did Sand also have the time to live? As Eisler reveals, hers seems more like several lives--literary, political, amorous, and domestic. Earlier biographers have either flash-frozen Sand into a feminist icon or blurred her in the dynamic of "child of the century," but Naked in the Marketplace presents Sand at her essence--the outsized persona and the inner woman, along with the unique and irreplaceable role she played in the history of her times.