Rudra Narshimha, a boy whose father is killed for reasons unknown to him. He didn't know what his father did in the royal palace but he did know that he held enormous power in the King's court. To protect his family he runs away to a new city leaving their old life behind. Broken by the death of his father he carries on with his life in the new city. There he meets a man of who teaches him to make peace with his past but the man's own past is shrouded in mystery and no one has any concrete idea who the man is or where did he came from? In a turn of events he comes across a nomadic tribe, a tribe who are in search of their homeland for over a century. But no one has ever found it. On the tribe's next voyage he decides to accompany them for his own personal reasons. But soon he realizes going to the voyage was a mistake as he is met with a cruel reality. What he had run from follows him in his new home and his life is turned upside down. Great forces are at work here and he will find himself at the centre of the whirlpool of events. Each event will bring him closer to the truth but what is the truth that is up to him to find out? Who is the man and what is his past? Will he be able to help the tribe find what they are looking for? WIll he be able to find out why his father was killed or will he suffer a fate worse than his father?

Based on actual events, The Deserters is a story of the last days of the Second World War, in a small border community between Austria and Germany. It is the story of a young man's awakening to his own morality and the belated, probably unsuccessful attempt of an old man to atone for his past.

“Powerful and often startling…The Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts.” --The Boston Globe A groundbreaking history of ordinary soldiers struggling on the front lines, The Deserters offers a completely new perspective on the Second World War. Charles Glass—renowned journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation—delves deep into army archives, personal diaries, court-martial records, and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by history. Surveying the 150,000 American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France, Italy, and Africa. Their deeds form the backbone of Glass’s arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point, a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiers. With the grace and pace of a novel, The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier. Glass shares the story of men like Private Alfred Whitehead, a Tennessee farm boy who earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandy—yet became a gangster in liberated Paris, robbing Allied supply depots along with ordinary citizens. Here also is the story of British men like Private John Bain, who deserted three times but never fled from combat—and who endured battles in North Africa and northern France before German machine guns cut his legs from under him. The heart of The Deserters resides with men like Private Steve Weiss, an idealistic teenage volunteer from Brooklyn who forced his father—a disillusioned First World War veteran—to sign his enlistment papers because he was not yet eighteen. On the Anzio beachhead and in the Ardennes forest, as an infantryman with the 36th Division and as an accidental partisan in the French Resistance, Weiss lost his illusions about the nobility of conflict and the infallibility of American commanders. Far from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia, the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair, a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reported—to the detriment of those who served and the danger of those nurtured on false tales today. Revealing the true costs of conflict on those forced to fight, The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times.

Braylar is still poisoned by the memories of those slain by his unholy flail Bloodsounder, and attempts to counter this sickness have proven ineffectual. The Syldoonian Emperor, Cynead, has solidified his power in unprecedented ways, and Braylar and company are recalled to the capital to swear fealty. Braylar must decide if he can trust his sister, Soffjian, with the secret that is killing him. She has powerful memory magics that might be able to save him from Bloodsounder’s effects, but she has political allegiances that are not his own. Arki and others in the company try to get Soffjian and Braylar to trust one another, but politics in the capital prove to be complicated and dangerous. Deposed emperor Thumarr plots to remove the repressive Cynead, and Braylar and Soffjian are at the heart of his plans. The distance between “favored shadow agent of the emperor” and “exiled traitor” is unsurprisingly small. But it is filled with blind twists and unexpected turns. Before the journey is over, Arki will chronicle the true intentions of Emperor Cynead and Soffjian.

This book examines the social atti-tudes that distinguish today's youth from their predecessors, identifies the sources of these attitudes in the social experiences of today's youth, and analyzes the stereotype implied in the term "Anti-American Generation." These essays show clearly that the issue between the dissenting, primarily middle-class youth and their elders and most of the working class (regardless of age) is a difference of opinion not about Americanism but about moral behavior and the scope of moral judgment. What distinguishes the generations is not so much their feelings about their country, as' their feelings about what people should do about their feelings and the role feelings should have in the conduct of one's life. The at-titudes of the young are largely in conflict with an older cultural tra-dition that promotes the subordi-nation of impulse and personal conviction to rational control for the sake of common purposes and future acceptability and effective-ness.

Includes court reports from the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.