Historical Fiction Girl

Early in the Great War, men left Britain’s factories in droves to enlist. Struggling to keep up production, arsenals hired women to build the weapons the military urgently needed. “Be the Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun,” the recruitment posters beckoned. Thousands of women—cooks, maids, shopgirls, and housewives—answered their nation’s call. These “munitionettes” worked grueling shifts often seven days a week, handling TNT and other explosives with little protective gear.

The fates of two women, one American, one Japanese, become entwined in this sweeping novel of 19th century Japan on the cusp of radical change and Westernization. The Japanese tea ceremony, steeped in ritual, is at the heart of this story of an American girl adopted by Kyoto's most important tea master and raised as attendant and surrogate younger sister to his privileged daughter, Yukako.

Thirteen-year-old Lisa has escaped from Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport. She arrives in London unable to speak a word of English, her few belongings crammed into a small suitcase. Among them is one precious photograph of the family she has left behind. Lonely and homesick, she is adopted by a childless couple. But when the Blitz blows her new home apart, she wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who she is or where she came from. The authorities give her a new name and dispatch her to a children's home. With the war raging around her, what will become of Lisa now?

Twelve-year-old Ji-li Jiang has brains, friends, and a bright future. Then Mao Zedong launches China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. Soon school is suspended and students are getting caught up in the fervor of Mao’s extreme politics. When Ji-li’s family is accused of capitalist crimes, all of her beautiful dreams burst like soap bubbles. Because Ji-li’s grandfather was a landlord, her family is harassed and humiliated. Their home is searched, and they live in constant fear. Nonetheless, Ji-li remains loyal to her beloved Chairman Mao....

Lorna Barnett is tired of playing the role of "good girl" that her mother has always lived, and that high society prizes. It isn't until she meets Jens Harken that she realizes she yearns to be cherished for herself. Although Jens is a servant, his strength and intelligence put all the society men she's met to shame.

Growing up in New York City in the 1910s, Luella and Effie Tildon realize that even as wealthy young women, their freedoms come with limits. But when the sisters discover a shocking secret about their father, Luella, the brazen elder sister, becomes emboldened to do as she pleases. Her rebellion comes with consequences, and one morning Luella is mysteriously gone.

Liverpool, 1935: Raised in a strict Catholic family, Viv Byrne knows what’s expected of her: marry a Catholic man from her working-class neighborhood and have his children. However, when she finds herself pregnant after a fling with Joshua Levinson, a Jewish man with dreams of becoming a famous jazz musician, Viv knows that a swift wedding is the only answer. Her only solace is that marrying Joshua will mean escaping her strict mother’s scrutiny. But when Joshua makes a life-changing choice on their wedding day, Viv is forced once again into the arms of her disapproving family.

1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has spent her life secure in the certainty of a bright, happy future - until one night of passion has more catastrophic consequences than she ever could have anticipated. Labelled a moral defective and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act, she is forced to endure years of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those who are supposed to care for her.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine: a prize of battle. Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history.

England, 1944. On a classified Navy base situated atop the cliffs of Dover, telegraph operator Katie Kingston toils day and night intercepting and translating enemy transmissions in Morse Code, hunting for the next piece of information that will give Britain the edge in the ongoing war. But as the entire base quietly prepares for Britain’s most daring operation yet, Katie has more at stake than her fellow telegraphists. Because among the allied forces due to land on the shores of Normandy in Operation Overlord is Special Forces Lt. Ciaran McElroy, an Irishman who has stolen her heart.

When Ned Giles is orphaned as a teenager, he heads West, hoping to leave his troubles behind by joining the 1932 Great Apache Expedition on their search for the young son of a wealthy Mexican landowner who was kidnapped by wild Apaches. But the expedition's goal becomes compromised when they encounter a wild Apache girl in a Mexican jail cell, victim of a Mexican massacre of her tribe that has left her orphaned and unwilling to eat or speak.

In her inimitable style–full of wit, wisdom, gossip, and romance–Julia Quinn introduces the charismatic Rokesby brothers as they maneuver through the scrutiny of London’s high society and secure matches worthy of their station–and their hearts. Adored by millions of fans worldwide, these timeless stories will transport you to a world of propriety, passion, and mischief—and love.

Kathryn Miller Haines’ debut Iris Anderson mystery received considerable buzz for its stellar 15-year-old heroine and engrossing 1940s period details. With her father back from the war, Iris is eager to help him with his private eye business—especially since his mobility is limited thanks to a missing leg. Now with a case involving a boy she knows from school to investigate, Iris leaps into action and soon finds herself in the middle of a harrowing adventure.

In Agatha H and the Siege of Mechanicsburg, Agatha Heterodyne, the last of the Heterodyne family, has returned to her family's hereditary town with the might of the Wulfenbach Empire hot on her heels. The only thing holding off an outright attack is Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, the heir to the Empire, who has joined Agatha and her friends inside the great artificially intelligent fortress of Castle Heterodyne. Now they must race to repair the mechanisms that once allowed the Castle to defend Mechanicsburg, before the rest of Europa shows up to take revenge....

Wynsdown, 1949. In the small Somerset village of Wynsdown, Charlotte Shepherd is happily married and now feels settled in her adopted home after arriving from Germany on the Kindertransport as a child during the war. Meanwhile, the squire's fighter-pilot son, Felix, has returned to the village with a fiancée in tow. Daphne is beautiful and charming...and is harboring secrets. After meeting during the war, Felix knows some of Daphne's past, but she has worked hard to conceal what could unravel her carefully built life.

Emma Bau, 19, has been married only three weeks when Nazi tanks thunder into her native Poland. Within days, Emma’s husband, Jacob, is forced to disappear underground, leaving her imprisoned within the city’s decrepit Jewish ghetto. But then, in the dead of night, the resistance smuggles her out. Taken to Krakow to live with Jacob’s Catholic aunt Krysia, Emma takes on a new identity as Anna Lipowski, a gentile. Emma’s already precarious situation is complicated by her introduction to Kommandant Richwalder, a high-ranking Nazi official who hires her to work as his assistant.

France, 1916: Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard’s portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. As the officer’s dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie will risk everything - her family, her reputation, and her life - to see her husband again.

It is 1914, and the world has been on the brink of war so often many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime to see the splendors of Russia. But when Austria declares war on Serbia, Eliza escapes back to America, while Sofya and her family flee to their country estate. In need of domestic help, they hire the local fortune-teller’s daughter, Varinka, unknowingly bringing intense danger into their household.

With her brother, Thomas, injured on the battlefront in the colonies, orphaned Cecilia Harcourt has two unbearable choices: move in with a maiden aunt or marry a scheming cousin. Instead she chooses option three and travels across the Atlantic, determined to nurse her brother back to health. But after a week of searching, she finds not her brother but his best friend, the handsome officer Edward Rokesby.

Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, 21-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, they couldn’t be more different, but both are beautiful, modern, and carefree...until the day their father tells them he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides.