historical

Willa Cather's American masterpiece about Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, told through the nostalgic memories of childhood friend Jim Burden. Luminous prose, elegiac tone, and one of literature's most enduring portraits of pioneer life and immigrant experience.

In 184 CE the Yellow Turban Rebellion broke the Han dynasty, and the next hundred years of warlord chaos resolved into three rival kingdoms - Cao Cao's Wei in the north, Liu Bei's Shu-Han in the west, Sun Quan's Wu in the south - before the Sima family quietly inherited everything and reunified China as the Jin dynasty in 280 CE; more than a thousand years later, in the 14th century, Luo Guanzhong took the long accumulation of historical chronicle, opera, and storytellers' embellishment around that century and produced one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which Moss Roberts has rendered into 2,300-plus unabridged English pages featuring the Oath of the Peach Garden between Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei; the strategist Zhuge Liang treated as something close to a demigod; the Battle of Red Cliffs as the inflection point; and hundreds of warlords, surrenders, sieges, and stratagems any modern Western reader is going to have to commit to in a way most modern novels do not ask for.