Historical fiction Books

From debut Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Mapepa comes the saga of the four Taha sisters, and the indomitable matriarch who carried her daughters - and her community - through times of drought and violence in their Harare neighbourhood.From the red soil of her...

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, the complete collection of her multiple award-winning City of Kings trilogy, includingThe Theory of Flight,The History of Man,andThe Quality of Mercy"Perhaps the most monumental trilogy to...

A whirlwind tour of San Francisco's fabled queer bohemia in the waning days of the 20th century, as the city's budget bon vivants work to save their eccentric lifestyles in the face of tech gentrification by LAMBDA award finalist Alvin Orloff.Harris, San...

'A very accomplished novel' Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin 'Hard to put this book down' Sofka Zinovieff 'An epic, page turning story, of longing and bravery... a must read' Nadia Marks Calliope is a young schoolmistress in the...

'Fresh, authentic and darkly funny. It's a beautifully told story full of warmth and emotion without ever being sentimental - I absolutely loved it' Ruth Hogan, bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost ThingsIt's the heatwave summer of 1976 and...

Victoria Swann is a successful author of romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of women's rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page. Everything changes for Victoria when she goes...

The novels O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My ntonia made Willa Cather's reputation and, though published separately, are nowstudied together as Willa Cather's Great Plains Trilogy. These three novels, set in Nebraska and Colorado, cemented...

In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow,...

It is Paris in the 1880s and the century is in its final decadent throes as it moves towards the fin de siecle. New scientific ideas are countered by a resurgent interest in the practice of magic, whilst in the arts the Symbolists are exploring the...

Spain, 1920s. The lives of three Carmelite nuns intersect and develop through a period of intense experience. In their personal histories there is great contrast, from the artistic exuberance of Paris in 'La Belle Epoque' to slavery in...

In 1638, Cassandra Southwick wonders if she has made an enormous mistake. She made the epic journey to Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony with her husband and their five children to escape religious persecution. She expects a freer life in the New World.....

In Three Fires,award-winning author Denise Mina re-imagines the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', a series of fires lit throughout Florence at the end of the fifteenth century - inspired by the fanatical Girolamo Savonarola.Girolamo Savonarola...

How far would you go to save yourself when the truth can't set you free?Scotland, 1589.Besse Craw is a young mother whose husband has mysteriously vanished. And in a time when women were powerless, she is accused of witchcraft, abused by her employer,...

17th century northern Nigeria. A royal messenger has died under suspicious circumstances. Tasked with investigating the death, a Durbar warrior and his young apprentice must endure trials of loyalty, betrayal, and sacrifice to solve the mystery and...

Banished from her parents' farm to a boarding school for young ladies, Ivy feels utterly alone. In a crumbling and isolated seminary that has seen better days, she is shunned by the other pupils for her working-class origins, and mourns for her sister,...

A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century ManhattanRavage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side-the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century-in...

A road novel, a coming-of-age tale, and a raunchy slapstick comedy that tells-in careening, charismatic prose-the (true) story of the theft of the body of Saint John of the Cross.In August 1592, a bailiff and his two assistants arrive at the monastery of...

The Arabian Nights is your magic carpet ride to exotic lands full of wonders and marvels. First collected nearly a thousand years ago, these folktales are presented as stories that crafty Scheherazade tells her husband, King Shahryar, over a...

This unabridged, annotated English translation of Jacopo Caviceo's Peregrino brings this popular Italian Renaissance romance to English readers for the first time.Jacopo Caviceo's Peregrino (1508) was a popular Renaissance prose romance in Italy, France,...

A battle lost. A daring escape. A long walk into obscurity. The ultimate failure....In the aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Culloden, a lonely figure takes flight with a small band of companions through the islands and mountains of the Hebrides. His...

'Beautifully written and sensitively observed'- Hazel Gaynor, author, The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter'Beautifully written and thought-provoking'- Ruth Hogan, author, The Keeper of Lost ThingsINSPIRED BY ONE...

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award in the Translation CategoryA Quebec bestseller based on the life of Michel Jean's great-grandmother that delivers an empathetic portrait of drastic change in an Innu community.Kukum recounts the story of...

1941, Berlin. After Police Chief Investigator Rolf Schneider is summoned to a meeting with Himmler and tasked with investigating the assassination of Heydrich, he exposes a web of corruption and secrecy involving the highest-ranking figures in the Reich...

