A million people were killed in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, one of the worst battles in history, and the intertwined stories of three people, each told in third person, offer a human-scale account of the cataclysm.
Europe
Materials from Europe
The Crane
The blue-capped man who operates the crane is so attached to the machine that he never leaves it in war or in peace. Also translated by F. N. Monjo.
Marta And The Bicycle
After Marta the cow watches the annual bicycle race go through her town, she decides to build her own bicycle and teach herself to ride.
Heart of Mine: A Story of Adoption
This book offers young readers a gentle story about adoption as two parents explain how their darling daughter, Tu Thi, came into their lives from a country so very far away.
The Acorn Eaters
An award-winning story by a Dutch author is set in the peasant country of Andalusia after the Spanish Civil War, when a poor youth struggles to help feed his family under the gun of the landowners.
Notso Hotso
Anthony, a neglected pet dog, develops an irritating skin condition and has most of his hair shaved off, which embarrasses him greatly until he realizes he now looks like a lion and can frighten other animals and people.
Invisible Threads
Alternating passages describe the experiences of a mother and her biological daughter when each is sixteen-years-old, as one becomes unexpectedly pregnant and the other decides whether to find her birth mother.
Dog
An old man living alone at the edge of a small Irish village grudgingly allows a dog into his life.
Kinderdike
When a baby and a kitten are found safe and dry after a disastrous flood in 1421, the people of a village in southern Holland decide to rebuild.
An Innocent Soldier
A sixteen-year-old farmhand is tricked into fighting in the Napoleonic Wars by the farmer for whom he works, who secretly substitutes him for the farmer’s own son.