Canada Historical Fiction

As the witches roast chestnuts and melt lead to see their fate, a series of odd messengers land on their doorstep bearing invitations for a New Year's Eve masquerade hosted by a woman they've never met. Gossip, dreams and portents follow, leading the witches to question the woman's motives. Is she as benevolent as she seems or is she laying a trap? And so, as Gilded-Age New York prepares to ring in the new year, the witches don their finery and head for the ball, on the hunt for answers that might well be the end of them.

During the reign of Louis XV, impoverished but lovely teenage girls from all over France are sent to a discreet villa in the town of Versailles. Overseen by the King’s favourite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, they will be trained as potential courtesans for the King. When the time is right, each girl is smuggled into the palace of Versailles, with its legendary Hall of Mirrors. There they meet a mysterious but splendidly dressed man who they’re told is merely a Polish count, a cousin of the Queen.

During the golden age of the Roman Empire, five girls enjoy a modest childhood in their small Portuguese village. They race each other through lemon orchards and pick fresh fruit for the commander who overlooks his people from a large house on the hill. Though the girls are all raised by different families, there is one thing they know without a doubt: they are sisters.What they don’t know is that their simple existence is about to be irrevocably changed.

Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost twenty years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea returns to Nova Scotia for her long-promised marriage to the captain of the Morning Light. But she cannot abandon her orphaned young sister, so Kay too embarks on a life-changing voyage to the other side of the world.

When young James Dixon, a local jack-of-all-trades recently returned from the Battle of Waterloo, meets Dorothy Wordsworth, he quickly realizes he’s never met another woman anything like her. In her early 30s, Dorothy has already lived a wildly unconventional life. And as her famous brother William Wordsworth’s confidante and creative collaborator - considered by some in their circle to be the secret to his success as a poet - she has carved a seemingly idyllic existence for herself, alongside William and his wife, in England’s Lake District.

On a summer evening in 1952, young sisters Zina and Presendia run hand-in-hand into the wooded hills of upstate New York, fleeing their family farmhouse as it collapses into flames. Deep in the Adirondack mountains, they en­counter a gritty band of “settlers” occupying a dilapidated sportsmen’s complex nestled along a secluded mountain lake. The girls soon be­come inculcated in the spiritual training and rustic hedonism of the group, attracting the interest of its profane but visionary founder: a rough-necked charismatic named Peter.

On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons. An early illness has left one son with the intellect of a child; the other is destined for greatness but struggles between a keen mind that craves instruction and the pressures of a society that demands his prowess as a soldier.

The year is 1885, and what Clara Thomas desires most is a life beyond the ordinary. As one of Canada’s first female physicians, she yearns to start her own medical practice. Unfortunately, her parents view her goals as an idle preoccupation, encouraging her instead to settle down with a man of their choosing and give up her dreams. Fleeing this conventional life, Clara marries a handsome stranger in haste and journeys to British Columbia to start a life she wants to live. Unfortunately, she shortly discovers that her husband has a crippling addiction and a tendency towards laziness and anger.

Akemi’s desire for independence and aversion to marriage are unusual in her small village. A gift for drawing allows her to move to a rooming house in Tokyo where she studies medical illustration, finding satisfaction in the precision and purpose of her work. Sayako is the first roommate to pay Akemi attention, and they quickly become inseparable—Sayako drawn to Akemi’s humble origins, so distinct from her own insufferable, wealthy family; Akemi attracted to Sayako’s rebelliousness and her aspiration to be a painter.

In the midst of war, an ordinary miracle: an abandoned baby tenderly cared for by a young boy living on the streets of Saigon. The boy is Louis, the child of a long-gone American soldier. Louis calls the baby em Hồng, em meaning "little sister," or "beloved." Even though her cradle is nothing more than a cardboard box, em Hồng's life holds every possibility.

