Historical Fiction World Literature

For the past seven years, Viola Branham has enjoyed the luxury of traveling the world as an independent woman and confining her awkward past to a distant, if painful, memory. But now, she has been summoned home to England over a stipulation in the will of her late uncle, the earl of Ellsworth, one that decrees she lose everything unless she reconciles with the man who broke her heart and ruined her life - her husband.

Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank, and with her cousin Edmund Bertram as her sole ally. When her uncle Sir Thomas Birtram travels to Antigua, siblings Mary and Henry Crawford arrive in the neighbourhood, bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation.

At Heim Hochland, a Nazi breeding home in Bavaria, three women’s fates are irrevocably intertwined. Gundi is a pregnant university student from Berlin. An Aryan beauty, she’s secretly a member of a resistance group. Hilde, only eighteen, is a true believer in the cause and is thrilled to carry a Nazi official’s child. And Irma, a forty-four-year-old nurse, is desperate to build a new life for herself after personal devastation. All three have everything to lose.

A series of baffling murders among a group of imprisoned agents threatens the outcome of World War II in this chilling mystery from the New York Times best-selling author of Mr. Churchill’s Secretary. World War II is raging, and former spy Maggie Hope knows too much. She knows what the British government is willing to do to keep its secrets. She knows the real location of the planned invasion of France. She knows who’s lying. She knows who the double-crossers are. She knows exactly who is sending agents to their deaths.

Oberlin, Ohio, 1868. Lisbeth Johnson was born into privilege in the antebellum South. Jordan Freedman was born a slave to Mattie, Lisbeth's beloved nurse. The women have an unlikely bond deeper than friendship. Three years after the Civil War, Lisbeth and Mattie are tending their homes and families while Jordan, an aspiring suffragette, teaches at an integrated school. When Lisbeth discovers that her father is dying, she's summoned back to the Virginia plantation where she grew up.

When her husband doesn’t come home one day, Ariella realises that the only way she can ensure her Jewish children’s safety is to avail of the Kindertransport, but can she bear to let them go? A thousand miles away, Elizabeth Klein has closed herself off from the world. Losing her husband on the last day of the Great War, and her child months later, she cannot, will not, love again. It hurts too much. But she is all Liesl and Erich Bannon have.

Twelve-year-old Lidia is outside her grandfather's house when planes fly overhead, bearing the Nazi cross on each wing. Before the bombs hit the ground, Lidia realizes her life is about to change forever. Poland has fallen under German occupation, and her father makes the brave decision to join the Polish army to fight against the Nazis. Lidia wants to follow him into war, but she's far too young, and she's needed by her mother and brother. After her family returns to Warsaw, Lidia continues to play the piano, but she also wants to aid the Jewish people held captive in the Warsaw Ghetto.

En 1944, les Allemands s'attendent à un débarquement. Mais où ? Les Alliés ont édifié sur la côte, au nord de Londres, une formidable base où s'entassent, entre d'interminables rangées de baraquements, des chars, des avions, des canons - tout cela en toile peinte tendue sur du bois ou en carton-pâte. Il s'agit de faire croire à Hitler que le débarquement se fera dans le Pas-de-Calais et non pas en Normandie.

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.

Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.

The Aylward women of Nenagh, Tipperary, are mad about each other, but you wouldn’t always think it. You’d have to know them to know that—in spite of what the neighbors might say about raised voices and dramatic scenes—their house is a place of peace, filled with love, a refuge from the sadness and cruelty of the world. Their story begins at an end and ends at a beginning. It involves wives and widows, gunrunners and gougers, sinners and saints. It’s a story of terrible betrayals and fierce loyalties, isolation and togetherness, of transgression, forgiveness, desire, and love.

Cilka Klein n'a que 16 ans lorsqu'elle est déportée. Très vite remarquée pour sa beauté par le commandant du camp de Birkenau et mise à l'écart des autres prisonnières. À la Libération, elle est condamnée pour faits de collaboration et envoyée dans un camp de Sibérie ; c'est alors un deuxième enfer qui commence pour elle. Au goulag, où elle doit purger une sentence de quinze ans, elle se lie d'amitié avec une médecin, et apprend à s'occuper des malades dans des conditions inimaginables.

Grand Duchess Olga Romanov comes of age amid a shifting tide for the great dynasties of Europe. But even as unrest simmers in the capital, Olga is content to live within the confines of the sheltered life her parents have built for her and her three sisters: hiding from the world on account of their mother’s ill health, their brother Alexei’s secret affliction, and rising controversy over Father Grigori Rasputin, the priest on whom the tsarina has come to rely.

The story of the restorative power of art in one man’s life, set against the sweep of the twentieth century—from Toronto in the ’20s and ’30s, through the killing fields of World War II, to 1960s Sicily.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.

It is still the War of 1812 and Jack Aubrey - with his tetchy, sardonic friend Stephen Maturin - has set course across the South Atlantic to intercept a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. If they do not come up with her before she rounds the Horn, they must follow her into the Great South Sea and as far across the Pacific as she may lead them.

In 1916, Sven Ormson leaves a restless life in Stockholm to seek adventure in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where darkness reigns four months of the year and he might witness the splendor of the Northern Lights one night and be attacked by a polar bear the next. But his time as a miner ends when an avalanche nearly kills him, leaving him disfigured, and Sven flees even further, to an uninhabited fjord. There, with the company of a loyal dog, he builds a hut and lives alone, testing himself against the elements.

Elisabeth Eidenbenz left Switzerland in 1937 to aid children orphaned during the Spanish Civil War. Now, her work has led her to France, where she's determined to provide expectant mothers and their unborn children a refuge amid one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. Desperate to escape the invasion of Franco's Fascist troops, Isabel Dueñas becomes one of many Spanish patriots fleeing their country. She leaves behind her husband as he fights for democracy, and she seeks asylum in a refugee camp across the border in France.

Two years into World War II, Britain is feeling her losses: The Nazis have won battles, the Blitz has destroyed cities, and U-boats have cut off the supply of food. In an effort to help housewives with food rationing, a BBC radio program called The Kitchen Front is holding a cooking contest - and the grand prize is a job as the program’s first-ever female co-host. For four very different women, winning the competition would present a crucial chance to change their lives.

May 1940: In the months since the war in Europe began, nineteen-year-old Aafke Cruyssen and her family have tried to carry on as normal—running their modest grocery store in Eindhoven, hoping that Germany will leave Holland alone as it did during the Great War. But this time, Holland will not be spared. The invasion comes, swift and merciless, and Dutch forces are easily overpowered. Aafke's one glimpse of humanity comes from a young German corporal who intervenes when a gang of looters tries to rob her family's shop.