Canada Historical Fiction

Heartbreaking and wise, Rush Home Road tells the life story of Adelaide Shadd, who finds redemption in old age, and Sharla, a five-year-old mixed race girl abandoned to Addy’s care by her white mother. Born in the first decade of the 20th century in Rusholme (inspired by the real town of Buxton), in southwestern Ontario, an all-black community settled by fugitive slaves, Addy Shadd is raped as a teenager and forced to flee the family home. She makes her way on foot to Detroit.

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.

It's 1922 at Far Cry Cannery, a quarter-mile of boardwalk and wooden buildings strung along the rocks of Rivers Inlet on the northwest coast of British Columbia. The time has come for Anders Viken, storekeeper and honorary uncle to the recently orphaned Kit, to give an account of his secret self—from his first home in Norway, another land of islands and fjords, to his escape from his family's loving grip, to his wide-open years of rough living and impossible love.

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.

For socialite Caroline Kimball, travel has become an escape—a way to run from her adult responsibilities while hiding her musical ambitions from her disapproving mother. When she meets handsome magazine photographer Jack “Tex” Fairchild beside a hotel pool in Acapulco, everything changes. His encouragement shows her she could have a life beyond that of a beautiful, bored heiress, and he convinces her that maybe her childish daydreams aren’t so impossible after all.

When the sophisticated Innes Kent turns up on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realizes she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. Elina struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with her sense of herself as an artist, and Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood that don’t tally with his parents’ version of events.

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.

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.

Swept up in a whirlwind courtship, Katja and Wasyl begin life anew in a Ukrainian settlement of Western Canada. The dusty Canadian prairies promise hope and independence, but when war breaks out between the old world and the new, their newfound stability is shattered. Rumors of the internment of Ukrainian-Canadians haunt the new settlers. Would the country they love betray them like this? An incident throws the couple and their young children into turmoil, and Katja faces the prospect of enduring a Canadian winter without Wasyl by her side.

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.

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.

Louis Riel arrives at Batoche in 1884 to help the Métis fight for their lands and discovers that the rebellious outsider Josette Lavoie is a granddaughter of the famous chief Big Bear, whom he needs as an ally. But Josette learns of Riel’s hidden agenda—to establish a separate state with his new church at its head—and refuses to help him. Only when the great Gabriel Dumont promises her that he will not let Riel fail does she agree to join the cause.

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.

1944: Daniel, a soldier, legendary among the Norwegians fighting the advance of Bolshevism on the Russian front, is killed. Two years later, a wounded soldier wakes up in a Vienna hospital. He becomes involved with a young nurse, the consequences of which will ripple forward to the turn of the next century. 1999: Harry Hole, alone again after having caused an embarrassment in the line of duty, has been promoted to inspector and has surveillance duties. He is assigned the task of monitoring neo-Nazi activities; fairly mundane until a report of a rare gun being fired sparks his interest.

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.

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.

January, 1980. At the height of the Cold War, Petra Kelly inspires hundreds of thousands to take to the streets to protest the placement of nuclear missiles on West German soil - including a NATO general named Emil Gerhardt, who shocks the establishment by converting to the cause. Petra and her general not only vault to fame as the stars of the Green Party, but they also fall in love. Then Manfred Schwartz, an ex-lover, urges Petra to draw back the curtain on Emil's war record, and they enter a world both complicated and threatening.

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.

Canadian Jim Armstrong married in haste during the Second World War after a one-night stand. When his wife and their small son join him in Canada, it's four years since they've seen each other. War bride Joan discovers Jim has no intention of the family returning to England. She struggles to adapt to life on a remote farm in Ontario, far from her family and cold-shouldered by Jim's mother. Jim, haunted by his wartime experiences in Italy, Iingering feelings for a former lover, and the demands of the farm, begins to doubt his love for Joan.

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.