Alternate history

History meets mystery in a novel about one pupil of Mozart's we have never heard of, the young Princess Victoria, whom the composer soon discovers has quite a talent for the keyboard and a knack for being a murder victim.

"There is her love affair with flying ('The sky is flesh') . . . .

"There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine ('Heroines did what they wanted') . . . her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out before Christmas.

There is the flight itself -- day after magnificent or perilous or exhilarating or terrifying day ('Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it').

And there is, miraculously, an island ('We named it Heaven, as a kind of joke').

And, most important, there is Noonan . . ."

"Once upon a time there was a mean, dying GOP chairman who had a brilliant scheme to assure that his man would retain the office of president of the United States of America. And the only man who could pull off this elaborate plan was a celebrated Hollywood director. Add to the mix a left-coast gumshoe named Broz who is trapped among cover-ups, undercover work, and his own morality, a cast of bicoastal desperate characters, and the stage is set for a powerful D.C./L.A. production." -- the author's Web site.
Later made into the movie, Wag the Dog. Subsequent editions of the book were renamed for the movie.

"Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. Baconians are trying to convince the world that Francis Bacon really wrote Shakespeare, there are riots between the Surrealists and Impressionists, and thousands of men are named John Milton, an homage to the real Milton and a very confusing situation for the police.

"Amidst all this, Acheron Hades, Third Most Wanted Man In the World, steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and kills a minor character, who then disappears from every volume of the novel ever printed! But that's just a prelude . . . Hades' real target is the beloved Jane Eyre, and it's not long before he plucks her from the pages of Bronte's novel. Enter Thursday Next. She's the Special Operative's renowned literary detective, and she drives a Porsche. With the help of her uncle Mycroft's Prose Portal, Thursday enters the novel to rescue Jane Eyre from this heinous act of literary homicide."

"...a story of a boy who is suddenly plucked from his life in a remote and peaceful village to find himself a pawn in a political scheme, filled with treacherous warlords, rivalry--and the intensity of first love. In a culture ruled by codes of honor and formal rituals, Takeo must look inside himself to discover the powers that will enable him to fulfill his destiny."

1632   In northern Germany things couldn't get much worse. Famine. Disease. Religous war laying waste the cities. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy.

2000   Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia, and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time.

THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED....

When the dust settles, Mike leads a group of armed miners to find out what happened and finds the road into town is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell: a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter attacked by men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don't have to ask who to shoot. At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of the Thirty Years' War.

What if President John F. Kennedy had not been murdered in 1963? An epic saga of America's might-have-been, Voyage is a powerful, sweeping novel of how, if President Kennedy had lived, we could have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s.

What if the Spanish Armada had beaten the British navy in 1588? Bestselling-author Harry Turtledove pictures Good Queen Bess a prisoner in the Tower of London, and William Shakespeare writing plays to please his oppressed country's new Latin masters!