Historical Fiction World Literature

They came on foot and by horseback, in wagons and on rafts, singly and by the score, restless, adventurous, enterprising, relentless, seeking a foothold on the future. European immigrants and American colonists, settlers and speculators, soldiers and missionaries, fugitives from justice and from despair-pioneers all, in the great and inexorable westward expansion defined at its heart by the majestic flow of the Ohio River. This is their story, a chronicle of monumental dimension, of resounding drama and impact set during a pivotal era in our history: the birth and growth of a nation.

It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna's parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own.

The only way Cilla van der Zee can survive the German occupation of the Netherlands is to do the unthinkable—become a spy for the Nazis in Britain. She soothes her conscience with a plan to abandon her mission and instead aid the Allies. Her scheme is thwarted when naval officer Lt. Lachlan Mackenzie finds her along the Scottish shore and turns her in to be executed. But perhaps she is more useful alive than dead.

January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb.... As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends - and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is.

A group of young women from Smith College risk their lives in France at the height of World War I in this sweeping novel based on a true story - a skillful blend of Call the Midwife and The Alice Network - from New York Times best-selling author Lauren Willig.

Bombay was the city everyone came to in the early decades of the 19th century: among them, the Goans and the Mangaloreans, looking for safe harbour, livelihood, and a new place to call home. Communities congregated around churches and markets, sharing lord and land with the native East Indians. The young among them were nudged on to the path of marriage, procreation and godliness, though noble intentions were often ambushed by errant love and plain and simple lust. As in the story of Annette and Benji (and Joe) or Michael and Merlyn (and Ellena).

When the shah is thrown out of Iran, the nation's turmoil becomes world headlines. Caught in this shifting world of fanaticism, ambition, duplicity, and violent death are the foreign helicopter pilots who have been servicing the oil fields up and down the country. Their one objective is to make a bold, concerted escape to safety across the Gulf.

1942. Hannah Martel has narrowly escaped Nazi Germany after her fiancé was killed in a pogrom. When her ship bound for America is turned away at port, she has nowhere to go but to her cousin Lily, who lives with her family in Brussels. Fearful for her life, Hannah is desperate to get out of occupied Europe. But with no safe way to leave, she must return to the dangerous underground work she thought she had left behind.

Jun Nakayama was a silent-film star in the early days of Hollywood. By 1964, he is living in complete obscurity, until a young writer, Nick Bellinger, tracks him down for an interview. When Bellinger reveals that he has written a screenplay with Nakayama in mind, Jun is intrigued by the possibility of returning to movies. But he begins to worry that someone might delve too deeply into the past and uncover the events that abruptly ended his career in 1922. Like the changing social and racial tides in California - and the unsolved murder of his favorite director.

Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara’s eye-opening and poignant new mystery, the story of a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister's death, brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese-American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II.

BERLIN, 1939. The dreams that Amanda Sternberg and her husband, Julius, had for their daughters are shattered when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down their beloved family bookshop and sending Julius to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her children, Amanda flees toward the south of France, where the widow of an old friend of her husband’s has agreed to take her in. Along the way, a refugee ship headed for Cuba offers another chance at escape and there, at the dock, Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life.

In this exciting sequel to the award-winning "The Hunt for the Peggy C," Capt. Jake Rogers returns to the North Atlantic as commander of a U.S. Liberty ship with some of his crew from the sunken "Peggy C." But disaster strikes, and they end up shipwrecked in Ireland. There, Rogers learns from Dutch sailors that the Nazis have arrested the father of Miriam Maduro, the love of his life, and are about to deport him to a concentration camp. Rogers and crew sneak back into Holland aboard a gun-running ship from neutral Ireland and make contact with a resistance group to help them.

In 1872, sixteen-year-old Goes First, a Crow Native woman, marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader. He gives her the name Mary, and they set off on the long trip to his trading post in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way, she finds a fast friend in a Métis named Jeannie; makes a lifelong enemy in a wolfer named Stiller; and despite learning a dark secret of Farwell’s past, falls in love with her husband.

December 1940. As German bombs fall on Southampton, England, the city's residents flee to the surrounding villages. In Upton village, amid the chaos, newly married Ellen Parr finds a girl asleep, unclaimed at the back of an empty bus. Little Pamela, it seems, is entirely alone. Ellen has always believed she does not want children, but when she takes Pamela into her home, the child cracks open the past Ellen thought she had escaped and the future she and her husband, Selwyn, had dreamed for themselves. As the war rages on, love grows where it was least expected, surprising them all.

Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs fall around deserted villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian who has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and recall long-forgotten memories of her own youth. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and set off on a course of events that will shape Ulysses's life for the next four decades.

January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, Laura receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital, where she soon hears whispers about haunted trenches and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion.

In the tradition of epic novels like Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow, Isaac’s Beacon is a sweeping historical tale based on the real events of Israel’s founding - bringing alive the power and complexities of the birth of the Jewish state out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Best-selling author David L. Robbins, called “the Homer of World War II”, turns his mastery of the historical novel to another defining moment of the 20th century: the birth of the state of Israel.

Born into poverty, brutalised and ignored by her family, it is only when she is married off to a nobleman that her life undergoes a transformation, as her husband recognises in Rosamund a magic she does not know she possesses but which affects almost all who encounter her. Presiding over a luxurious chocolate house where men go to be seen, exchange news and indulge in the sweet and heady drink to which they have become addicted, Rosamund feels blessed. But disaster strikes, and Rosamund stands on the brink of losing all she has worked so hard to achieve.

Germany, 1944: Nazi banners blowing in the wind, Maggie Sullivan takes her first steps into enemy territory. Armed only with a camera and a US press pass, Maggie never backs down from danger. But close to her heart is a secret; one that she can never share. Maggie was born in Germany. Years ago, she and her mother were forced to flee Berlin, leaving her siblings behind. The US Army are Maggie’s protectors for now, but she wakes each night in a cold sweat wondering: what will they do if they discover her past?

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.