Historical Fiction Classics

Cybils Award-winning author Laura Amy Schlitz crafts a masterful interpretation of one of the Grimm Brothers' most engrossing fairy tales. A cold and hungry soldier is returning from war. He has no money, so he makes a pact with the devil. If he can wear a bearskin for seven years, he will always have plenty of gold. But if he tells anyone of the pact, he will lose his soul.

Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreet affair that her cold, ambitious husband - and Russian high society - would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Anna and Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman Konstantine Levin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life - a mirror of Tolstoy’s own spiritual crisis - Konstantine is haunted by thoughts of suicide.

Now Darcy and Elizabeth are returning to Hertfordshire for their wedding and Elizabeth worries there is still one trial to be faced - Mrs. Bennet. Her mother refuses to prepare the simple, elegant affair the couple wishes for their wedding day. Will it be the day of their dreams or a disaster?

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last. This is destined to be remembered as one of the most-recognized first sentences in literature - along with "Call me Ishmael." And Una Spenser, the transcendent hero at the center of Ahab's Wife may well become every bit as memorable as Ahab. Inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick, Sena Jeter Naslund has created an entirely new universe - an epic-scale, enthralling, and compelling saga, spanning a full, rich, eventful, and dramatic life. In the "soprano voice" whose absence critics lamented in Moby Dick - the strong, intelligent voice of a woman whose life is dominated by the sea - Naslund tells many stories.

Martin Luther's Bondage of the Will (1525) is a response to Desiderius Erasmus's "Diatribe on Free Will.’ The work is considered as one of the great masterpieces of the Reformation. Luther writes powerfully about man's depravity and God's sovereignty in his direct style, which combines spirituality and humor. For Luther, the crucial issue was the ability of free will, and the extent to which it is subject to God's sovereignty.

"Znachor" to wzruszajaca historia chirurga, profesora Rafala Wilczura, który zrozpaczony odejsciem zony i córeczki szuka ukojenia w alkoholu. Bedac kompletnie pijanym, zostaje okradziony i pobity, w wyniku czego traci pamiec. Po latach wlóczegostwa kradnie dokumenty i pod nazwiskiem Antoniego Kosiby znajduje schronienie u mlynarza. Zyskuje slawe znachora po udanej operacji. Miejscowy lekarz, zazdrosny o jego sukcesy, grozi Kosibie sadem za wykonywanie praktyki lekarskiej bez zezwolenia.

Set in Venice at the close of World War II, Across the River and into the Trees is the bittersweet story of a middle-aged American colonel, scarred by war and in failing health, who finds love with a young Italian countess at the very moment when his life is becoming a physical hardship to him.

An “extraordinary” (New York Review of Books) novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of The Book of Science and Antiquities and The Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden — Schindler’s Jews — to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.

The Brothers Karamazov is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and is generally considered the culmination of his life's work. Published in November 1880, Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing the novel set in 19th-century Russia. Fydor Karamazov, a mean and disreputable landowner, has three sons, Dmitry, a profligate army officer; Ivan, a writer with revolutionary ideas; and Alexey, a religious novice.

It is a truth universally accepted that well-bred members of society are not beleaguered with magic. For Elsabeth Dover and her sisters, that truth means living in a perpetual state of caution, never using their sorcerous gifts in public. Elsabeth chafes under the stricture, although not enough to risk the possibility of good marriages for her sisters...until she meets handsome, arrogant Fitzgerald Archer

The Provincial Lady finds herself in London, looking for voluntary work to support the war effort, which proves an unexpectedly difficult thing to achieve. Her interactions with a varied host of companions, also caught up in a strange frenzy, reflect so clearly the mood and tension of the time, yet the account is witty, apposite - and so very English, with the stiff upper lip underpinning it all.

All alone in Singapore, proper Miss Primrose Tunstell must steal helium to save her airship, the Spotted Custard, in a scheme involving a lovesick werecat and a fake fish tail. When she uncovers rumors of a new kind of vampire, Prim and the Custard crew embark on a mission to Peru. There, they encounter airship pirates and strange atmospheric phenomena, and are mistaken for representatives of the Spanish Inquisition. Forced into extreme subterfuge (and some rather ridiculous outfits) Prim must also answer three of life's most challenging questions.

A collection of Smith's apace adventure stories featuring Captain Volmar, including the never before published novella, "Red World of Polaris."

At the outbreak of World War I, Joey, young Albert's beloved horse, is sold to the cavalry and shipped to France. He's soon caught up in enemy fire, and fate takes him on an extraordinary odyssey, serving on both sides before finding himself alone in no man's land. But Albert cannot forget Joey and, still not old enough to enlist, he embarks on a treacherous mission to the trenches to find him and bring him home.

When an invading army crosses the Mercerian border, the only thing standing between victory and defeat is an heir to the crown with no battle experience. Enter Dame Beverly Fitzwilliam, who has trained for this moment since she first held a sword. From her relentless pursuit of knighthood to the day she single-handedly saves the king's life and earns her spurs, she has searched for someone worthy of her fealty.

After attacking Devil's Reef in 1928, the US government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god, Cthulhu. Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps, and they emerged without a past or a future. The government that stole Aphra's life now needs her help. FBI agent Ron Spector believes that communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets.

Essentially, the story is about Russia before and after the October Revolution of 1917. There are many characters who float into and out of the story, the main one being Yuri Zhivago. As the tale unwinds, we encounter the decadence of pre-war Czarist Russia, the harrowing experience of WWI, and the sudden exhilaration of revolution. But exhilaration gives way to the horror of civil war and Bolshevik terror.

Peter Gardner, a white scientist from England, is exiled after performing dangerous experiments on patients. He flees with his beautiful young daughter, Virginia, to the Caribbean, where he raises her in isolation among few people - all natives. One of those natives is Carlos, a young boy of mixed race. Virginia and Carlos develop a forbidden friendship, which later blooms into a love that binds them above all cultural, racial, and paternal resistance. This is a touching love story and a haunting coming-of-age tale.

Europe, 1940. As war rages across the continent, America watches anxiously from the sidelines. And President Franklin Roosevelt has been keeping an even closer eye on developments in the Third Reich. At the president’s personal request, Lanny Budd gained the confidence of the Nazi high command and began transmitting valuable information back to the White House. Espionage is a dangerous game, however, and Presidential Agent 103 soon finds himself a target of the French Resistance fighters he is attempting to assist.

Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: the Army is their heart and blood...and, possibly, their death.