Sea Before Us

In 1944, American naval officer Lt. Wyatt Paxton arrives in London to prepare for the Allied invasion of France. He works closely with Dorothy Fairfax, a "Wren" in the Women's Royal Naval Service. Dorothy pieces together reconnaissance photographs with thousands of holiday snapshots of France--including those of her own family's summer home--in order to create accurate maps of Normandy. Maps that Wyatt will turn into naval bombardment plans. As the two spend concentrated time together in the pressure cooker of war, their deepening friendship threatens to turn to love. Dorothy must resist its pull. Her bereaved father depends on her, and her heart already belongs to another man. Wyatt too has much to lose. The closer he gets to Dorothy, the more he fears his efforts to win the war will destroy everything she has ever loved. The tense days leading up to the monumental D-Day landing blaze to life under Sarah Sundin's practiced pen with this powerful new series.

As D-Day approaches, American naval officer Lt. Wyatt Paxton is teamed up with Dorothy Fairfax, a British officer. Once they piece together family and reconnaissance photos to map Normandy, will Wyatt's bombardment plans destroy what Dorothy loves most?

Charles Tyng's quarter century under sail took him around the world half a dozen times at the begining of the nineteenth century. Fortunately, he proved to be as natural a storyteller as he was a sailor. Before the Wind has been hailed as a superb contribution to seafaring literature, alongside such books as Two Years Before the Mast and the novels of Patrick O'Brian. Both Tyng's life and the way he recounts his years at sea are full of wonder: He survives shipwrecks, squalls, and pirates. He makes and loses fortunes in tea, sugar, and cotton. He meets Lord Byron as well as the British princess (later queen) Victoria. Sailors, armchair travelers, history buffs, and lovers of pulse-quickening maritime stories will find this book as seductive as the siren song of the sea.

New York Times Editors' Choice 2022 An NPR Books We Love 2022 Shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award Finalist for the Lambda Award in Bisexual Fiction "A spellbinding book." —Megha Majumdar "Akil Kumarasamy is a singular talent." —Cathy Park Hong In the near future, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students—living through a drought and at the edge of the war—as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator’s life and the manuscript begin to become entangled. Along the way, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project will force her to question her own moral compass and sense of goodness. How involved are we in the suffering of others? What does real compassion look like? How do you make a better world?

The story of life and love, death and adventure in North America eleven thousand years ago.

A fascinating naval perspective on one of the greatest of all historical conundrums: How did thirteen isolated colonies, which in 1775 began a war with Britain without a navy or an army, win their independence from the greatest naval and military power on earth? The American Revolution involved a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans—to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French, and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea and, of course, off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theaters. In The Struggle for Sea Power, Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American independence from a naval perspective, and he also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political, and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. In doing so Willis offers valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian history. This unique account of the American Revolution gives us a new understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, of the American path to independence, and of the rise and fall of the British Empire.

Pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson explores the wonders of the Earth's oceans in these classics of American science and nature writing. Rachel Carson is perhaps most famous as the author of Silent Spring, but she was first and foremost a "poet of the sea" and the three books collected in this deluxe Library of America volume are classics of American science and nature writing. Under the Sea-Wind (1941), Carson's lyrical debut, offers an intimate account of maritime ecology through the eyes of three of the ocean's denizens, the individual lives of sanderling, mackerel, and eel dramatically intertwined in the enduring ebb and flow of the tides. The Sea Around Us (1951)--a winner of the National Book Award--draws on a wealth of oceanographic, meteorological, biological, and historical research to present its subject on a grand, biospheric scale, revealing not only many mysteries of the still-unfathomed depths, but a reverence for the sea as a source of global climate and of life itself. Concluding Carson's "sea trilogy," The Edge of the Sea (1955) explores the habits of the many small creatures that live on shorelines and in tidepools accessible to any beachcomber: part identification guide, part hymn to ecological complexity, it is a book that conveys the "sense of wonder" in nature for which Carson is justly celebrated. At a moment when overfishing, pollution, and global warming are causing catastrophic changes to marine environments worldwide, Carson's lyrically detailed accounts of these environments offer a timely reminder of their beauty, fragility, and immense consequence for human life.

"A treasure of a book."—David McCullough The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye. A New York Times Notable Book America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen—the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution. Combining spellbinding human drama and meticulous research, Philbrick reconstructs the dark saga of the voyage to show why, instead of being celebrated and revered as that of Lewis and Clark, it has—until now—been relegated to a footnote in the national memory. Winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize

Sea Stories: Memoir of a Naval Officer (1956-1967) spans Slaughter's naval service during the Cold War. Over 60 vignettes depict the danger of Navy life over the course of his naval career.

Through eyewitness accounts based on hundreds of interviews with crew members; personal diaries, notes, and letters; and each cutter's logbooks and patrol reports Walling plunges you into the thick of the battle, re-creating some of the most desperate encounters, heroic rescues, and harrowing missions of the Second World War. Told largely in the voices of the men who lived it, this unforgettable tale is peppered with humorous and ironic anecdotes about life aboard ship during wartime. You'll meet the liberty-craving crew members who painted their entire ship in less than an hour; the ship's mascot who became canine-non-grata in Greenland; and the crew whose vessel was mistaken for the German battleship Bismarck and attacked by the Royal Navy. Complete with dramatic photographs of the Coast Guard in action, Bloodstained Sea brings this epic drama to vibrant and pulsing life.