Historical Literary Fiction Saga

It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in an institution: the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish, forgotten. Deeply in love, they escape, and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. But the couple is not alone - Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl. When the authorities catch up to them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness, and Lynnie is caught.

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.

On the banks of the River Seine in 1899, a young woman takes her final breath before plunging into the icy water. Although she does not know it, her decision will set in motion an astonishing chain of events. It will lead to 1950s Norway, where a grieving toy-maker is on the cusp of a transformative invention, all the way to present-day Ottawa Valley in Canada, where a journalist, battling a terrible disease, risks everything for one last chance to live.

Billy Phelan, small-time bookie, pool hustler, and poker player, becomes an unlikely go-between in the 1938 kidnapping of an Albany, New York, political boss' son.

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.

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart.

Une envoûtante saga familiale sur les effets dévastateurs de la guerre. Novembre 1972, Hanoi. Face aux rumeurs d'offensive américaine, Huong et sa grand-mère, Dieu Lan, décident d'abandonner la capitale pour rejoindre les campagnes vietnamiennes. Un retour qui ravive le souvenir du départ de Dieu Lan, vingt ans plus tôt, chassée de la ferme familiale par la réforme agraire du gouvernement communiste nouvellement au pouvoir.

In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a worn and weathered original sonata manuscript - the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens - come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta's eye, it appears to be an authentic 18th-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is commanding, hauntingly beautiful, clearly the undiscovered composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be.

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.

Spanning the 20th century, the story of Roses takes place in a small East Texas town against the backdrop of the powerful timber and cotton industries, controlled by the scions of the town's founding families. Cotton tycoon Mary Toliver and timber magnate Percy Warwick should have married but unwisely did not, and now must deal with consequences of their momentous choice and the loss of what might have been - not just for themselves but for their children, and their children's children.

Hofmiller, un oficial de la caballería austrohúngara, es invitado a una fiesta en la casa de un rico terrateniente Kekesfalva, lo que le lleva a un mundo completamente distinto del de su rutina cuartelaria habitual: se encuentra en un entorno glamuroso, donde el vino fluye libremente y acaba estimulándole, a pedir a la bella hija de su anfitrión que baile con el. Sin embargo para su horror descubre que la joven es inválida. Esta torpeza inconsciente va a ser el comienzo de la pérdida del respeto hacia sí mismo.

In the late 19th century, Newport, Rhode Island, was a cauldron of money, excess, and unapologetic greed, where reputations were made and lost in a whirlwind of parties and fancied slights. But amid the glamour of yacht races, tennis matches, and costume balls raged undeclared class warfare, scandalous doings, even madness. In 1893, railroad mogul Sam Driver, one of the few surviving robber barons of the lawless years after the Civil War, knocks on the door of fabled Newport with his daughter, Jenny.

1630: after long years of peace the reign of Charles I brings brutal civil war to England. The clash between King and Parliament is echoed at Morland Place when Richard brings home a Puritan bride while his brother, Kit, joins Prince Rupert and the Royalist cavalry, leaving their father Edmund desperately trying to steer a middle course between the fighting factions. As the war grinds on, bitterness and disillusion replace the early fervour, and the schisms between husband and wife, father and son, grow deeper.

Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour, and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Here, new outrages - gas, shell-shock - present themselves.

As the novel opens, Kitty and Louise Heaney say good-bye to their boyfriends Julian and Michael, who are going to fight overseas. On the domestic front, meat is rationed, children participate in metal drives, and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller play songs that offer hope and lift spirits. And now the Heaney sisters sit at their kitchen table every evening to write letters.

Honora and Sexton are just settling into their new marriage, and have just bought their beloved New Hampshire house, when the economy crashes and everything in their world changes. Anita Shreve presents a "literary novel of the caliber and craft of Edith Wharton or Henry James," says the Baltimore Sun.

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.

Set in post-revolutionary Iran from 1983 to 2011, this stunning debut novel follows a group of mothers, fathers, children, and lovers, some related by blood, others brought together by the tide of history that washes over their lives. Finally, years later, it is the next generation that is left with the burden of the past and their country’s tenuous future as a new wave of protest and political strife begins. Children of the Jacaranda Tree is an evocative portrait of three generations of men and women inspired by love and poetry, burning with idealism, chasing dreams of justice and freedom.

The son of Maya Angelou, Guy Johnson is a critically acclaimed author and poet in his own right. Echoes of a Distant Summer is the story of Jackson St. Clair Tremain, a San Francisco civil servant who thought he had left his old life far behind. In 1982, Jackson is summoned to Mexico to confer with his dying grandfather, the brutal hustler King Tremain. When King dies, Jackson inherits $50 million - and the unwanted attentions of a malevolent bayou crime lord named Pug DuMont.

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.