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For Army Reserve soldier Michael Cross, the world as he knows it ends in an instant. One minute he’s in college, and the next rioters are roaming the highway around him, breaking into cars and literally tearing people apart. This is the day the dead walk. This is the world of We’re Alive.

The dead have risen, and they are hungry. Slow and plodding, they are legion. The undead hunt the living. Stop and they will catch you. Hide and they will find you. If you have a heartbeat, you do the only thing you can: You run. Survivors escape to an island stronghold: a cop and his daughter, a computer nerd, a garbage man with a piece of rebar, and an escapee from a mental hospital with a lifesaving secret. After reaching Alcatraz, the ever-expanding group of survivors realize that the infected are not the only threat.

It was just a random mutation - one of a billion that happen in viruses every day. But this one was different. It exploded out of Somalia and spread across the oceans before anybody thought to look up from their cell phones to see what was going on. The infected breathed the virus into the air around them, spreading it through the cities faster than anyone thought possible. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Police lines crumbled. Quarantine sites disintegrated. Cities started to collapse.

In Enemies and Neighbors, Ian Black, who has spent over three decades covering events in the Middle East and is currently a fellow at the London School of Economics, offers a major new history of the Arab-Zionist conflict from 1917 to today. Laying the historical groundwork in the final decades of the Ottoman Era, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the Holy Land, Black draws on a wide range of sources - from declassified documents to oral histories to his own vivid on-the-ground reporting - to recreate the major milestones in the most polarizing conflict of the modern age from both sides.

John Quincy Adams was the last of his kind - a Puritan from the age of the Founders who despised party and compromise yet dedicated himself to politics and government. The son of John Adams, he was a brilliant ambassador and secretary of state, a frustrated president at a historic turning point in American politics, and a dedicated congressman who literally died in office - at the age of 80, in the House of Representatives, in the midst of an impassioned political debate.

McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. This is history on a grand scale, an audiobook about politics, war, and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, it is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

David M. Potter's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Impending Crisis is the definitive history of antebellum America. Potter's sweeping epic masterfully charts the chaotic forces that climaxed with the outbreak of the Civil War: westward expansion, the divisive issue of slavery, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's uprising, the ascension of Abraham Lincoln, and the drama of Southern secession.

Virus. Chaos. Survival. Alienated in a world where he doesn't fit in, Christian Black survives because he's different. Then the virus came, and made the world turn different, too. Now people are dying by the million. Food supplies are short. Riots are blazing through the streets, and Christian's only goal is to keep his family alive. But safety lies far from the city, and just getting out will be tougher than anyone knows.

Flavius Ferox, Briton turned Roman centurion, is charged with keeping Rome's empire intact. But from his base at Vindolanda on the northern frontier of Britannia, he feels enemies closing in on him from all sides. Ambitious leaders await the chance to carve out empires of their own while men nearer at hand speak in whispers of war and the destruction of Rome. And now new threats are reaching Ferox's ears. Stories about the boat-dwelling men of the night who have cursed the land and come ashore only to feast on men's flesh.

The extraordinary life of James Monroe: Soldier, senator, diplomat, and the last Founding Father to hold the presidency, a man who helped transform 13 colonies into a vibrant and mighty republic.