For most Latinos under seventy, there has never been a time without Celia Cruz. Her career has spanned three generations and each one harbors memories of Celia’s music. Based on well over 500 hours of taped interviews recorded in the months before her death, this authorized, posthumous memoir includes never before told personal anecdotes, and photographs from the Queen of Salsa’s extraordinary life. A Larry Warren recommended title.

Larkwood Priory, Suffolk, 1995: Father Anselm is stopped by an old man. What, he is asked, should a man do when the world has turned against him? Anselm’s response—claim sanctuary—is to have greater resonance than he could ever have imagined, for the man returns demanding the protection of the Church. He is Eduard Schwermann, a suspected Nazi war criminal. Meanwhile Agnes Aubret unburdens a secret to her granddaughter Lucy. Fifty years earlier Agnes lived in occupied Paris and risked her life to smuggle Jewish children to safety until her group was exposed by an SS officer: Eduard Schwermann.

The great fire of WWII has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, a hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Peter Exley, another veteran, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death, and Leith saved Exley’s life. They have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.

Barack Obama’s story begins when he hears that his father - a figure he knows more as myth than man - has died in an accident. The news triggers a chain of memories, as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the exotic, dreamlike islands of Hawaii; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack is two; and Barack’s own painful awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.