Showing results by author "William Ferrier Jr" in All Categories

September 1775. Two hundred and forty people walk out of Sonora into the desert. They are soldiers, wives, children, priests, and a thousand animals. They are carrying everything they own. They are going to found San Francisco. Fray Pedro Font is the expedition's chaplain and astronomer — a man with a quadrant, a diary, and orders to record what he sees. What he sees is the hardest overland journey in the history of the American West: the crossing of the Colorado River, the killing sands of the Imperial Dunes, three children born on the open road, and a commander named Anza who holds 240 ...

When sound is the only truth you can trust, every second is a verdict. 1943, Western Pacific. A damaged U.S. submarine stalks enemy waters on fumes and nerve, commanded by a skipper who believes courage is restraint. Through the headphones of Ash, the boat's sonarman, we enter a patrol of split-second choices: slipping a mined harbor by inches, shadowing an unmarked transport, and surfacing under smoke to pull survivors from burning water while enemy destroyers close. Ash hears death before anyone sees it—hedgehog patterns stepping closer, a torpedo turning back to hunt its maker, the ...

In the summer of 1942, Johnny Ferris boards a train to war with nothing but a duffel bag, a baseball glove, and a promise whispered to the girl he loves: I will see you again. Told through tender letters that cross oceans and silence, I Will See You Again captures the heartbreak and hope of a love tested by World War II. Johnny writes from barracks and battlefields; Claire answers from their small town, her words steady as prayer. Each envelope becomes a lifeline—carrying devotion, courage, and the vow that distance cannot erase. As weeks stretch into months, censored lines and missing ...

"Roots of America: Three Centuries, One Tree" - Book Description For Maximum Organic Sales From the ancient oak that has witnessed it all comes an unforgettable American epic spanning three centuries of love, loss, and the unbreakable bonds that make us family. In 1681, a Jumano boy named Aiyana plants a promise beneath a mighty oak tree in the Texas wilderness. Three hundred and twenty years later, that same tree shelters the descendants of Spanish colonists, Mexican ranchers, and American dreamers—families who learned that survival means bending without breaking, that home is something ...

BEFORE THE WATER ROSE In the literary tradition of The Things They Carried and All Quiet on the Western Front—a devastating portrait of a young man learning to disappear. Calvin Webb stands at windows. In small-town Kansas during the Dust Bowl, watching is safer than participating. Observation is easier than action. When a boy falls from a roof and Calvin freezes instead of running for help, he learns what paralysis costs. The U.S. Navy promises to fix what's broken. Boot camp will teach him to act without thinking. To move without hesitating. To become useful instead of frozen. And it ...

She's here to inspect his station. He's not here to let anyone in. Nora Castellano arrives on the Oregon coast with a clipboard, two pens, and a job to do. As a state fire inspector, she's seen every kind of station — the good, the neglected, the ones hanging on by a thread. Coldwater Fire Station 1 is all three. Captain Eli Morrow hasn't let anyone past his defenses in five years. Not since a warehouse floor collapsed and took his rookie with it. He runs his crew with precision, writes every logbook entry by hand, and stands at the kitchen counter because sitting at the table would mean ...

They walked a thousand miles to find a harbor that didn't exist. They found San Francisco Bay instead. They didn't want it. In 1769, a Spanish expedition of sixty-four men left San Diego under orders to locate the harbor of Monterey. Their engineer, Miguel Costansó, kept a diary of measurements: distances, latitudes, the depth of every pool, the height of a dead grizzly bear. He did not record feelings. He recorded facts. The facts are these: the men walked for six months through canyons and mountains and fog. They ate their mules when the food ran out. Seventeen soldiers were crippled by ...

Twenty-six men walked into the jungle. Twenty-one walked out. Central Highlands, Vietnam. November 1967. Lieutenant Daniel Elias leads his platoon on a routine five-day mission to secure a remote village. The intelligence says the area is quiet. The intelligence is wrong. What follows is ten days of combat, loss, and the brutal education of a young officer who discovers that command is not control — it is carrying what cannot be set down. A compass that belongs to a wounded point man. A bottle of hot sauce from a dead squad leader's wife. A three-sentence letter from a father who never ...

Ohio, 1916. Sam Archer sees the world in numbers. He can calculate a hawk's trajectory mid-dive, predict weather patterns from cloud formations, reduce any problem to elegant mathematics. When America enters the Great War, the Army sees exactly what they need: a pilot who can turn killing into calculus. By his thirtieth kill, Sam is an ace. By his thirty-first, he can no longer count to ten. What the mathematics gave him, the war takes away—piece by piece, number by number, until the boy who could calculate anything can't remember his sister's name. Discharged and discarded, Sam finds ...

★★★★★ "A masterpiece of historical fiction that deserves every major literary award." Some journeys measure a thousand miles. Others measure the distance between who you were forced to be and who you refuse to become. In 1883, twelve-year-old Nayeli is ripped from his family and imprisoned at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School—an institution designed to systematically erase Native American identity. His hair is cut. His name is taken. His language is forbidden. Children who resist are beaten. Children who remember are punished. Children who fight back disappear. But Nayeli ...

