Downton Abbey, season 4 (DVD): The sweeping Downton Abbey saga continues, beginning six months after the unexpected death of Matthew Crawley, heir to Downton Abbey, husband to Lady Mary, and brand new father to a baby boy and successor, in a car accident. Although it is the 1920s, Britain still observes mourning rituals that are almost Victorian in their solemnity. Nonetheless, life goes on at Downton Abbey and the Crawleys are beginning to snap out of it. Check Availability
Dominion by C. J. Sansom: 1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the
appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany. The global economy strains
against the weight of the long German war against Russia still raging in the
east. The British people find themselves under increasingly authoritarian
rule--the press, radio, and television tightly controlled, the British Jews
facing ever greater constraints. But Churchill's Resistance soldiers on. As
defiance grows, whispers circulate of a secret that could forever alter the
balance of the global struggle. The keeper of that secret? Scientist Frank
Muncaster, who languishes in a Birmingham mental hospital. Civil Servant David
Fitzgerald, a spy for the Resistance and University friend of Frank's, is given
the mission to rescue Frank and get him out of the country. Hard on his heels
is Gestapo agent Gunther Hoth, a brilliant, implacable hunter of men, who soon
has Frank and David's innocent wife, Sarah, directly in his sights. Check Availability
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris: This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus
affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage.
Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted
of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil's Island, and stripped of
his rank in front of a baying crowd of twenty-thousand. Among the witnesses to
his humiliation is Georges Picquart, the ambitious, intellectual, recently
promoted head of the counterespionage agency that "proved" Dreyfus
had passed secrets to the Germans. At first, Picquart firmly believes in
Dreyfus's guilt. But it is not long after Dreyfus is delivered to his desolate
prison that Picquart stumbles on information that leads him to suspect that
there is still a spy at large in the French military. As evidence of the most
malignant deceit mounts and spirals inexorably toward the uppermost levels of
government, Picquart is compelled to question not only the case against Dreyfus
but also his most deeply held beliefs about his country, and about himself. Check Availability
Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Ann Quindlen: Moving to a small country cabin, a once
world-famous photographer bonds with a local man and begins to see the world
around her in new, deeper dimensions while evaluating second chances at love,
career, and self-understanding. Check Availability
The Fifth Estate (DVD): WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg team up to become underground watchdogs of the very powerful. They create a platform that allows whistleblowers to anonymously leak covert data. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society, and what are the costs of exposing them? Check Availability
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