Historical Fiction United States

A year ago, Dovie Larkin's life was shattered when her fiance committed suicide just weeks before their wedding. Now, plagued by guilt, she has become a fixture at the cemetery where William is buried, visiting his grave daily, waiting for answers she knows will never come. Then one day, she sees an old woman whose grief mirrors her own. Fascinated, she watches the woman leave a letter on a nearby grave. Dovie ignores her conscience and reads the letter—a mother's plea for forgiveness to her dead daughter—and immediately needs to know the rest of the story.

When Savannah history Professor Everly Winthrop is asked to guest-curate a new museum collection focusing on artifacts recovered from the steamship Pulaski, she's shocked. The ship sank after a boiler explosion in 1838, and the wreckage was just discovered, 180 years later. Everly can't resist the opportunity to try to solve some of the mysteries and myths surrounding the devastating night of its sinking. Everly's research leads her to the astounding history of a family of 11 who boarded the Pulaski together, and the extraordinary stories of two women from this family.

As the Ice Age ends and the glaciers release their hold on North America, a brave band of people make their way into the new continent. The climate is changing and the game is scarce. A hostile tribe pursues them, driving them ever southward. In their midst rises a young shaman, who receives a Dream from the spirit of the Wolf, a vision of paradise on the other side of the impenetrable ice. An older, more powerful Dreamer teaches the young man how to find the path to the new land, but they both realize that a shadowy menace looms on the horizon, a cosmic battle between good and evil.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle, so she forms a plan to go north.

It’s the 1960s in North Carolina, and Lorraine Delford has it all—an upstanding family, a perfect boyfriend, and an idyllic home complete with a white picket fence. Yet every time she looks through her father’s telescope, she dreams of leaving it all behind to go to space. It’s ambitious, but Lorraine has always been exceptional.

In an ancient time of fear and superstition, she stood apart because of her unusual blue eyes. In a land of great stone cities and trackless wilderness, she sought her own unique path. But it was with the clan that accepted her - and in the heart of the magic man who saved her - that she found her ultimate destiny. Her name was Kwani. But legend would call her She Who Remembers.…

Following the disappearance of his only son and the death of his beloved wife, Richard Morgan is falsely imprisoned and exiled to the penal colonies of 18th-century Australia. His life is shattered, but Morgan refuses to surrender, overcoming all obstacles to find unexpected contentment and happiness in the harsh early days of Australia's settlement. From England's shores to Botany Bay and the rugged frontier of a hostile new world, Morgan's Run is the epic tale of love lost and found, and the man whose strength and character helped settle a country and define its future.

An abused and unwanted daughter of the First Men Tribe, young Kiin knows the harsh realities of life in a frozen land at the top of the world. In an age of ice nine millenia past, her destiny is tied to the brave sons of orphaned chagak and her chieftain mate kayugh - one to whom, Kiin is promised, the, other for whom she yearns But the evil that her own family spawned drags the tormented young woman far from her people - where savage cruelties, love and fate will strenghten and change her... and give her the courage to fight for the future of her own helpless progeny.

It's been a lifetime (and three seasons) in the making, but Jane Gloriana Villanueva is finally ready to make her much-anticipated literary debut! Snow Falling is a sweeping historical romance set in 1902 Miami - a time of railroad tycoons, hotel booms, and exciting expansion for the Magic City.

For the tourists traveling on Henry Flagler’s legendary Overseas Railroad, Labor Day weekend is an opportunity to forget the economic depression gripping the nation. But one person’s paradise can be another’s prison, and Key West-native Helen Berner yearns to escape. After the Cuban Revolution of 1933 leaves Mirta Perez’s family in a precarious position, she agrees to an arranged marriage with a notorious American.

Kit Crockett lives on a farm with her grief-stricken, widowed father, tending the garden, fishing in a local stream, and reading Nancy Drew mysteries from the library bookmobile. One day, Kit discovers a mysterious and beautiful woman has moved in just down the road. Kit and the newcomer, Bella, become friends, and the lonely Kit draws comfort from her. But when a malicious neighbor finds out, Kit suddenly finds herself at the center of a tragic, fatal crime and becomes a ward of the court.

Samuel, 13, spends his days in the forest, hunting for food for his family. He has grown up on the frontier of a British colony, America. Far from any town, or news of the war against the King that American patriots have begun near Boston.

Following the acclaimed Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life, Honey in the Heart, this is an expansive lyrical novel in the tradition of Indigenous oral storytelling. Based on the author's many years of living in a Guatemalan village, Stealing Benefacio's Roses interweaves dramatic recountings of village life and the political horrors of civil war with lyric retellings of sacred Mayan myths.

Inara Erickson is exploring her deceased aunt's island estate when she finds an elaborately stitched piece of fabric hidden in the house. As she peels back layer upon layer of the secrets it holds, Inara's life becomes interwoven with that of Mei Lein, a young Chinese girl mysteriously driven from her home a century before. Through the stories Mei Lein tells in silk, Inara uncovers a tragic truth that will shake her family to its core - and force her to make an impossible choice.

From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried….

Olivia Dunne, a studious minister's daughter who dreams of being an archaeologist, never thought that the drama of World War II would affect her quiet life in Denver. An exhilarating flirtation reshapes her life, though, and she finds herself banished to a rural Colorado outpost, married to a man she hardly knows. Overwhelmed by loneliness, Olivia tentatively tries to establish a new life, finding much-needed friendship and solace in two Japanese American sisters who are living at a nearby internment camp.

In this new installment in his acclaimed series of novels examining the collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers, William T. Vollmann tells the story of the Nez Perce War, with flashbacks to the Civil War. Defrauded and intimidated at every turn, the Nez Perces finally went on the warpath in 1877, subjecting the US Army to its greatest defeat since Little Big Horn as they fled from Northeast Oregon across Montana to the Canadian border.

Meet Tony: insatiably curious, deeply compassionate, with a unique perspective on every scene he encounters. Kidnapped and transported to the New World after traveling from the British East India Company’s outpost on the Coromandel Coast to the teeming streets of London, young Tony finds himself in Jamestown, Virginia, where he and his fellow indentured servants—boys like himself, men from Africa, a mad woman from London—must work the tobacco plantations. Orphaned and afraid, Tony initially longs for home.

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.

Thirteen-year-old Loyal Raines is supposed to stay close to home on a hot summer day in 1934. When he slips away for a quick swim in the river and finds a dead body, he wishes he'd obeyed his mother. The ripples caused by his discovery will impact the town of Beverly, West Virginia, in ways no one could have imagined.