Depression Historical Fiction

Beatrice Carraway has dreams. Although she’s aged out of the childhood pageant circuit, she’s intent on carrying her talents all the way to the big screen—if only she can escape the poverty of West Dallas first. But as the Great Depression drags the working class further and further under, Beatrice struggles just to keep herself, her mother, and her younger sister afloat. After a string of failed auditions, she feels defeated. And then in walks Jack Turner.

In the heart of the Great Depression, Rancho Las Moras, like everywhere else in Texas, is gripped by the drought of the Dust Bowl, and resentment is building among white farmers against Mexican Americans. All around town, signs go up proclaiming “No Dogs or Mexicans” and “No Mexicans Allowed.” When Estrella organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos in their town of Monteseco, Texas, her whole family becomes a target of “repatriation” efforts to send Mexicans “back to Mexico”—whether they were ever Mexican citizens or not.

Bobby Lassiter has some important secrets - but it’s not as if anyone’s paying attention. It’s the middle of the Depression, and while Bobby’s mother and older sister knit all day to make money, Bobby explores the California desert around their home. That’s how Bobby finds Boots. He’s under their one half-dead tree, half dead himself. Right away he’s a secret, too - a secret to be fed and clothed and taken care of, and even more of a secret because of what he can do. Sometimes Boots is a man. Sometimes he’s (really, truly) a horse.

When Elizabeth Lavenza enrolled at Ingold as its first female medical student, she knew she wouldn't have an easy time. So when she stumbles across what appears to be a faulty Bio-Mechanical - one of the mechanized cadavers created to service the school - she jumps at the chance to fix it and get ahead in the program. Only this Bio-Mechanical isn't like the others. This one seems to have thoughts, feelings...and self-awareness. Soon Elizabeth realizes that it is Victor Frankenstein - a former student who died under mysterious circumstances.

Murder. One of the Allerdon sisters has been charged with a pre-meditated killing and taken to jail. It doesn't seem possible - but it's happening. What was supposed to be a typical summer is anything but for this seemingly ordinary family. Shortly after they arrive at their cozy family cottage on the river, Lander meets and is smitten with a handsome young man, and they begin to date. Miranda has a bad feeling about her sister's new boyfriend. And when the family must deal with an unimaginable nightmare, Miranda can't help feeling that the boyfriend has something to do with it.

Carolyn Meyer's historical fiction, such as Marie, Dancing, is popular for its unique perspectives. Loving Will Shakespeare is the tale of Agnes Anne Hathaway. There are few details known about the girl who - though eight years his senior - would eventually become wife to the Bard. Meyer's imagining of her story will inspire listeners to learn more.

When Travis returns home from Afghanistan, his parents are splitting up, his brother's stolen his girlfriend and car, and the nightmares of his best friend getting killed keep him completely spooked. But when he runs into Harper, a girl who despises him for rumors Travis started back in middle school, life actually starts looking up. And as he and Harper see more of each other, he falls deeper in love with her and begins to find his way through the family meltdown and the post-traumatic stress.

Colton, Montana, 1931: Struggling through the Great Depression, Maddy Aldridge agrees to run an illegal speakeasy in order to save her family's mercantile store. Keeping her dangerous new business partner at arm's length is no easy task, but her bravery faces its biggest test when Jack Rucker unexpectedly comes home. He left town seven years ago, breaking his promise - and her heart. Now Jack is willing to do anything to earn her forgiveness...anything except reveal one important truth: that he's a Prohibition agent on an undercover assignment.

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching autobiographical novel destined to become a classic American coming-of-age story.

Tall, slender Violet Mathers is growing up in the Great Depression, which could just as well define her state of mind. Abandoned by her mother as a child, mistreated by her father, and teased by her schoolmates ("Hey, Olive Oyl, where's Popeye?"), the lonely girl finds solace in artistic pursuits. Only when she's hired by the town's sole feminist to work the night shift in the local thread factory does Violet come into her name, and bloom.

Chloe Lorraine Kimball is born at the estate of Ivy Manor in the wee hours of the twentieth century. Becoming a young woman, and having a home filled with everything a young girl could desire, she still lacks the one thing she wants above all else: unconditional love from her parents. With the help of friends, Chloe strikes out on her own, determined to stand apart from her family. She embraces marriage and a career, but not even motherhood brings her what she longs for.

From the critically acclaimed author of Bloodroot, a gripping, wondrously evocative novel of a family in turmoil, set against the backdrop of real-life historical event—the story of three days in the summer of 1936, as a government-built dam is about to flood an Appalachian town, and a little girl goes missing.

Millie’s mind is racing and there seems to be no clear line between right and wrong. Either path leads to pain, and she’ll do anything to protect the ones she loves. So she decides to bury the truth and begin again, helping Bump launch a ranch in the wilds of Colorado. But just when she thinks she’s left her old Mississippi life behind, the facts surface in the most challenging way.

Mary Patterson grew up in South Carolina during the US Great Depression in the early 1900s. She sacrificed for her brothers and sisters her education and her youth. She cared for, tended to, fed, and helped provide for her siblings.

Enid Campbell, granddaughter of a duke, grew up surrounded by servants, wanting for nothing except love. But when her brother died in the First World War, a new heir was needed, and it was up to Enid to provide it. A troubled marriage and three children soon followed. Broken by postpartum depression, overwhelmed by motherhood and a loveless marriage, Enid made the shocking decision to abandon her family, thereby starting a chain of events—a kidnap, a court case, and selling her son to her sister for £500 - that reverberated through the generations.

Twelve-year-old Aaron Broom is protecting his father's car from repossession when he witnesses a jewelry store robbery gone wrong. To Aaron's shock, his father, a struggling salesman in the wrong place at the wrong time, is fingered as the prime suspect in the murder. Aaron - precocious, plucky, not a little naïve - must seek out gangsters, diamond dealers, bootleggers, and street kids in order to prove his father's innocence.

Through the long years of the Great Depression, Harper Flute watches with a child's clear eyes her family's struggle to survive in a hot and impoverished landscape. As life on the surface grows harsher, her brother Tin escapes ever deeper into a subterranean world of darkness and troubling secrets, until his memory becomes a myth barely whispered around the countryside.

Eighteen-year-old Constance is not interested in marriage or in being a “young lady”. But for a young woman coming of age in the early 1800s, that’s just about all that’s available to her. When her parents arrange her a marriage with a man more than twice her age, she’s powerless to resist. Stance couldn’t possibly find her newfound husband less appealing, but what can she do? Here’s what: Four months into the marriage, she can slip out of their bed in the middle of the night, and she can put on his clothes.

When the skies dried up, Gloria thought it was temporary. When the dust storms rolled in, she thought they would pass. But now the bank man’s come to take the family farm, and Pa’s decided to up and move to California in search of work. They’ll pick fruit, he says, until they can save up enough money to buy land of their own again.

This is the first installment of the action and adventure-packed historical fiction book series, The Boloney Trail Trilogy. The novel tells the remarkable true events of the Hornbeck family, who struggle to survive The Great Depression, only then to become key players in the birth of the feared Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.