Historical Fiction American Literature

In a time before history, in a harsh and beautiful land near the top of the world, womanhood comes cruelly and suddenly to beautiful, young Chagak. Surviving the brutal massacre of her tribe, she sets out across the icy waters off Ameria's northwest coast on an astonishing odyssey that will reveal to Chagak powerful secrets of the earth and sky...and the mysteries of love and loss.

When Amos Fortune was only 15 years old, he was captured by slave traders and brought to Massachusetts, where he was sold at auction. Although his freedom had been taken, Amos never lost his dignity and courage. For 45 years, Amos worked as a slave and dreamed of freedom. And, at age 60, he finally began to see those dreams come true.

New York Times best-selling author Catherine Anderson tells the gripping tale of a woman running from violence and toward a quiet future. Years have passed since Amy Masters escaped the brutal Texas plains to become a schoolteacher in Oregon. But now that Comanche warrior Swift Antelope has galloped back into her life, she'll have to explore her heart for the courage to trust again.

Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family’s past. Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it is Ravi - her grandmother’s former servant and trusted confidant - who reveals the resilience, struggles, secret love, and tragic fall of Jaya’s pioneering grandmother during the British occupation.

A harrowing journey into a milestone event of Canadian history: the use of Chinese coolies to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia in hazardous conditions. After the CPR is built in 1885, Yang Hok, a former coolie, treks along the railway to return his half-Chinese/half-Native son to the boy's mother, where he confronts the conflicts arising from road-building among the Chinese and Native peoples.

In 1850, as her mother lay dying and a priest stood by, Santa Fe Cameron was named by her Scottish father after the town in which she had just been born. At seven years old, she would also lose her father. Shortly thereafter, a Navajo shaman recognized psychic power in the orphan girl, and gave her a turquoise pendant as a keepsake. This turquoise, the Indian symbol of the spirit, will dominate her life - even after she leaves the simple beauty of her native New Mexico to search for happiness in the glamorous New York of the 1870s.

Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.

Leslie Marmon Silko's sublime Ceremony is almost universally considered one of the finest novels ever written by an American Indian. It is the poetic, dreamlike tale of Tayo, a mixed-blood Laguna Pueblo and veteran of World War II. Tormented by shell shock and haunted by memories of his cousin who died in the war, Tayo struggles on his impoverished reservation. After turning to alcohol to ease his pain, he strives for a better understanding of who he is.

The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity.

Karen Harper tells the tale of Consuelo Vanderbilt, her “Wedding of the Century” to the duke of Marlborough, and her quest to find meaning behind “the glitter and the gold”.

Nettie Boileau joins the Black Panthers’ Free Health Clinics in Oakland in 1968 and is soon swept up in an all-consuming love affair with Melvin Mosley, a defense captain of the Black Panther Party. When Nettie and Melvin head to Chicago to help launch the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, they find themselves targets of J. Edgar Hoover’s famous covert campaigns against civil rights leaders. As she learns more about the inner workings of the Panthers, Nettie discovers that fighting for social justice may not always mean equal justice for women.

William W. Johnstone and J. A. Johnstone present Book 2 in the Man From Waco series.

Cana, Massachusetts: a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language. As the bond between these two men grows more and more passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments which threaten to destroy them in this world and the next.

Two Feathers, a young Cherokee horse-diver on loan to Glendale Park Zoo from a Wild West show, is determined to find her own way in the world. Two’s closest friend at Glendale is Hank Crawford, who loves horses almost as much as she does. He is part of a high-achieving, land-owning Black family. Neither Two nor Hank fit easily into the highly segregated society of 1920s Nashville. When disaster strikes during one of Two’s shows, strange things start to happen at the park. Vestiges of the ancient past begin to surface, apparitions appear, and then the hippo falls ill.

Harper Fleming is done with being passed over. As a journalist for a Chicago newspaper, she’s been refused a shot at the sportswriter position she longs for. And her on again/off again relationship is going nowhere. Leaving both behind, she heads to Nashville, Tennessee, where she plans to interview her widowed grandfather, Bernard Fleming, for a book about his father Kelton Fleming’s time in the Negro Baseball Leagues. When Bernard reveals health issues within days of her arrival, Harper assumes responsibility for taking care of him.

A seaside village, an English country house, a family of wealthy eccentrics, a determined detective - all the ingredients are here for a cozy Agatha Christie-style whodunit. But wait. Edward "Mitch" Mitchell is no Hercule Poirot, and The Back Passage is no Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Mitch is a handsome, insatiable 22-year-old hunk who never lets a clue stand in the way of a steamy encounter, whether it's with the local constabulary, the house secretary, or his school chum and fellow athlete Boy Morgan, who becomes his Watson when they're not busy boffing each other.

Cerynise Kendall has been left destitute and in dire need following the death of her doting patron and protectress. A brilliant young artist tossed from her home with only the clothes on her back, Cerynise must now turn to a childhood companion for assistance—the dashing sea captain Beauregard Birmingham—and beg him to provide her with passage to the Carolinas. She seeks a new home and a new life across the waters, but all depends upon the kindness of a charming adventurer who was once the object of her youthful infatuation.

On the islands of Hans Lollik, Sigourney Rose was the only survivor when her family was massacred by the colonizers. When the childless king of the islands declares he will choose his successor from amongst eligible noble families, Sigourney is ready to exact her revenge. But someone is killing off the ruling families to clear a path to the throne. And as the bodies pile up and all eyes regard her with suspicion, Sigourney must find allies among her prey and the murderer among her peers...lest she become the next victim.

In this stunning work of historical fiction, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America--a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record. In 1527 the conquistador Pnfilo de Narvez sailed from the port of Sanlcar de Barrameda with a crew of 600 men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernn Corts.

Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations.