Roger A. Deakins

Follows "Swoff, " a third-generation Marine enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through the Middle East deserts. There is no cover from intolerable heat or from the Iraqi soldiers, who are always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country...

At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield and Blake are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers, Blake's own brother among them.

Loosely based on Homer's "Odyssey", this is the story of three convicts--escapees from a prison farm in Mississippi--and their adventure as they travel home in hopes of recovering buried loot before it's lost forever in a flood.

Theodore 'Theo' Decker was thirteen years old when his mother was killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tragedy changes the course of his life, sending him on a stirring odyssey of grief and guilt, reinvention and redemption, and even love. Through it all, he holds on to one tangible piece of hope from that terrible day, a painting of a tiny bird chained to its perch.