Historical Romance Families

Scripture tells a husband to love his wife, but what if she loves the memory of a dead man? Lured to the Texas frontier by more free land than they could ever buy, four families struggle to carve a home and a living out of the Western wilderness. And though love isn’t always easy coming, like bees to sweet flowers, a neighbor and his partner swoop in, hoping to steal the hearts of the clan’s two young beauties. Will their infants spoil the ointment? Predator animals, Indians on the warpath, and living hand to mouth never make it easy, but my, oh my—Texas, my Texas! What a land!

Libby, a free spirit who can’t be tamed by her parents, finds solace with her neighbor Oliver, the son of Lord Croft of Ladenbrooke Manor. Libby finds herself pregnant and alone, when her father kicks her out and Oliver mysteriously drowns in a nearby river. Though theories spread across the English countryside, no one is ever held responsible for Oliver’s death. Sixty years later, Heather Toulson, returning to her family’s cottage in the shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor, is filled with mixed emotions.

Holding the letter in trembling hands, Daisy’s future crumbled before her – the words engraved on her heart forever. The village of Little Creek, the long winter of 1867. The first flakes of snow are falling when Daisy Marshall, secretly engaged to her master's son, finds herself jilted at the altar. Heartbroken, Daisy flees to the small village of Little Creek, nestled on the coast of Essex. There she is warmly welcomed – but the village is poverty-stricken, suffering under a cruel lord of the manor. And when cholera hits, the villagers are truly in dire straits.

1912, London. Eighteen-year-old Flora Butler is going up in the world. She has the prized position of lady's maid to young Constance Ogilvie and is able to provide for her beloved parents and four younger siblings. She has even fallen in love, and though she does not feel quite ready to marry, her future seems clear. But Flora's life is turned upside down when her mistress' father dies. Connie is forced to move to New York to live with her aunt until she comes of age and begs Flora to go with her. Flora has never left the country before and now faces a difficult decision.

In 1955, 18-year-old Janet Jones keeps the love she shares with her best friend, Marie, a secret. It's not easy being gay in Washington, DC, in the age of McCarthyism, but when she discovers a series of books about women falling in love with other women, it awakens something in Janet. As she juggles a romance she must keep hidden and a newfound ambition to write and publish her own story, she risks exposing herself - and Marie - to a danger all too real.

A compelling tale of two women separated by a century who discover long-buried secrets in an Australian manor house. In 1891, Tilly Kirkland is reeling with shock and guilt after her tempestuous marriage ends in horrific circumstances. Fleeing to the farthest place she knows, Tilly takes a job on Ember Island in Moreton Bay, Australia, where she becomes the governess to the prison superintendent's precocious young daughter, Nell.

Christmas may be the season of goodwill and festive cheer, but not for the poor of 1950s Liverpool. And for St Angelus Hospital in Lovely Lane, it is frantically busy. There are the old, the dying, the children and the emergencies.

The nurses, known locally as the Angels of Lovely Lane, are run off their feet. Dana, Beth, Pammy and Victoria hardly have time to catch their breath, let alone have a Christmas of their own.

Richard Peck is a master of stories about people in transition, but perhaps never before has he told a tale of such dramatic change as this one, set during the first year of the Civil War. The whole country is changing in 1861, even the folks from a muddy little Illinois settlement on the banks of the Mississippi. Here, 15-year-old Tilly Pruitt frets over the fact that her brother is dreaming of being a soldier and that her sister is prone to supernatural visions.

A beautiful, very moving, melancholic and elegiac novel set in the late 1960s in Melton, a small town in the West Country. The story revolves around a disparate group of people who come together there to establish an arts festival...This is the story of their intertwining relationships and how they come to love, and not to love each other in different ways and why - a perfect book to curl up and read by the fireside on an autumn afternoon and as satisfying a read as Brief Encounter is a film.

It is the dawn of the 18th century, when girls stay home and sew while men sail the high seas finding adventure, danger, and gold. But two unusually adventurous girls (a rich merchant's daughter, Nancy Kington, and her former plantation slave, Minerva Sharpe) take to the high seas from Jamaica on a ship the crew renames Deliverance.

There was no money, the family was scattered, and Lucille, who had mothered them all since she was 16, was going to be married. So the house must be sold; Lucille knew that was the only sensible things to do, but the family had other ideas. Home they came by whatever way they could, penniless and bedraggled but with certain newfound friends who were to help them to upset Lucille's plans - all her plans for a calm, settled, and sensible life.

Against a vivid backdrop of war and thrilling innovation, Danielle Steel breathes life into history, weaving an intensely human story that spans three decades, of two tremendously different people, who in spite of themselves, are irrevocably woven into the fabric of each other's lives. More Steel.

For childhood friends Leo Kelly, Jane Devlin, and newly ordained "Packy" Keenan, the summers they spent at the lake together were times of pure magic. And no summer was more enchanting than the summer of 1948 - until a tragic car wreck killed two of their friends.

War rages, but the women and children of Liverpool’s Dr Barnardo’s Home cannot give up hope.... Liverpool, 1943. Yorkshire is the place Lana has always called home, but it’s now filled with painful memories of her fiancé, Dickie, who was killed at sea. When she accepts the challenging position of headmistress at a school in Liverpool, she hopes a new beginning will help to mend her broken heart.

Alice, Kate and Naomi want to keep the magic of Christmas alive in their village of Churchwood but a thief in the area and a new family that shuns the local community are only the first of the problems they face.

Can a rake like André Raveneau truly be tamed into a domesticated husband and father...or will he remain a pacing tiger, destined to break free of his cage? Come into the Raveneaus' Connecticut home, as Devon struggles to balance the needs of her little children with the demands of a restless, hot-blooded husband. When two people reappear from the past, long-suppressed fears ignite, and St. Valentine's Day becomes a time of reckoning for André and Devon Raveneau.

A French pirate of smoldering passions, Justin St. Briac will never marry. However, when his manipulative mother beckons him to her deathbed in Cornwall, he succumbs to her plea that he take a bride. Mouette Raveneau, once the toast of the London ton, has been ruined by her dead husband's crimes. With two adolescent sons and no means of support, she reluctantly takes refuge in Cornwall. To grant his mother's dying wish, Justin devises an elaborate charade.

1527: At seventeen, Thomasin Marwood is plunged into court society when a husband is found for her elder sister, Cecilia. But the mood at court is tense. It is split between the conservative Catholics, loyal to Queen Catherine of Aragon, and the fashionable Francophiles, enthralled by King Henry's mistress, Anne Boleyn. While her parents sympathize with the old queen and her faith, Thomasin cannot help but be drawn to the glamour and vitality Anne represents. And her head is soon turned by the tall, dark and handsome Rafe Danvers who seems equally entranced with her.

Maggie Bailey has not had an easy childhood. Her father, Michael, always too easy with his fists after spending the family’s rent money down the pub. Just sixteen, in love and blinded by promises, Maggie sees marriage to handsome Jack as her great escape. However, she soon finds herself abandoned with a beautiful baby when Jack disappears. Maggie is forced to seek a new life away from the East End of London and finds herself a job at a hotel in Yarmouth.

With a beautiful and clever wife, a growing investigative business, and a baby due any day, former Bow Street Runner John Pickett finally has a respectable life far removed from his beginnings as a juvenile pickpocket in the rookeries of St. Giles.