Saving Bravo by Stephan Talty is about what is surely one of the most important previously untold tales from the Vietnam War. Lt. Colonel Gene Hambelton had a head so full of top secret information that he was one of the last people youd want to fall into North Vietnamese and Soviet hands. In 1972, his plane was shot down. He ejected and landed in the midst of a North Vietnamese force of 30,000. In a panic, American military leaders effectively put the rest of the war on hold for 12 days in an effort to extract him. This book relates how that was finally accomplished by a Navy SEAL and his Vietnamese guide.
Moving on to fiction, fans of Game of Thrones will want to check out the new book by George R.R. Martin, the author of the books on which the TV series is based. Fire & Blood tells the story of House Targaryen 300 years before the events of the TV series.
Beau LAmour, son of author Louis LAmour, has turned roughly patched segments of what would have been his fathers first novel into a book. Thats not necessarily a recipe for a good book, but No Traveller Returns is getting good reviews. Its an adventure story featuring the crew of a ship carrying a highly explosive cargo across the Pacific in 1939.
In Jeffrey Archers Heads You Win, a mother and son flee Leningrad in 1968, escaping the KGB which assassinated their husband and father. They can stow away on a ship going to Britain or one going to the U.S. In this novel, Archer offers two parallel stories in alternating chapters, the storylines varying depending on which ship they took.
Surely most of the unusual love stories of modern times is that of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman. That is retold in fictional form in Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan. The lifelong bachelor, British academic, and Christian writer in his late 50s married the American divorcee 17 years his junior.
Erstwhile Communist and then Christian convert, Davidmans acquaintance with Lewis began with two years of correspondence as she was writing a book herself. They met when she came to England. After a few years he agreed to a civil marriage to prevent her from being deported when her visa expired, although they lived apart. Within a year, however, he realized he had fallen in love with her and the two were married in a church ceremony and entered into an actual marriage. By this time, she had been diagnosed with cancer. Her death three years later led to one of Lewis best-known books A Grief Observed.
