A Student of Living Things – Susan Richards Shreve
Even in the confusion and dread of the post-9/11 world, the tightly knit Frayn family is fairly well insulated from the snipers, bomb threats, and natural disasters that plague Washington, D.C., a few years into the future.
Then, in the moment it takes Claire Frayn to dig for her umbrella while her brother Steven waits next to her on the library steps of their university, he is shot and killed. Shattered, the family scatters to whatever havens they can find. Steven’s father moves into the airplane hangar behind the house, his mother moves into the glass factory where she works, and Claire, a biology student, adapts.
Galvanized by an impassioned stranger who claims to be her brother’s friend, she sheds her measured academic persona and sets out to avenge her brother’s death. Expecting to uncover a political conspiracy aimed at her outspoken brother, Claire finds instead her family’s own darkest secrets and her true love.
Paris, February 1998: Aimée Leduc has her work cut out for her—running her detective agency and fighting off sleep-deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bébé. The last thing she has time for now, is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (French Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimée, something to do with Aimée’s father’s unsolved murder a decade ago. How can she say no?
After 85 long years, Fatimah Abdullah is dying, and she knows when her time will come. In fact, it should come just nine days from tonight, the 992nd nightly visit of Scheherazade, the beautiful and immortal storyteller from the epic The Arabian Nights.
An epic saga of love and war, Shadow of the Swords tells the story of the Crusades—from the Muslim perspective.