Paris, 1798. Hortense de Beauharnais is engrossed in her studies at a boarding school for aristocratic girls, most of whom suffered tragic losses during the tumultuous days of the French Revolution. She loves to play and compose music, read and paint, and daydream about Christophe, her brother's dashing fellow officer. But Hortense is not an ordinary girl. Her beautiful, charming mother, Josephine, has married Napoleon Bonaparte, soon to become the most powerful man in France, but viewed by Hortense as a coarse, unworthy successor to her elegant father.

1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire.

For fans of Jess Watler's Beautiful Ruins, Follow the Sun paints a portrait of the 1960s International Jet Set Era through the eyes of an aspiring singer-songwriter, desperate to forge her own path in music and in love. Listeners will delight in this sun-drenched trip through a world of fashion, film, and sixties pop culture, written with an emotional, heartbreaking voice reminiscent of Chanel Cleeton.

In 1721, when the most notorious pirates are either dead or on the run, Jimmy Kavanagh, who sailed with Blackbeard, decides to pull together a "Company of Gentleman of Fortune" for one last "Adventuring Cruise" that will set them all up for life. All begins well: the pirates sail across the Atlantic and sack Cape Coast Castle, looting it of chests of gold ill-gotten from the slave trade. But before Kavanagh can lead them on, he sickens, unleashing a drastic series of power struggles among the company.

Montreal, 1978. Newly promoted Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars attends the scene of 17 break-ins at an apartment complex. Nothing more than stolen toasters. Cinq-Mars suspects that the burglaries are a trial run for a bigger heist...until he discovers a body pinned to a wall with a machete in one apartment. When the former captain of Night Patrol, Armand Touton, receives a tip from an undercover informant in the Mafia, Cinq-Mars is ordered to intervene with a prisoner's release: the man must stay behind bars. He fails with the task and the immediate consequences are devastating.

Imogen is going to hurt Quentin, and she can't bear it. He has been her only friend and confidant during her time at medical school in Chicago, but he wants more than friendship and she doesn't. Unlike most well-brought-up young women in 1916, Imogen does not want to be a wife - she wants to become one of the country's first female psychiatrists. And she has just accepted a residency at the world-leading Phipps Clinic in Baltimore that will take her away from her best friend and toward that future.

It is the early 1950s in a restless Iran, a country powerful with oil wealth but unsettled by class and religious divides and by a larger world hungry for its resources. One night, a humble driver in the Iranian army is walking home through a neighbourhood in Tehran when he hears a small, pitiful cry. Curious, he searches for the source, and to his horror comes upon a newborn baby girl abandoned by the side of the road and encircled by ravenous dogs. He snatches up the child, and forever alters his own destiny and that of the little girl, whom he names Aria.

As a young man, Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. When he moves from his father's plantation in Savannah to New Orleans, he takes with him Annie, a tiny woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, who he is sure would not survive life on the plantation. She'll be much safer with him, away from his father's cruelty. And when he discovers Annie's pregnancy, already a few months along, he is all the more certain that he made the right decision. As the years pass, the divide between Moody's assumptions and Annie's reality widens ever further.

Tanzania, 1956. A Maasai woman gives birth to a child with albinism. The child is seen as a curse upon her tribe, and so begins Pó's tumultuous story. As Pó navigates the world, she must claim her life in the face of violence and ostracism. Further south, in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique, Ezequiel struggles for acceptance, too. Adopted by missionaries, he is not recognized by his Portuguese father's community or by his Makonde mother's tribe. When civil war erupts, he must choose whom to fight for and whom to leave behind.

Cette fresque familiale canadienne fut l'un des plus grands succès de la littérature nord-américaine, dès la parution en 1927 du premier des seize romans, aussi célèbre que Autant en emporte le vent de Margaret Mitchell. En 1863, durant la guerre de Sécession, la famille Whiteoak, qui s'est agrandie avec la naissance de Philippe, invite à Jalna Lucy et Curtis Sinclair, sudistes et esclavagistes, qui vont secrètement organiser depuis le Canada, un front de résistance. De se trouver mêlée peu ou prou aux conspirations de Curtis enchante Adeline.