Historical Humor

In 1954, after the government implements the Indian Termination Act, three Klamath brothers are forced to contemplate their futures amidst the growing turmoil of life on the reservation.

The true test for surviving war lies in the mind, not on the battlefield. Inspired by the author’s own experiences of US military operations during the Vietnam War, Boot is a debut literary novel that charts the journey of marine George Orwell Hill, known affectionately as G.O. by his brothers-in-arms, as he comes to grips with the psychological impacts of war in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

The year is 1969, and Jack Sheffield is a young teacher in need of a job. In a room full of 29 other newly qualified teachers, he's overjoyed when he's appointed to Heather View Primary. Jack is excited to start his first year there and to begin shaping young minds in a beautiful new location on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. But Heather View isn't as idyllic as it first sounds.

Blandford Candy is sent to London, after an illicit affair, and joins the Roundhead army to fight against the King, taking part in the Battle of Edgehill. A reluctant hero if ever there was one, he becomes a spy for the cause - and, through luck or judgement, uncovers more than one Royalist plot. His love of wine and the fairer sex prove both a curse and a blessing for the agent. Blandford soon earns the enmity of the King’s spy mistress Jane Whorwood, and patronage of the great parliamentarian leader John Hampden.

June 1813. As the Peninsular War edges toward its climactic battle at Vitoria, a well-bred, newly commissioned, and hopelessly incompetent officer arrives to take charge of a seasoned troop of British cavalry. The troop's eloquent but shifty corporal takes the officer under his wing, and thus begins a journey through the campaign with many laugh-out-loud moments as the less-than-upright members of the troop determine to turn the war against the French to their pecuniary advantage.

Mailand 1493: Der junge Pandolfo liegt mit eingeschlagenem Schädel in einem Abfallhaufen. Der Seidenhändler Bernardino Bellapianta findet den Schwerverletzten und pflegt ihn in seinem märchenhaften Palast gesund. Doch Pandolfo hat sein Gedächtnis verloren. Auf der Suche nach seiner Vergangenheit überlebt Pandolfo einen zweiten Mordanschlag, steigt mit einem Flugmaschinenbauer in die Lüfte auf, verliebt sich zum zweiten Mal in dieselbe Frau und kommt langsam dahinter, dass sein Wohltäter nicht ganz so tadellos ist, wie er scheint.

Tennyson's Gift is an imaginative cocktail of Victorian seriousness and farce that reimagines the world of the 19th-century English poet laureate, placing him in the midst of eccentric company that includes Lewis Carroll. Going Loco features a critic trying to write a definitive account of the doppelganger in Gothic fiction, amid the chaos of her domestic life, including paranoia that her cleaning lady is taking over her life.

Senator Jim MacVeagh is proud to serve his country - and his president, Mark Hollenbach, who has a near-spotless reputation as the vibrant, charismatic leader of MacVeagh’s party and the nation. When Hollenbach begins taking MacVeagh into his confidence, the young senator knows his star is on the rise. But then Hollenbach starts summoning MacVeagh in the middle of the night to Camp David. There, the president sits in the dark and rants about his enemies, unfurling insane theories about all the people he says are conspiring against him.

In the polemic spirit of Jane Anger’s The Protection for Women, we publish The Worming of America, as a rebuttal to Joseph Swetnam’s novel published in 1615.

London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy has been restored, and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar “Balty” St. Michel is 24 and has no skills and no employment. He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer in the king’s navy. Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New World. He is to track down two missing judges who were responsible for the execution of the last king, Charles I.

Milligan and the Samurai Rebels is a humorous historical novel set in the Japan of the 1860s. The Shogun has been forced by the threat of Western firepower to re-open Japan to the outside world, while samurai outraged at this decision are scheming to topple the Shogunate and re-establish Imperial rule. In parallel to this struggle, Britain and France are fighting by every means except open warfare to establish themselves as the leading influence on the government of Japan and secure the accompanying trading privileges.

Sir Alanbart avoids action, recoils from romance, and shuns self-sacrifice; yet when he finds himself drawn into a harebrained attempt to rescue King Arthur, he becomes a victim of all three, and then poor Alanbart must fight hard to stay true to his cowardly and indolent nature.

Three Days and Two Knights is a genre crossover that blends fantasy adventure, comedy, and romance in a historical literary setting.

In 1934, a rabbi's son in Prague joins a traveling circus, becomes a magician, and rises to fame under the stage name the Great Zabbatini just as Europe descends into World War II. When Zabbatini is discovered to be a Jew, his battered trunk full of magic tricks becomes his only hope of surviving the concentration camp where he is sent. Seven decades later in Los Angeles, 10-year-old Max finds a scratched-up LP that captured Zabbatini performing his greatest tricks.

B League Champs evokes a freer time of growing up in the Sixties and is a heartfelt but unsentimental reckoning of one boy's coming of age through his Little League experiences.

When the eldest daughter of a whaling family in New South Wales sets out to write about the particularly difficult season of 1908, the story she tells reveals itself to be far larger than she ever expected. As her family struggles to survive, and as she attempts to navigate sibling rivalries and all-consuming first love, 19-year-old Mary will soon discover a shocking side to these men who hunt the seas and the truth of her own place among them.

On the eve of Vermont's Great Flood of 1927, rain falls on northern Lake Champlain. Otter's father has been missing since World War I, and then a letter arrives with surprising news. Royal St. Onge may be alive! Otter and Granddad load a canoe with Missisquoi Moonbeam and paddle across Goose Bay to rendezvous at the family camp, but Otter's father is nowhere to be found, and bullet holes scar the cabin walls.

Der junge Pandolfo hat einen Schlag auf den Kopf erhalten: Er weiß nicht mehr, wer er ist. Der schwerreiche Seidenhändler Bernadino Bellapianta findet ihn verletzt in einem Misthaufen liegend, nimmt ihn mit sich und pflegt ihn gesund. Wieder genesen erweist sich Pandolfos Geschick fürs Zeichnen und er wird als Musterzeichner für luxuriöse Webstoffe eingestellt. Aber er macht sich auch auf die Suche nach seiner Vergangenheit.

Do you enjoy Monty Python, PG Wodehouse, and Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder? If so, then you might just enjoy Context Clues, an irreverent new novel from James C. Ferguson that combines both humor and history as it chronicles the fictional exploits of history's worst spy. Set during Sir Francis Walsingham's reign as chief secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, Context Clues follows the adventures of Basil Coventry, an "information gatherer" employed by the Crown.

Banking, Beer & Robert The Bruce is a fictional novel depicting two slowly entwining families from Irish/Scottish and English descent in a humorous and real-life way. Mixing bawdy British humor and American-style action-adventure, this is good old fashioned story-telling at its best.

Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck. Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands - a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver - a true comedy of errors ensues.