Historical Fiction United States

In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a "road bum", an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois, and died fighting with guerillas in Central America.

The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd’s invitation to join him as a servant for a white family, and she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern plantation household.

Jack Duncan is a high school senior whose dream is to play baseball in college and beyond - as far away from Delano as possible. He longs to escape the political turmoil surrounding the labor struggles of the striking fieldworkers that infests his small ag town. Ever since his father, a grape grower, died under suspicious circumstances 10 years earlier, he's had to be the sole emotional support of his mother.

Südchina, 1923. Eine arrangierte Ehe mit einem Witwer in Kalifornien ist für die junge Mei Ling die einzige Chance, bitterer Armut zu entkommen. Unter dem Namen seiner ersten Frau tritt sie die strapaziöse und oft demütigende Seereise an. Liebevoll kümmert sie sich dabei um das kleine Waisenmädchen Shiya. Doch endlich im chinesischen Viertel von San Francisco angekommen, erlebt Mei Ling eine herbe Enttäuschung.

Colman Harpe works for the C&O in the Appalachian rail town of Thurmond, West Virginia, but he'd rather be a preacher and lead his own congregation. When a member of the rival McLean clan guns down his cousin and the clan matriarch, Serepta McLean, taunts the Harpes by coming to a tent revival in their territory, Colman chooses peace over seeking revenge with the rest of his family. Colman, known for an unnaturally keen sense of hearing, is shocked when he hears God tell him to preach to the McLeans.

It is October 1519 - and the Mexican empire is on the brink. Hernán Cortés leads an army of Spaniards and their native allies to Moctezoma’s capital. Moctezoma believes the only way to save his empire is to heed the God of War and sacrifice Flower, a beautiful woman warrior, in exchange for protection from the invaders. But a different faction - the resistance - wants to overthrow Moctezoma and go to war against the invaders. The resistance has other plans for Flower - if they can only help her escape before Moctezoma offers her as a sacrifice.

Nineteen-twenties Mexico and the American Southwest hold many dangers, as the last Apache strongholds persist against the foreign invaders. Hard-as-nails Confederate serviceman Jock MacNeil receives an unexpected invitation to guide runaways from a reservation to a stronghold in Sierra Madre. Facing both Mexican and American authorities, and the Apache Wars raging around them, Jock witnesses first-hand the terrors of war, and his own transformation from a man of faith to Apache spirituality.

An emotionally gripping, brutally invasive tale of four young Native Americans wrongly committed to our nation's only Indian insane asylum during the 1920s. This powerful narrative is unpauseable, unforgettable, and an unbelievable combination of drama, conflict, and romance. Gathered from true events in the records of the South Dakota State Archives, this long hidden world of heartbreak takes you to the darkest depths of the human spirit and promises to touch your very soul.

Based on events in the life of the author's wife's grandmother, Gum Moon (Cantonese for "Gold Door" or "Golden Gate") is the remarkable coming of age story of a Chinese American girl, Mei Chun Lai, who is sold in 1898 at the age of three to a cruel brothel keeper. A sympathetic prostitute befriends Chun, but during a plague quarantine, Chun is thrust into a bewildering new world when she is rescued and placed in a home for abused and trafficked girls. The home is destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, but Chun (aka "Maud") survives.

During the Great Depression, the U.S. government illegally deported more than a million Mexican-American citizens to make room on the welfare rolls and alleviate unemployment for white Americans. Carlos Moreno is a young man who has known only hardship and poverty, chasing rumors of work across Texas during the 1920s. Pursued by a renegade Texas ranger who thinks he holds the key to a secret, Carlos takes refuge in “Little Mexico,” Houston’s colorful, boisterous barrio. He picks the worst possible time to fall in love.

Judith Kratt inherited all the Kratt family had to offer - the pie safe, the copper clock, the murder that no one talks about - and she knows in her old bones that it's time to make an inventory of her household and its valuables. But she finds that cataloging the family belongings - as well as their misfortunes - won't contain her family's secrets, not when her wayward sister suddenly returns, determined to expose skeletons that the Kratts had hoped to take to their grave.

By virtue of a broken treaty in 1838, 15,000 members of the Cherokee Tribe were sold down the river by President Andrew Jackson and were forced to walk from their ancestral homes in the southeastern United States to designated Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 Cherokee Indians perished along the way, and their dead bodies lined the pathway of what is now known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

The Chandaria family - emigrants from the Indian enclave of Nairobi - have flourished in America. Premchand, the father, is a doctor who has worked doggedly to grow his practice and give his family security; his wife, Urmila, runs a business importing artisanal Kenyan crafts; and their son, Sunil, has been accepted to a PhD program in philosophy at Harvard. But the parents have kept a very important secret from Sunil: his cousin, Bimal, is actually his older brother. When this hidden history is revealed by an unforeseen accident, and the entire family is forced to return to Nairobi.

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on the South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. W--, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it at first simply as a source of extra cash. But as he grows closer to the iconoclastic, charming, and feisty Mrs. W--, he gets drawn into a world of privilege and wealth far different from his racially mixed, blue-collar beginnings.

The entire MacLeod clan is haunted by secrets, and young Bud MacLeod doesn't realize he carries the biggest secret of all. Growing up poor in Depression-era South Georgia is hard enough, but Bud is also cursed with a stutter and a birthmark that disfigures his face. His hateful father and amoral mother make life worse still, despite his brother's efforts to shield him. To survive, Bud must discover his strengths and confront the sins of his parents. First, though, he'll need to grasp his own truth: that he can't embrace his future until he comes to terms with his past.

When Olivia Villalobos finds a bloodstained love letter she endeavors to deliver it before Chief Inspector Sedeño finds it in her possession. A city along the southern coast of Puerto Rico emerges in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Olivia, daughter of a drunkard police investigator who never knew the truth behind her mother’s disappearance, finds a bloodstained love letter in the hidden compartment of her father’s coat. Convinced it belonged to the man recently found dead she sets out to deliver it to the Labyrinth of Love Letters.

Two young women learning to survive in their own worlds are forced to confront even greater challenges when those worlds collide. Elisabeth, a passenger on the Mayflower, and Attitash, a young Wampanoag, discover differences in their core beliefs - but also a common humanity. As they learn to trust each other, their covert friendship forestalls starvation but can't overcome the distrust that's widespread in both cultures. In time, accusations of witchcraft and betrayal threaten their friendship and the survival of both societies.

As tensions rise on the Korean peninsula, US diplomat Nate Simon is sent to Seoul to gauge the political situation and advise the president. He also needs to find out why someone sent the president an ancient, intricately carved comb with an ivory inlay of a two-headed dragon. Though familiar with Korea’s language and culture, Nate knows little of its troubled history. Beautiful and mysterious embassy aide Anna Carlson believes it’s time he learns, starting with the extraordinary story of Korea’s last queen.

The Living Infinite is based on the true story of the Spanish princess Eulalia, an outspoken firebrand at the Bourbon court during the troubled and decadent final years of her family's reign. After her cloistered childhood at the Spanish court, her youth spent in exile, and a loveless marriage, Eulalia gladly departs Europe for the New World. In the company of a small-town bookseller with a thirst for adventure, she travels by ship, first to a Cuba bubbling with revolutionary fervor then on to the 1893 Chicago World Fair.