"A Navy captain near the end of a decorated career, Stephen Rensselaer is disciplined, intelligent, and determined to always do what's right. In defending the development of a new variant of warship, he makes an enemy of the president of the United States, who assigns him to command the doomed line's only prototype--Athena, Patrol Coastal 15--with the intent to humiliate a man who should have been an admiral. Rather than resign, Rensselaer takes the...

"Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour--a maitre at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust--must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present. In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life--days bright with music, family, rowing on the Seine--Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges...

A Roman student is torn from his carefree life when World War I breaks out, and fifty years later, recounts the triumphs and tragedies of his existence to an illiterate factory worker.

This fantasy is also a political fable in which a reactionary queen tries to turn back the clock. After many years of peace, a queen prepares for the birth of her first child, only to be forced to confront an impending danger, as the Usurper once again threatens her city, while her husband and his army are vanished into the wilderness, in the third volume of a trilogy that began with Swan Lake.

A prince's love for a swan queen overcomes an evil sorcerer's spell in this fairy tale adaptation of the classic ballet.

In these twenty stories, Mark Helprin offers a series of meditations on some of humanity's most enduring and universal questions. At the hour of his death, an American priest in Rome must choose between his church and his God. A young man finds love in a hot, dirty typewriter-ribbon factory in the Bronx. A Dutch child in a Canadian orphanage carries the pain of war and her love for her family in her heart. An Israeli scout risks the safety and respect...

The story of a daring young heroine and would-be queen's quest to avenge the murder of her royal parents and reclaim her lost kingdom.