June 1967. Joseph Ward watches his nineteen-year-old son board a bus to Fort Polk, Louisiana. It's the last time he'll see Daniel as a boy. For the next nineteen months, Joseph fights a war from his driveway in Kokomo, Indiana—checking the mailbox twice daily, watching Walter Cronkite count casualties, drinking alone in the basement while his son screams through nightmares eight thousand miles away. This is not another soldier's story. This is the war nobody writes about: the fathers who stood helpless while their sons walked into the jungle. The mothers who slept in empty bedrooms. The ...

In March 1968, Soviet submarine K-129 sinks in the North Pacific. The official cause: mechanical failure. The truth lies three miles underwater. Captain Vladimir Kobzar watches his command dissolve as fifteen unidentified men conduct a satellite transmission test that exposes his submarine to American surveillance. He documents everything in a letter to his seven-year-old daughter—the only record he can control. Three days after the transmission, the submarine sinks with all hands. Six years later, American engineer Sherman Wetmore designs the impossible: a system to lift the wreck from ...

Seven men vanished from Spain’s first over-land march into California. This is the story the diaries erased—and the gold that doomed them. 1769. Governor Gaspar de Portolá leads soldiers, missionaries, and ships toward the mythical ports of San Diego and Monterey. Scurvy hollows the ranks, rations rot, and earthquakes rattle the coast. Deep in the fog-shrouded redwoods, five soldados de cuera and two Native scouts discover river sand that glitters with raw gold. Bound by desperation, they desert under cover of night, vowing to survive the wilderness and return for the mother lode. ...

"The Arizona Series belongs alongside the great works of WWII fiction. The Last Witness is its devastating, perfect conclusion." I'm the last one. And in seven days, I'll be dead. At 102 years old, James Marsh is the final surviving crew member of USS Arizona. He has one week to live. One week to tell the truth about the five novels that defined how America remembers Pearl Harbor. They weren't just stories. They were confessions. For eight decades, Marsh has carried the weight of five men's lives—Calvin Webb, Thomas Avery, John McAllister, Percy Cole, and Vincent DeLuca. Five sailors who ...

A jukebox. A coin. One hundred songs. Each one is a door. Carson City, Nevada. Summer of 1992. A twelve-year-old boy arrives at his grandparents' house to spend the summer while his grandmother dies. His grandfather—a man who pulls weeds from dawn to noon without stopping and has never spoken about his past—keeps a 1953 Seeburg jukebox polished to a mirror shine in the corner of the living room. Nobody plays it. Until the boy drops a coin in the slot. Each song carries him backward—into the Catholic orphanage where his grandfather was abandoned at five, the streets of San Francisco ...

THE SOUND OF JOY Book Five · The USS Arizona Series “Haunting, restrained, and quietly devastating—The Sound of Joy captures the fragile beauty of a life just before history shatters it, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it long after the final page.” Before the war. Before the fire. Before the silence that would echo across the Pacific. Vincent DeLuca learned early that music could do what words could not. Raised in a quiet Brooklyn apartment by a father who spoke through his trumpet, Vincent discovers that sound can comfort the grieving, move the hardened, and hide the pain no ...

She smiled at the men who killed her brother. Then she destroyed them. Stockholm, 1942. While Europe burns, neutral Sweden has become the world's most dangerous chessboard—a city where German, British, Soviet, and American spies circle each other in an endless shadow war. Karin Lindqvist is a celebrated actress with a secret: she works for Swedish intelligence, gathering information from the Nazi officers who court her at diplomatic receptions. It's her way of avenging her brother, torpedoed by a German U-boat in the North Sea. But when a German pastor arrives with an extraordinary ...

What would you sacrifice to survive? And how much of yourself would be left? Percy Augustus Cole knows the answer cost him everything. Chicago, 1920s. Percy's grandmother raises him with three rules: Stand tall. Use all three names. Never compromise your dignity. But dignity doesn't pay rent during the Depression. When the Navy offers steady wages, Percy enlists as a mess attendant aboard the USS Arizona. The work is simple: serve breakfast, pour coffee, stay invisible. Six years of making himself smaller. Six years of perfecting the dangerous art of disappearing. He becomes so good at ...

From the author of the Vietnam War novel, Brown Water A literary novel about the tunnel rats of Vietnam. Until now. Cu Chi, November 1967. The tunnels run for two hundred miles beneath the red dirt of South Vietnam—three levels deep, carved by hand, invisible from the surface. The Viet Cong live in them, fight from them, vanish into them. The U.S. Army sends men down to find them. Earle Cain is one of those men. A coal miner's son from Virginia, he carries a .45 pistol and a flashlight into tunnels so narrow he cannot turn around. Fourteen inches wide. Twenty inches high. Absolute dark. ...

January 1778. No meat in eleven days. The shoes are done. The dead horse by the commissary road is covered in snow. The Continental Army is starving at Valley Forge — and Elias Finch is still here. Elias is twenty-two, a private from Bucks County who enlisted after his father died and hasn't been home since. He shares a smoke-filled hut with eleven men, eats flour-and-water paste baked on a stone, and writes in a journal he bought in Morristown with a pencil he keeps sharp with his knife. He doesn't think about independence or the rights of man. He thinks about fire, shoes, and whether ...