Historical Fiction United States

When it was first published in 2006, then-literary critic and poet Alejandro Zambra’s first novel, Bonsai, caused a sensation. Here, in a brilliant new translation from four-time International Booker Prize nominee Megan McDowell, is the little book that started it all: The story of Julio and Emilia, two Chilean university students who, seeking truth in great literature, find one another instead. As they fall together and drift apart over the course of young adulthood, Zambra spins an emotionally engrossing, expertly distilled, formally inventive tale of love, art, and memory.

It is a time of troubles. In Cahokia, the corn crop is failing again and a warchief - and the warrior woman he may never possess - are disgusted by their Chief's lust for tribute. Now even the gods have turned their faces, closing the underworld to the seers. If the gods have abandoned the people, there is no hope - unless it comes in the form of a young girl who is learning to Dream of Power.

When Minerva Jane Jenkins was just 14 years old, she married a man who moved her to the mountains. He carried with him a small box, which he told her was filled with gold. And when he died 50 years later, he made her promise to keep his secret. She is to tell no one about the box or the treasure it contains. Now 94, Minerva is nearing the end of what has sometimes been a lonely life. But she's kept that secret. Even so, rumors of hidden gold have a way of spreading, and Minerva is visited by a reporter, Del Rankin, who wants to know more of her story.

From the Cajun swamp cabins to the great river plantations of the Mississippi and the glittering night spots of Jazz Age New Orleans, Bayou sweeps listeners into the mysterious and fascinating Louisiana delta and into the hearts and lives of four indomitable women: Olivia, a headstrong Cajun beauty, Celisma, a fiercely loyal mulatto slave, Manon, the toast of New Orleans, and Zoe, a convent-bred Creole who seeks and finds her destiny on her own terms.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of young Japanese brides, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers....

The name still sends shivers down the spine and has the power to draw in young readers: Geronimo, the legendary Indian who inspired and fought for his people. But who was this man, really? Here is the riveting tale of the last Apache warrior - told by the author of the best-selling Little Britches.

Present Day: Julia Baxter’s wedding veil, bequeathed to her great-grandmother by a mysterious woman on a train in the 1930s, has passed through generations of her family as a symbol of a happy marriage. But on the morning of her wedding day, something tells her that even the veil’s good luck isn’t enough to make her marriage last forever. Overwhelmed, she escapes to the Virgin Islands to clear her head.

From the best-selling author of Riders of the Purple Sage, comes another classic Western tale. In the spirit and glory of a classic Western, and published exactly as the author originally intended, Knights of the Range, is one of Zane Grey's swiftest and most exciting novels.

Set 5,000 years ago and ranging through what is now Montana, Wyoming, northern Colorado, and Utah, People of the Earth follows the migration of the Uto-Aztecan people south out of Canada. It is the unforgettable tale of a woman torn between two peoples and two dreams, of the two men who love her and the third who must have her, and of the vision given to the peoples long ago by the spirit of the wolf.

A thousand years ago, the mighty Cahokian civilization dominated the North American continent. At the heart of the empire stood a vast city, teeming with tens of thousands of residents, traders, and travelers. The city of Cahokia sent settlers and priests throughout the continent, from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying word of the power of their gods. People who wouldn't bow to that power were conquered or slaughtered. Power rested in one being, Morning Star, a god resurrected in the body of a living man.

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the 18th century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires.

When Shek Yeung sees a Portuguese sailor slay her husband, a feared pirate, she knows she must act swiftly or die. Instead of mourning, Shek Yeung launches a new plan: immediately marrying her husband’s second-in-command, and agreeing to bear him a son and heir, in order to retain power over her half of the fleet. But as Shek Yeung vies for control over the army she knows she was born to lead, larger threats loom.

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.

A stunning debut novel about a young undocumented Peruvian woman fighting to keep her family afloat in New York City. Ana Falcón, along with her husband, Lucho, and their two young children, has fled the economic and political strife of Peru for a chance at a new life in New York City in the 1990s. Being undocumented, however, has significantly curtailed the family’s opportunities: Ana is indebted to a loan shark who calls herself Mama and is stretched thin by unceasing shifts at her factory job.

During the Great Depression, labor camps crop up in remote areas throughout the American South. Destitute workers live under terrible conditions. Trapped in these isolated locations, workers are entirely dependent on the often greedy, abusive camp owners who provide food and housing at grossly inflated prices. But for the most desperate among America's vast unemployed, these camps are often the last and only option.

On the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished village. It is only when Mei arrives at the Chairman’s opulent residence—a forbidden city unto itself—that she learns that the girls’ job is to dance with the Party elites. Ambitious and whip-smart, Mei beelines toward the Chairman.

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.

In the midst of war, an ordinary miracle: an abandoned baby tenderly cared for by a young boy living on the streets of Saigon. The boy is Louis, the child of a long-gone American soldier. Louis calls the baby em Hồng, em meaning "little sister," or "beloved." Even though her cradle is nothing more than a cardboard box, em Hồng's life holds every possibility.

Award-winning novelist Taylor Brown brings to life one of the most compelling events in twentieth-century American history, reminding us of the hard-won origins of today’s unions. Rednecks is a propulsive, character-driven tale that’s both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against all odds.

The beloved bestselling author of The Color of Air, Women of the Silk, and The Samurai's Garden returns with this magnificent historical novel based on the life of the luminous, groundbreaking actress Anna May Wong—the first and only Asian American woman to gain movie stardom in the early days of Hollywood.