Mary Doria Russell Books In Order

The Sparrow

ONE OF ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

‘A NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT…
Russell shows herself to be a skillful storyteller who subtly and expertly builds suspense.’
USA Today

‘AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED…
If you have to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you choose? How about four Jesuit priests, a young astronomer, a physician, her engineer husband, and a child prostitute turned computer expert? That’s who Mary Doria Russell sends in her new novel, The Sparrow. This motley combination of agnostics, true believers, and misfits becomes the first to explore the Alpha Centuri world of Rakhat with both enlightening and disastrous results…
. Vivid and engaging…
An incredible novel.’
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

‘POWERFUL…
Father Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of a Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat, ‘a soul…
looking for God.’ We first meet him in Italy…
sullen and bitter…
. But he was not always this way, as we learn through flashbacks that tell the story of the ill fated trip…
. The Sparrow tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence.’
San Francisco Chronicle

‘SMOOTH STORYTELLING AND GORGEOUS CHARACTERIZATION…
Important novels leave deep cracks in our beliefs, our prejudices, and our blinders. The Sparrow is one of them.’
Entertainment Weekly

SELECTED BY THE BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB

Children of God

4 cassettes / 4 hoursRead by Stephen LangMary Doria Russell’s debut novel, The Sparrow, took us on a journey to a distant planet and into the center of the human soul. A critically acclaimed bestseller, The Sparrow was chosen as one of Entertainment Weekly’s Ten Best Books of the Year, a finalist for the Book of the Month Club’s First Fiction Prize and the winner of the James M. Tiptree Memorial Award. Now, in Children of God, Russell further establishes herself as one of the most innovative, entertaining and philosophically provocative novelists writing today. The only member of the original mission to the planet Rakhat to return to Earth, Father Emilio Sandoz has barely begun to recover from his ordeal when the So ciety of Jesus calls upon him for help in preparing for another mission to Alpha Centauri. Despite his objections and fear, he cannot escape his past or the future. Old friends, new discoveries and difficult questions await Emilio as he struggles for inner peace and understanding in a moral universe whose boundaries now extend beyond the solar system and whose future lies with children born in a faraway place. Strikingly original, richly plotted, replete with memorable characters and filled with humanity and humor, Chil dren of God is an unforgettable and uplifting novel that is a potent successor to The Sparrow and a startlingly imaginative adventure for newcomers to Mary Doria Russell’s special literary magic.

Doc

The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon filled cow town jammed with liquored up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holliday, the frail twenty six year old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House. Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given an awful choice at the age of twenty two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone and everything he loves in the hope that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Young, scared, lonely, and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier just as an economic crash wrecks the dreams of a nation. Soon, with few alternatives open to him, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally; he is also living with M ria Katarina Harony, a high strung Hungarian who*re with dazzling turquoise eyes, who can quote Latin classics right back at him. Kate makes it her business to find Doc the high stakes poker games that will support them both in high style. It is Kate who insists that the couple travel to Dodge City, because that’s where the money is. And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp really begins before Wyatt Earp is the prototype of the square jawed, fearless lawman; before Doc Holliday is the quintessential frontier gambler; before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety. Authentic, moving, and witty, Mary Doria Russell s fifth novel redefines these two towering figures of the American West and brings to life an extraordinary cast of historical characters, including Holliday s unforgettable companion, Kate. First and last, however, Doc is John Henry Holliday s story, written with compassion, humor, and respect by one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

A Thread of Grace

Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God. It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen year old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Na*zis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive. Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty three thousand Jews during the war’s final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell s many fans and earn her even more. From the Hardcover edition.

Dreamers of the Day

I suppose I ought to warn you at the outset that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am sure of this much: My little story has become your history. You won t really understand your times until you understand mine. So begins the account of Agnes Shanklin, the charmingly diffident narrator of Mary Doria Russell’s compelling new novel, Dreamers of the Day. And what is Miss Shanklin s little story? Nothing less than the creation of the modern Middle East at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, where Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell met to decide the fate of the Arab world and of our own.A forty year old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel just as the Peace Conference convenes, Agnes, with her plainspoken American opinions and a small, noisy dachshund named Rosie enters into the company of the historic luminaries who will, in the space of a few days at a hotel in Cairo, invent the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. Neither a pawn nor a participant at the conference, Agnes is ostensibly insignificant, and that makes her a welcome sounding board for Churchill, Lawrence, and Bell. It also makes her unexpectedly attractive to the charismatic German spy Karl Weilbacher. As Agnes observes the tumultuous inner workings of nation building, she is drawn more and more deeply into geopolitical intrigue and toward a personal awakening. With prose as graceful and effortless as a seductive float down the Nile, Mary Doria Russell illuminates the long, rich history of the Middle East with a story that brilliantly elucidates today s headlines. As enlightening as it is entertaining, Dreamers of the Day is a memorable, passionate, gorgeously written novel. From the Hardcover edition.