War & Military – The Black Cat

A Thousand Splendid Suns

pedro — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:06:17 +0000

Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

“Just as good, if not better, than Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling first book, The Kite Runner.”—Newsweek

Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

All Quiet on the Western Front

pedro — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:12:09 +0000

The original US edition of the masterpiece of war literature depicting the plight of German soldiers during World War I—now an Oscar-nominated Netflix film

From the perspective of Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier in World War I, comes an unsettling tale of the mundanity and misery of trench warfare on the Western Front. When Paul and his comrades volunteer for the Imperial German Army, pressured into this act of patriotism by idealistic parents and a steely schoolmaster, they quickly learn that the authorities they trusted to shape their minds and guide their growth were condemning them to unimaginable danger and squalor, in the name of duty to an old world in its death throes.

Bombarded by shells and bombs, by horror after horror, Paul absorbs the sordid lessons of combat and reflects upon the strangers on the arbitrary other side, transformed into enemies by a distant “word of command.” With timeless insight and searing prose, Erich Maria Remarque draws readers into the embattled consciences of soldiers on the frontlines, enlivening a tragic story with characters whose survival one hopes for against all odds.

Les Miserables: Introduction by Peter Washington

pedro — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:06:12 +0000

It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean—a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert—Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama—highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications—of the redemption of one human being.