While writing Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford found herself drawn to the wit and humanity of his often misunderstood patron and friend, Frederick of Prussia. The result was her only biography of a non-French subject, and the one she considered her finest. 

The Prussian king Frederick II (1712-1786) is perhaps best known for successfully defending his tiny country against the three great European powers of France, Austria, and Russia during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), a feat that allowed Great Britain to limit its engagement on the Continent and emerge as the world's leading colonial power, as summed up in William Pitt's famous claim that "America was won in Germany."

But in his youth, tormented by a spectacularly cruel and dyspeptic father, this future military genius was drawn first to the flute and French poetry, and throughout his long life counted nothing more important than the company of good friends and great wits. This was especially evident in his longstanding, loving, and vexing relationship with Voltaire. An absolute ruler allergic to pomp, a nonhunter who wore no spurs, a reformer of great zeal who maintained complete freedom of the press and religion and cleaned up his country's courts, a fiscal conservative and patron of the arts, the builder of the rococo palace Sanssouci and improver of the farmers' lot, maddening to his rivals but beloved by nearly everyone he met, Frederick was-notwithstanding a penchant for merciless teasing-arguably the most humane of enlightened despots.

In Frederick the Great, a richly entertaining biography of one of the eighteenth century's most fascinating figures, Nancy Mitford's trademark wit and charm find the ideal subject.

A dazzling and energetic story of resourcefulness and courage, of one girl's will to survive even when everyone in her life has given her up as lost.

A few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, Anais Hendricks sits in the back of a police car in Midlothian, Scotland, headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders. She can't remember the events that led her here, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and there is blood on Anais's school uniform.

Put in foster care at birth, Anais has been let down, or worse, by just about every adult she has ever met. And yet despite the parade of horrors visited upon her early life, she greets the world with a witty, blunt, and endlessly entertaining voice. Smart, funny and fierce, Anais is a counterculture outlaw. 

Author Jenni Fagan was born in Livingston, Scotland. A published poet, she has won awards from Arts Council England, Dewar Arts and Scottish Screen among others. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. 

"... & Sons explores the existential tension between literary fame and family legacy for A. N. Dyer, an elderly writer whose double-initial moniker and early success are reminiscent of J. D. Salinger's. ... [It's] the kind of book that generates that magic reading tension between impatience to know what happens next and the desire to prolong immersion as long as possible."

--Shelf Awareness

The funeral of Charles Henry Topping on Manhattan's Upper East Side would have been a minor affair (his two-hundred-word obit in The New York Times notwithstanding) but for the presence of one particular mourner: the notoriously reclusive author A. N. Dyer, whose novel Ampersand stands as a classic of American teenage angst. But as Andrew Newbold Dyer delivers the eulogy for his oldest friend, he suffers a breakdown over the life he's led and the people he's hurt and the novel that will forever endure as his legacy. He must gather his three sons for the first time in many years - before it's too late.

& Sons is that rarest of treasures: a startlingly imaginative novel about families and how they define us, and the choices we make when faced with our own mortality.

David Gilbert is the author of the story collection Remote Feed and the novel The Normals. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, and Bomb. He lives in New York with his wife and three children.