She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw––young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent––reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all––her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief...

Landing on the Mexican coast on Good Friday, 1519, Hernan Cortes felt himself the bearer of a divine burden to conquer and convert the first advanced civilization Europeans had yet encountered in the West. For Montezuma, leader of the Mexicans, April 21, 1519 (known in their sophisticated astronomical system as 9 Wind Day) was the precise date of a dire prophesy: the return of Quetzalcoatl, a fearsome god predicted to arrive by ship, from the East, with light skin, a black beard, robed in black exactly as Cortes would. The ensuing drama is described by eminent historian Maurice Collis in a...

Gareth's parents die in a tragic car accident. Yet his investigations show that it was no accident and he discovers his father deliberately drove the car over a cliff. This leads him on a search which uncovers the mystery of his parents' lives during the war years and after. Gareth keeps a secret and he comes to realise that his parents also have secrets which they have kept. But no secret can stay locked away forever and the secrets of the past spring forward to disturb the equilibrium of Gareth's life and those around him.