Historical Fiction California

Juliet must bear the burden of caring for her younger sisters, but that doesn't thwart her desire to run away to be a star on the stage. Taking her sisters, she heads to New York, where her journey to stardom is swift, but the price of fame is dear.

Bound for Gold continues New York Times bestselling author William Martin’s epic of American history with the further adventures of Boston rare-book dealer Peter Fallon and his girlfriend, Evangeline Carrington. They are headed to California, where their search for a lost journal takes them into the history of Gold Rush. The journal follows young James Spencer, of the Sagamore Mining Company, on a spectacular journey from staid Boston, up the Sacramento River to the Mother Lode.

Emmeline Amity Callahan is a feisty charmer with a needy heart. Emmeline's an ugly duckling. At least that's what she thinks, that is until she receives a gift that leads her to California's Big Valley where she makes a surprising discovery.

Kai Ting is the only American-born son of a Shanghai family that fled China during Mao’s revolution. Growing up in a San Francisco multicultural, low-income neighborhood, Kai is caught between two worlds - embracing neither the Chinese nor the American way of life. After his mother’s death, Kai is suddenly plunged into American culture by his stepmother, who tries to erase every vestige of China from the household.

The Mexican American War has ended, but in a California divided between two nations, Anglo squatters continue to antagonize citizens of Mexican descent by making claims on their land. Against this charged backdrop, the lives of the Alamar family - the rightful owners of a San Diego ranch - become politically, economically, and romantically entwined with a family of New England settlers, the Darrells. Inspired by experiences in her own life, Ruiz de Burton insightfully captured a troubling time in American history - a period of intense corruption, greed, racism, and classism.

1958. Kate Morgan is looking for an escape, and she gets her chance by honoring a cryptic plea from her grandfather: Find the beautiful stranger. The search takes her to Hotel del Coronado, the beachfront landmark on the Southern California coast where filming is underway on the movie Some Like It Hot. For a movie lover like Kate, it’s a fantasy come true. So is the offer of a position at the glamorous hotel. But as sure as she is that Coronado is her future, Kate discovers it’s also where the ghosts of the past have come to stay.

Pasadena, David Ebershoff's sweeping, richly imagined novel, is set against the backdrop of Southern California during the first half of the twentieth century and charts its rapid transformation from frontier to suburb.

A wonderful period piece, set in the time of the Great Depression. This audiobook follows two youths, as they struggle to cross the now-broken country to find their estranged family in rural California. In the process, they discover their own strengths and inevitable weaknesses. In the end, there are many lessons of life, survival, and respect for their fellow brethren.

Termed the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the southwestern Indians and the first protest novel of California, Ramona is the story of 3 cultures - Indian, Mexican, and Anglo - locked in combat. The upheaval and injustice are humanized through the romance of a beautiful half-Indian orphan who grow up as the ward of Señora Moreno in privileged surroundings, then falls in love with an Indian and joins him in a life of poverty and tragedy. The Ramona Pageant in Hemet, California, based on this romance, has played each year since 1923, reenacting the transition period between Mexican traditions and the new U.S. and state governments.

Calafia is a historical fiction about California’s colonization filled with mystery, suspense, and political saga. Listen to this untold story of the Spanish expedition to settle and civilize the frontier known as Alta California. This fascinating account chronicles the suspenseful clashes of the political architects who planned the expedition. The explorers' grueling journey to the unsettled land and the Indians' resistance to their arrival challenging their culture on the early American western frontier.

Her sister gone, her roommates soon to follow, Leora Mitchell must now face the fact that she, along with the others, are mail-order brides. For years, her life revolved around Brown’s Textile Mill, her sister Lottie, and their friends. Now, as mail-order brides, they’d be scattered across the country, ready to start a new life. The only problem was Leora had no idea what that life looked like, nor did she have any idea who she was without the familiar faces she loved so much.

Oakland, California, 1983: a city churning with violent crime and racial conflict. Officer Hanson, a Vietnam veteran, has abandoned academia for the life-and-death clarity of police work, a way to live with the demons that followed him home from the war. But Hanson knows that justice requires more than simply enforcing the penal code. He believes in becoming a part of the community he serves - which is why, unlike most officers, he chooses to live in the same town where he works. This strategy serves him well...to a point. He forges a precarious friendship with the drug king of East Oakland.

Virginia Reed survived the Donner Party Werewolves only to find herself in a life and death struggle with a creature out of nightmares. When gold is discovered, California becomes flooded with miners who push Indian tribes from their lands, or kill them if they refuse to leave. But there is a creature in the mountains that won't be so easily removed, who reacts to the invasion of his territory by slaying everyone who trespasses.

She is all blond, beautiful motion; tanned and lithe, she represents freedom, youth, and a playful sexuality that is at once seductive and dangerous to a man's soul. The California girl became a national fantasy in the Sixties, a myth that embodied every daydream, set to the rhythm of a Beach Boys anthem. The story is told in the first person by David Levine, a Jewish New Yorker. In 1965, at the beginning of his senior year in high school, he moves with his family to the San Fernando Valley in Southern California.

Frank Norris, accused of theft and unable to prove his innocence, leaves for excitement and adventure in the California gold fields of 1850s America. He sails the Atlantic, braves a storm while working as a barge man on the Mississippi, survives an Indian attack while crossing the plains with a caravan, strikes it rich in the California gold mines, and is finally able to clear his name and return to England to claim his rightful inheritance.

Christina Swan, the local schoolteacher, is fired when two overzealous suitors brawl at her school. Angry at the unfair treatment, she seizes the opportunity to manage a fledgling ranch for her uncle and runs into the obstinate Kern Yager, a neighboring landholder. As tempers flare between them, the two discover a common enemy in a land development plan that will swallow their ranches. They also discover the faith to meet their problems with God's support.

On her 10th birthday, Leah receives a surprise gift from glamorous Aunt Olivia, Mama's only sister, who lives in Los Angeles. It is a red rose box. Not many people in 1958 Louisiana have seen such a beautiful traveling case, covered with red roses, filled with jewelry, silk bedclothes, expensive soaps...and train tickets to California.

Duncan, Mary, and her sister are pursued by the zealot John Kimball, who believes God has directed him to take the sisters as his wives. Eventually, they find refuge in New Lovelock, Nevada. With the hope that Kimball has given up his chase, the sisters settle in and make a fresh start.

When a bishop is killed inside the Vatican by someone after an ancient artifact, a team is assembled to try to find the artifact and killer before more blood is spilled. In the process, an absent-minded professor and his archaeologist friend get swept up in what could very well be a wild goose chase - but nothing is as it appears. When the professor goes missing, his grandson and his student must pick up the trail to find the professor before it's too late.

For three-years, Jeb Benjamin and Zach Daughtry dreamed of traveling to California to gain their fortune, once released from Camp Douglas, an infamous Union POW hellhole. When the Confederate veterans reach Jeb’s sisters ranch in the Rio Grande valley, they find it in flames, his sister’s family dead and the ranch’s cattle stolen. Death and destruction haunt the veterans. A border war flares with General Juan Cortiña’s irregulars. Jeb learns Juan’s younger brother, Miguel, has raided their ranch, kidnapping his 14-year-old niece.