Madison Shelf
September 25 is THE LOCKED ROOM. That one is locked, so it is not on this week's ballot.
One vote per week. The title with the most votes moves to the front of the queue and takes the next open Friday. The rest keep their order.
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In 1831 a twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat crosses the Atlantic on a pretext, to study American prisons, and spends nine months trying to understand the strangest country on earth.
Scheduled October 2
No votes yet
A Lutheran pastor who could have waited out the war in New York goes home to Germany, joins a conspiracy to kill Hitler, and ends up in a cell writing letters about what a Christian owes his country.
Scheduled October 9
No votes yet
Athens, 399 BC. A seventy-year-old stonemason's son is charged with corrupting the young. His friends have bribed the guard, and all he has to do is walk out.
Scheduled October 16
1 vote
1804. Thirty-odd men, one teenage mother with a baby, and orders from President Jefferson to cross a continent nobody has mapped and come back alive.
Scheduled October 23
No votes yet
Scotland, 1561. A young Catholic queen comes home to a country that has just turned Protestant, and the fiercest preacher in Edinburgh will not stop saying so to her face.
Scheduled October 30
No votes yet
A young member of Parliament decides to end the British slave trade. It takes twenty years, it costs him his health, and he loses the vote again and again.
Scheduled November 6
No votes yet
1790. Two old friends, both of whom backed the American Revolution, split for good over the French one, and their argument becomes the one every free country has had since.
Scheduled November 13
No votes yet
Indiana, 1825. A famous industrialist buys an entire town to prove that a society without private property will produce perfect people. It lasts about two years.
Scheduled November 20
No votes yet
A king falls for a young woman who tends her brothers' vineyard, and she will not be won like the other brides at court.
Scheduled November 27
No votes yet