Historical House Fiction

It is 1914, and the world has been on the brink of war so often many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime to see the splendors of Russia. But when Austria declares war on Serbia, Eliza escapes back to America, while Sofya and her family flee to their country estate. In need of domestic help, they hire the local fortune-teller’s daughter, Varinka, unknowingly bringing intense danger into their household.

1973. A final, top-secret mission to the Moon. Three astronauts in a tiny module, a quarter of a million miles from home. A quarter of a million miles from help. As Russian and American crews sprint for a secret bounty hidden away on the lunar surface, old rivalries blossom and the political stakes are stretched to breaking point back on Earth. Houston flight controller Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis must do all he can to keep the NASA crew together, while staying one step ahead of his Soviet rivals. But not everyone on board Apollo 18 is quite who they appear to be.

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself; his wife, Neni; and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty - and Jende is eager to please. Clark's wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses' summer home in the Hamptons.

Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavinia arrives on the steps of the kitchen house and is placed, as an indentured servant, under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate slave daughter. Lavinia learns to cook, clean, and serve food while guided by the quiet strength and love of her new family. In time Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, caring for the master's opium-addicted wife and befriending his dangerous yet protective son. She attempts to straddle the worlds of the kitchen and big house, but her skin color will forever set her apart.

It is 1934. Returning to the West Country after their latest adventure in London, lady's maid Verity Hunter and cook Joan Hart are ready to embrace a quieter life. Their mistress, the glamorous young heiress Dorothy Drew, is attempting to rein in her enthusiasm for too many cocktails and takes up the offer of a place to rest and recuperate from an old family friend, Mrs Ashford. All seems well, until the day after they arrive, when everyone in the house is struck down by what appears to be mushroom poisoning. The deadly dish proves fatal for one unlucky soul.

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North.

East Texas wasn’t much of a home for Cullen Baker. Few liked him, and some even tried to kill him. Yet after three hard years of wandering, he’s come back to farm the land that’s rightfully his. Only Cullen’s in for an unwelcome homecoming: his neighbors have long memories, the Reconstructionists have greedy hearts, and his worst enemy has teamed up with a vicious outlaw. But Cullen isn’t about to back down.

On the eve of a popular rebellion, the Chinese government starts to crack down in cities across the country. Fleeing the turmoil, Wang Yuan, the son of a famous general and grandson of the patriarch of The Good Earth, leaves for America to study agriculture. When he returns to China six years later, he encounters a nation still in the grip of violent uprisings. Unprepared for the social upheaval, Wang is torn by the tensions between old traditions and new ways and by his formidable family, whose struggles he hopes to solve.

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

In the late 1950s, in a small New England town, Reverend Tyler Caskey has suffered a terrible loss and finds it hard to be the person he once was. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family’s tragedy.

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter, Blanca, embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban.

The fates of two women, one American, one Japanese, become entwined in this sweeping novel of 19th century Japan on the cusp of radical change and Westernization. The Japanese tea ceremony, steeped in ritual, is at the heart of this story of an American girl adopted by Kyoto's most important tea master and raised as attendant and surrogate younger sister to his privileged daughter, Yukako.

New York is the book that millions of Rutherfurd's American fans have been waiting for. A brilliant mix of romance, war, family drama, and personal triumphs, it gloriously captures the search for freedom and prosperity at the heart of our nation's history.

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

The New York Times best-selling author of Whiter Than Snow, Sandra Dallas delivers a novel about the secrets and passions of three generations of women who live in a Victorian Colorado house. While the house is under construction in 1880, a 17-year-old servant imagines living in the “Bride’s House” with one of her several suitors. Decades later, the legacy and secrets of earlier Bride’s House women cause the current occupant to question what she really wants and who she truly loves.

When mystery novelist Hazel Martin receives a secretive letter from an old friend who suspects her relatives have murderous intentions, she packs her bags and heads to the country. Tampered medications, symptoms of poisoning, and suspicious accidents all add up to attempted murder, and it's up to Hazel and her Siamese cat, Dickens, to sniff out the clues. But with a house full of relatives who all have a motive, will Hazel be able to unmask the culprit before things turn deadly?

After discovering six gold Roman coins buried in the mud of the Devil's Dyke, Barnabas Sackett enthusiastically invests in goods that he will offer for trade in America. But Sackett has a powerful enemy: Rupert Genester, nephew of an earl, wants him dead. A battlefield promise made to Sackett’s father threatens Genester’s inheritance. So on the eve of his departure for America, Sackett is attacked and thrown into the hold of a pirate ship.