Yeah, but What If?

1945

Robert Conroy

America has dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Japan has only begun to fight. . . . In 1945, history has reached a turning point. A terrible new weapon has been unleashed. Japan has no choice but to surrender. But instead, the unthin kable occurs. With their nation burned and shattered, Japanese fanatics set in motion a horrifying endgame–their aim: to take America down with them. In Robert Conroy’s brilliantly imagined epic tale of World War II, Emperor Hirohito’s capitulation is hijacked by extremists and a weary United States is forced to invade Japan as a last step in a war that has already cost so many lives. As the Japanese lash out with tactics that no one has ever faced before–from POWs used as human shields to a rain of kamikaze attacks that take out the highest-value target in the Pacific command–the invasion’s success is suddenly in doubt. As America’s streets erupt in rioting, history will turn on the acts of a few key players from the fiery front lines to the halls of Washington to the shadowy realm of espionage, while a mortally wounded enemy becomes the greatest danger of all.

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Soulless

Gail Carriger

Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette. Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire -- and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate. With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London's high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?

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The Man in the High Castle

Philip Dick

The Axis have won World War II, Japan and Germany occupy America, Nazi rockets rule the skies, and slaves again are forced to serve harsh masters. Fleeing a world governed by hate and superstition, Juliana Frink travels to no-man's-land. A myste rious travel lends her his copy of a sensational novel that has been banned in the Nazi-held eastern territory - she reads of another way of living.

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The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

Mark Hodder

London, 1861. Sir Richard Francis Burton - explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman; his reputation tarnished; his career in tatters; his former partner missing and probably dead. Algernon Charles Swinburne - unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sa de, for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin! Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn't exist at all!

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11/22/63

Stephen King

ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK? In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular cul ture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it. It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

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The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

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