Historical Literary Fiction Saga

Long before Hank Crawford arrived in the waters of Ketchikan, his partners and compatriots were already in love with its shores. Following the final, crushing moments of World War II, Japanese officer Kiyoshi Tsurifune, Sergeant Jones Henry, and Resistance fighter Swede Scorden struggle to regain normalcy and any contact with the shimmering, fish-filled sea. Lost honor, fallen friends, their cultural identities gone in the wake of a nuclear blast - these fishermen-turned-soldiers have a long way to go till they regain the waters in which they feel most at home.

Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge—she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake.

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.

The French Riviera, spring 1936: It's off-season in the lovely seaside village of Juan-les-Pins, where 17-year-old Ondine cooks with her mother in the kitchen of their family-owned Café Paradis. A mysterious new patron who's slipped out of Paris and is traveling under a different name has made an unusual request - to have his lunch served to him at the nearby villa he's secretly rented, where he wishes to remain incognito.

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.

The year is 878 and Wessex is free from the Vikings.Uhtred, the dispossessed son of a Northumbrian lord, helped Alfred win that victory, but now he is disgusted by Alfred's lack of generosity and repelled by the king's insistent piety. He flees Wessex, going back north to seek revenge for the killing of his foster father and to rescue his stepsister, captured in the same raid. He needs to find his old enemy, Kjartan, a renegade Danish lord who lurks in the formidable stronghold of Dunholm.

When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria, she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across Europe, and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There, Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British Army in Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters....

Ah Boon is born into a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of twentieth-century coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is a gentle boy who is not much interested in fishing, preferring to spend his days playing with the neighbor girl, Siok Mei. But when he discovers he has the unique ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can find, he feels a new sense of obligation and possibility—something to offer the community and impress the spirited girl he has come to love.

Nothing bad can happen at the Ritz; inside its gilded walls, every woman looks beautiful, every man appears witty. Favored guests walk through its famous doors to be welcomed and pampered by Blanche Auzello and her husband, Claude, the hotel’s director. Until June 1940, when the German army sweeps into Paris, setting up headquarters at the Ritz. Suddenly, with the likes of Hermann Goëring moving into suites once occupied by royalty, Blanche and Claude must navigate a terrifying new reality. One that entails even more secrets.

Epic in scope, Marge Piercy's sweeping novel encompasses the wide range of people and places marked by the Second World War. Each of her 10 narrators has a unique and compelling story that powerfully depicts his or her personality, desires, and fears. Special attention is given to the women of the war effort, like Bernice, who rebels against her domineering father to become a fighter pilot, and Naomi, a Parisian Jew sent to live with relatives in Detroit, whose twin sister, Jacqueline - still in France - joins the resistance against Nazi rule.

Una novela inolvidable ambientada en el Berlín de la primavera de 1939, la Cuba pre- y postrevolucionaria, y el Nueva York después del 11 de septiembre. Antes de que todo se desmoronara, Hannah Rosenthal y sus padres tenían una vida encantadora. Su familia, una de las más distinguidas en los altos círculos sociales berlineses, era admirada por amigos y vecinos. Ahora en 1939, Berlín se ha teñido de los colores blanco, rojo y negro de una bandera que no reconocen como suya.

Morocco, 1941. With France having fallen to Nazi occupation, twelve-year-old Josie has fled with her family to Casablanca, where they await safe passage to America. Life here is as intense as the sun, every sight, smell and sound overwhelming to the senses in a city filled with extraordinary characters. It’s a world away from the trouble back home—and Josie loves it. Seventy years later, another new arrival in the intoxicating port city, Zoe, is struggling—with her marriage, her baby daughter and her new life as an expat in an unfamiliar place.

Set in a luxurious grand hotel just outside Lisbon, at the height of the Second World War, Estoril is a delightful and poignant novel about exile, divided loyalties, fear and survival. The hotel's guests include spies, fallen kings, refugees from the Balkans, Nazis, American diplomats and stateless Jews. The Portuguese secret police broodingly observe the visitors, terrified that their country's neutrality will be compromised. The novel seamlessly fuses the stories of its invented characters with appearances by historical figures.

Una columna de fuego arranca cuando el joven Ned Willard regresa a su hogar en Kingsbridge por Navidad. Corre el año 1558, un año que trastocará la vida de Ned y que cambiará Europa para siempre. Las antiguas piedras de la catedral de Kingsbridge contemplan una ciudad dividida por el odio religioso. Los principios elevados chocan con la amistad, la lealtad y el amor, y provocan derramamientos de sangre. Ned se encuentra de pronto en el bando contrario al de la muchacha con quien anhela casarse, Margery Fitzgerald.

In mid 17th-century England, the nation was in upheaval. In the Dorset countryside, one sunlit afternoon, a young girl, illicitly bathing in a stream, first fell in love with a passing stranger. Her parents called her Dorcas, but he called her Campion and that's what she longed to be, then and forever. She had one gift left for her by her unknown father - a pendant made of gold, banded by tiny glowing stones and at its base was a seal engraved with an axe and the words: St Matthew.

St. Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1916. Marina Makarova is a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history. Swept up on these tides, Marina will join the marches for workers' rights, fall in love with a radical young poet, and betray everything she holds dear before being betrayed in turn.

Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry.

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.

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.

In the tumultuous aftermath of the Trojan War, a young man battles to save his home and his inheritance. Setting out to find his father, he ends up discovering himself. Telemachus' father, Odysseus, went off to war before he was born...and never came back. Aged 16, Telemachus finds himself abandoned, his father's house overrun with men pursuing his beautiful mother, Penelope, and devouring the family's wealth. Telemachus determines to leave Ithaca, his island home, and find the truth.