Historical Fiction American Literature

It is 1685 and England is on the brink of a renewed civil war. King Charles II has died without an heir and his brother James is to take the throne. But the people are bitterly divided, and many do not welcome the new king or his young queen. Ned Ferryman cannot persuade his sister, Alinor, that he is right to return from America with his Pokanoket servant, Rowan, to join the rebel army. Instead, Alinor and her daughter Alys, have been coaxed by the manipulative Livia to save the queen from the coming siege. The rewards are life-changing.

Business lately has been deadly for Ike Kelly. Recent unexpected gunplay has left his agency to a single operative. John Henry Cole is that operative. Kelly has received a letter from former lover Lydia Winslow, who operates an escort service in the new mining camp of Deadwood in Dakota Territory. "Three young women have been murdered since they arrived in camp." It is obviously a dangerous assignment, and Cole is advised that he must take every precaution - as if he needed such advice.

The fateful first meeting of Enza and Ciro takes place amid the Italian Alps at the turn of the last century. Still teenagers, they are separated when Ciro is banished from his village and sent to hide in New York's Little Italy, apprenticed to a shoemaker, leaving a bereft Enza behind. But when her own family faces disaster, she, too, is forced to emigrate to America. Though destiny will reunite the star-crossed lovers, it will, just as abruptly, separate them once again - sending Ciro off to serve in World War I, while Enza is drawn into the glamorous world of the opera.

In 1930s Mississippi, Mary Johnson hates the oppressive heat, working on her family farm, and having to attend her minister father's church several times a week. But she loves Mason Carter, her musician boyfriend. Both fantasize about living the high life up north in the big city. When William Bevers, a wealthy old preacher, comes to court her, he promises a life of luxury along with money and status for her family. Mary wants nothing to do with him, but her parents decide for her. Determined to avoid a forced marriage, Mary elopes with Mason to the bright lights of Chicago.

As recovery from World War II begins, expatriate American NoraTours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing 16-year-old daughter. There she unexpectedly meets up with an oldacquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emergedfrom the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts tosurvive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter's life. Lee suffersfrom what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.

Fast-paced and suspenseful, The Last of the Mohicans follows an intrepid group of frontiersmen and Native Americans as they navigate the rugged terrain of both the landscape and their racial differences. Together they strive to deliver Colonel Munro’s two daughters to safety at Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War. Widely considered the first “Great American Novel”, James Fenimore Cooper’s classic encapsulates the violence and beauty, tragedy and heroism at the heart of the American frontier, set against the stunning backdrop of the northern New York wilderness.

Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.

For Ilka Weissnix, everything is new. Having recently arrived in the United States, she is determined to escape the immigrant communities of New York and boards a train headed west to discover "the real America". She finds Carter Bayoux "sitting on a stool in a bar in the desert, across from the railroad."

Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves is an origin story in the true American tradition. Before Bass Reeves could stake his claim as the most successful nineteenth-century American lawman, arresting more outlaws than any other deputy during his thirty-two-year career as a deputy US marshal in some of the most dangerous regions of the Wild West, he was a slave. After a childhood picking cotton, Reeves became an expert marksman under his master's tutelage, winning shooting contests throughout the region. His skill had serious implications, however, as the Civil War broke out.

Willow Dupré never thought she would have to marry, but with her father's unexpected retirement from running the prosperous Dupré sugar refinery, she is forced into a different future. The shareholders are unwilling to allow a female to take over the company without a man at her side, so her parents devise a plan - find Willow a spokesman king in order for her to become queen of the business empire.

Set in 1950s New Orleans, Little Black Girl Lost is a powerful tale filled with sex, greed, and the explosive political and social climates of an America long gone. Fifteen-year-old beauty Johnnie Wise lives her life devoted to God. But her innocence is shattered when her mother, who has been a prostitute for years, sells Johnnie's body to lecherous insurance man Earl Shamus.

As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia, their headstrong eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride.

Teenage beauty Johnnie Wise has seen her share of hardship. Sold into prostitution at an early age, she is an accessory to a murder that sparks terrible race riots. Her boyfriend, Lucas, wants to give her a better life, but Johnnie has a powerful effect on men, and gangster Napoleon Bentley will stop at nothing to have her.

To save her family from financial ruin, Miss Poppy Garrison accepts an unusual proposition to participate in the New York social season in exchange for her grandmother settling a family loan that has unexpectedly come due. Ill equipped to handle the intricacies of mingling within the New York Four Hundred, Poppy becomes embroiled in one hilarious fiasco after another, doomed to suffer a grand societal failure instead of being deemed the diamond of the first water her grandmother longs for her to become.

It's been a lifetime (and three seasons) in the making, but Jane Gloriana Villanueva is finally ready to make her much-anticipated literary debut! Snow Falling is a sweeping historical romance set in 1902 Miami - a time of railroad tycoons, hotel booms, and exciting expansion for the Magic City.

This fictional recreation of the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants' hearts and minds.

On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her house, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans, they have been reclassified virtually overnight as enemy aliens, and they are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.

Set 5,000 years ago and ranging through what is now Montana, Wyoming, northern Colorado, and Utah, People of the Earth follows the migration of the Uto-Aztecan people south out of Canada. It is the unforgettable tale of a woman torn between two peoples and two dreams, of the two men who love her and the third who must have her, and of the vision given to the peoples long ago by the spirit of the wolf.

At the end of the 19th century, three revolutionary women fight for freedom in New York Times best-selling author Chanel Cleeton's captivating new novel inspired by real-life events and the true story of a legendary Cuban woman - Evangelina Cisneros - who changed the course of history. A feud rages in Gilded Age New York City between newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.