Historical Literary Fiction Saga

No. It is a simple word, uttered on a summer porch in 1936. And it will haunt Kitty Milton for the rest of her life. Kitty and her husband, Ogden, are both from families considered the backbone of the country. But this refusal will come to be Kitty’s defining moment, and its consequences will ripple through the Milton family for generations. For while they summer on their island in Maine, anchored as they are to the way things have always been, the winds of change are beginning to stir.

As the Japanese begin their assault on Singapore, Sarah Fuller is forced to leave her parents and fiancé, Philip, behind. The long journey to England is fraught with danger, and Sarah and her sister Jane don’t even know if their great-aunt is alive, let alone waiting for them. They arrive in Cliffehaven, on the south coast of England, and here Sarah must find work to support them both. When the Women's Timber Corps takes over the local estate, Sarah enlists as a lumberjill.

Napoli, 1938. Carolina è un’operosissima sarta, sposata con don Arturo e madre di ben cinque figli. In occasione della visita di Adolf Hitler alla città, ella ha come un oscuro presentimento: ben presto, in uno sforzo quasi parossistico, inizia a lavorare di buona lena, per riuscire a stipare abbastanza risorse alimentari nella sua sartoria, così come nella cantina di casa. Di lì a pochi anni, poi, il suo impegno risulterà essere stato provvidenziale.

The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the changing fortunes of three generations of an American dynasty. The family serves as a metaphor for the old society that crumbled after the Industrial Revolution, as a Midwestern town spreads and darkens into a city.

At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives....

Looking back to the Vienna of Klimt and Freud and forward to the shadow that is starting to fall over Europe, Sebastian Faulks' new novel is an intensely personal story that focuses on Lena, a spirited girl born with nothing, and Anton, a man of passion and self-doubt. Lena was born with nothing but her own strength of character to an alcoholic mother in a small town in southern Austria in 1906. Anton is the restless son of a bourgeois family who sets out to make his fortune in pre-First World War Vienna.

In apartheid South Africa, free-spirited young Amina has broken all the rules of her own conventional community by running a café. When she meets Miriam, a young traditional wife and mother, their unexpected attraction turns their world upside down.

On a morning in 1924, a young woman rises from the floor of her family's small home in Belorussia to find her parents and her husband slaughtered beside her and her infant daughter, Sophie, missing. When her aunt tells her the baby is dead, Lillian emigrates to America. She is working as a seamstress at the Yiddish Theater and enjoying cafe society when a cousin arrives and insists that her daughter is still alive, in Siberia.

Known as the despair of the Davenports, Reginald is a disinherited, disgraced alcoholic who is headed for a bad end - that is until the new Earl of Wargrave gives him one last chance at redemption by letting him take his place as the heir of Strickland, his lost ancestral estate. Masquerading as a man in order to obtain a position as estate manager of Strickland, Lady Alys Weston came to Strickland after having fled her home, her wealth, and her title due to betrayal and despair.

Chase Benteen Calder was bound to wrest a fortune from Montana land, where the whisper of riches swept across a sea of buffalo grass. With Lorna at his side, a woman who took the tough ways of the land as her destiny, he would breathe life into his dream. Through the treacherous Texas prairie, the perils of Indian country, and a bustling Dodge City, they forged their way to Montana. With Calder strength, they would harvest their fortune from the rich earth, on the sprawling plains of This Calder Range.

When her own first child is tragically still-born, the young Mette is pressed into service as a wet-nurse at the court of the mad king, Charles VI of France. Her young charge is the princess, Catherine de Valois, caught up in the turbulence and chaos of life at court. Mette and the child forge a bond, one that transcends Mette’s lowly position. But as Catherine approaches womanhood, her unique position seals her fate as a pawn between two powerful dynasties.

Rhoda Middleton suspects her husband Peter is having an affair. But when Rhoda tracks the mysterious woman down, she finds she is not his lover after all, but the wife of his wartime best friend, Archie Foster. There is only one problem - Rhoda has never even heard of Archie Foster.

The Kades’ two older children, Elizabeth and James, are growing into young adults in the peaceful riverside town of Nauvoo, Illinois, in the 1840s. When traitors plot to murder the Prophet Joseph Smith, James learns of their plan. Danger and intrigue mount as James strives to shield the Prophet from assassination.

March 1912: 24-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet, has never seen the world beyond her home on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. So she is astonished when her first fan letter arrives, from a college student, David Graham, in far-away America. As the two strike up a correspondence - sharing their favorite books, wildest hopes, and deepest secrets - their exchanges blossom into friendship, and eventually into love. June 1940: At the start of World War II, Elspeth’s daughter, Margaret, has fallen for a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Her mother warns her against seeking love in wartime, an admonition Margaret doesn’t understand....

Destined to be a classic, Sweeping Up Glass is a tough and tender novel of love, race, and justice, and a ferocious, unflinching look at the power of family. Olivia Harker Cross owns a strip of mountain in Pope County, Kentucky, a land where Whites and Blacks eke out a living in separate, tattered kingdoms and where silver-faced wolves howl in the night. But someone is killing the wolves of Big Foley Mountain - and Olivia is beginning to realize how much of her own bitter history she’s never understood: Her mother’s madness, building toward a fiery crescendo.

Guerreros y eremitas, boyardos y siervos, héroes y heroínas románticos, ancianas damas ricas, buscadores de fortuna y exiliados... Los personajes de Rusia habitan en un mundo contradictorio de bosques, estepas, iconos y hachas, fe ortodoxa y persecución a los judíos, hermosas iglesias, palacios magníficos y pueblos miserables; de arte popular ruso y operas suntuosas, de Tolstói y Lenin, Chaikovsky y Rasputín.

In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.

"Masterful...a classic parable of the human condition," said Publishers Weekly about Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets, and the same can be said about Canin's brilliant new novel. Breathtaking in its suspense and beauty, Carry Me Across the Water tells the story of a complex man's extraordinary life, lived against the backdrop of the central years of the twentieth century.

In October 1947, after a summer-long drought, fires break out all along the Maine coast, from Bar Harbor to Kittery, and are soon racing out of control from town to village. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband, Gene, joins the volunteer firefighters. Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie's two young children, Grace watches helplessly as their houses burn to the ground, the flames finally forcing them all into the ocean as a last resort.

Finally available as an audiobook, Joyce Carol Oates' lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th-century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture.