Sheila Williams - Böcker

“This is a truly character-driven novel that explores how people define themselves, the creation of family and home, and the importance of memory and language. . . . Fans of historical epics won’t be able to put this book down.”—Historical Novel Society“Emotionally satisfying. . . . A remarkable character portrait.”—Publishers WeeklyThe author of The Secret Women tells the story of a brave and enduring woman as indomitable as Ernest Gaines’ legendary Miss Jane Pittman, in a breathtaking novel that combines the epic romance and adventure of Outlander, the sweeping drama of Roots, and the haunting historical power of Barracoon.Things Past Telling is a remarkable historical epic that charts one unforgettable woman’s journey across an ocean of years as vast as the Atlantic that will forever separate her from her homeland. Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Grace—a.k.a “Momma Grace” will live a long, wondrous life marked by hardship, oppression, opportunity, and love. Though she will be “gifted” various names, her birth name is known to her alone. Over the course of 100-plus years, she survives capture, enslavement by several property owners, the Atlantic crossing when she is only eleven years of age, and a brief stint as a pirate’s ward, acting as both a spy and a translator. Maryam learns midwifery from a Caribbean-born wise woman, whose “craft” combines curated techniques and medicines from African, Indigenous, and European women. Those midwifery skills allow her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement, as she walks the razor’s edge trying to balance the lives and health of her own people with the cruel economic mandates of the slave holders, who view infants born in bondage not as flesh-and-blood children but as investment property. Throughout her triumphant and tumultuous life Maryam gains and loses her homeland, her family, her culture, her husband, her lovers, and her children. Yet as the decades pass, this tenacious woman never loses her sense of self.  Inspired by a 112-year-old woman the author discovered in an 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio, loosely based on the author’s real-life female ancestors, spanning more than a hundred years, from the mid-eighteen-century to the end of America’s Civil War, and spanning across the globe, from what is now southern Nigeria to the islands of the Caribbean to North America and the land bordering the Ohio River, Things Past Telling is a breathtaking story of a past that lives on in all of us, and a life that encompasses the best—and worst—of our humanity.

“Just the novel to elevate these unforgettable voices.”—Shelf AwarenessThe acclaimed author of The Secret Women and Things Past Telling returns with an engrossing WWII historical novel about a little known aspect of World War II—the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only Black WACs to serve overseas during the conflict. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Dorothy Thom, Spelman graduate, librarian and Francophile, joins the Women’s Army Corps wanting to do her part for the war effort. Longing for adventure, she has one question for the recruiter: “Do you think I’ll get to go abroad?”As Dorothy and her sister WACs discover, life in the Army is an adventure filled with unexpected deprivations and culture shock. Women from all levels of society, secretaries, teachers, and sharecroppers, work together to navigate a segregated military where race and gender define their every move. At boot camp, the “colored girls” are separated for processing. At Ft. Riley, the women’s barracks are rustic and heated by coal-burning pot-bellied stoves while German POWs spend their incarceration in buildings with central heat and hot water.In early 1945, Dorothy and eight hundred African American WACs cross the turbulent North Atlantic to their post in England. Their orders are to process the mail sent to GIs from their loved ones back home, an estimated 17 million pieces. The women arrive to find mail stockpiled for over two years in warehouses and airplane hangars, many pieces in poor condition, the names illegible. In England and France, the WACs traverse a landscape of unimagined possibilities. With their outlooks changed forever, they return to the United States as the catalysts for change in America and build lives that transcend anything their ancestors ever dreamed of.No Better Time illuminates a story of overlooked history, and a love of country and duty that has been forgotten until now.

Book club favorite and acclaimed author of No Better Time and The Secret Women makes her first foray into the mythical fantasy genre with this epic tale of legacy, power, sacrifice, and family bonds that is a call to action wrapped in elemental magic.Aeola St. James is no ordinary CEO. While navigating boardroom politics and the chaos of motherhood, she harbors a secret: she is Keeper of the Winds, an elemental being who can read the landscape and harness the wind. The planet is warming faster than it should and Aeola senses catastrophe.To ward off disaster, Aeola must gather “Daughters of the Wind” from every epoch and corner of the globe, including her own daughters whom she has hidden for their protection: Buran, mammoth hunter in Ice Age North America, Burga, her Eurasian counterpart, a skilled falconer, Siree, midwife to the Kushite royal house, Zonda of the Cloud People, masters of the Andean peaks, and Mistral, mercurial and fierce, survivor of a medieval witch hunt.As Aeola time-travels the globe, an enemy waits. Tech billionaire Wills Holloway has devised a plan to monetize climate correction by launching a missile into the stratosphere, seeding it with a cooling compound. His corporate intelligence reveals that Aeola’s company has a mechanism that will facilitate the dispersal of his creation and he initiates a hostile takeover. But Wills has no idea that the “mechanism” he seeks to acquire is Aeola herself.As the climate clock ticks, Aeola uses her gifts to outsmart the uber-introverted Holloway and persuade him to partner with her and the Daughters to give the blue planet a fighting chance.

From the archives of Analog Science Fiction and Face and Asimov's Science Fiction magazines comes this thought-provoking anthology of stories by a group of acclaimed, bestselling female writers who have changed the nature of visionary fiction. These ten classic stories, each featuring well-developed, strong female characters, have garnered numerous literary awards and span every style and theme in speculative fiction. With an introduction by Connie Willis, this powerful collection includes gems from Anne McCaffey, Ursula Le Guinn and Octavia Butler.