It's 1927 and Prohibition is in full effect in St. Louis, Missouri. Organised crime has risen to meet the relentless demand for illicit alcohol. Bootleggers, gangsters, and might-makes-right rule dominate the city's underworld, fueled by the patrons of...

The Bee and the Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson presents a lifelong exchange of unknown letters between Dickinson, the reclusive poet, and Alcott, the most renowned author of the time.What could Alcott say to...

Amid a mountain of rain-soaked donations to the Ohnita Harbor Public Library rummage sale, Gabriela Domenici finds a small box that contains an odd-looking cross. When the carved center turns out to be ivory and a clue links the cross to Catherine of...

In the alternate history novel The New Empire, the world undergoes a drastic change in the 14th century when Chinese ships land on the west coast of what we know as the Bay Area of California. Fast forward four hundred years to a much different America...

How do you stay alive when everybody wants you dead? The Devil Hound, set in mid-eighteen century Europe and the Americas, as an evil priest dedicates his life to destroying two innocent Romani (Gypsy) brothers because of their ethnic origin and because...

During the course of his career, poet-writer Baron Wormser has investigated the hearts of many matters. In Some Months in 1968, he portrays the Brownsons, a family of five living in suburban Baltimore, who experience one of the most tumultuous moments in...

Kathryn Lasky has written an exciting new adult amateur sleuth mystery set in New Mexico in the 1930s. The sleuth is GeorgiaO'Keefe, who actually did suffer a nervous breakdown in 1933 when her husband Alfred Stieglitz had a somewhat public affair, was...

Winner of 5 major book awards, including thePublishersWeeklyU.S.2021 Selfies Award for Best Adult Fiction and winner of theIndieReader2021Discovery Award."L'Origine got me hooked-what a story! Milgrom brings the reader right along on her adventures as a...

"One of those rare biographical novels that bring a whole world to life in a way that lingers in memory." -Jay Parini, author of Borges and MeThis absorbing, sensitive novel portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal...

Follow along in the story of Jesus' Silent Years in this final chapter of the hero's development as His suffering finally pays off He's survived starvation, plague, and prison. He's taken his friends for an air-walk above a castle wall. Now join Jesus as...

Winner of the Dzanc Prize for Fiction A work of brilliant and innovative historical fiction, Asylum delves into the disturbing and seductive relationship between a young hysteric named Augustine and renowned nineteenth-century French neurologist J.M...

In August of 1844, a man named Leonard Reed takes violently ill at his home near Heathsville, Illinois, and four days later he is dead. The cause? Arsenic poisoning.The suspect? His wife, Betsey.The chief witnesses against her? A hired girl, Eveline...

Brilliant debut author with strong connections in the literary world, whose work will appeal to fans of Lindsey Drager, Matt Bell, Brian Evenson, and Jenny Offill. Quinn's accolades include the Meridian Editor's Prize inProse, The Cupboard Pamphlet's...

Haunted by the loss of her parents and twin sister at sea, Henna cloisters herself in a Northeastern village where the snow never stops. When she discovers the body of a young woman at the edge of the forest, she's plunged into the mystery of a...

New illustrations by Tim Foley and a new foreword by author Robert Wheeler catapult this timeless classic by Ernest Hemingway into the twenty-first century with vigour.For nearly a century, The Sun Also Rises has endured as one of Hemingway's...

"As much a love letter to the cathedral as it is the story of two doomed lovers." --Smithsonian Magazine Written in 1831, The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo is a beloved French gothic novel which centers around the wondrous Notre Dame Cathedral...

2023 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Long List2023 Book of the Year, Southern Literary ReviewNamed a 2023 Great Group read, Women's National Book AssociationA South Carolina family endures one life-shattering day in 1961 in a town that lies in the shadow...

How do you turn old gold into priceless treasure? At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigurlina finds herself in a hopeless situation. She is themotherless daughter of an eccentric father, who expects her to spend her life helping himcatalogue...

A claim of justice for the losers of history with echoes of authors as different as Joseph Conrad, Alejo Carpentier, and David Mitchell.The conquest of Mexico is over, and Juan de Toanes is one of so many soldiers without glory who roam like beggars for...

Above all, Berthe Morisot yearns to be a professional artist. Despite the skepticism of her parents and the male-dominated conservatism of the Parisian art world, Berthe pursues her artistic passion. Chafing under the tutelage of traditional masters,...

A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combatSalinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter...

"A perfect book."Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and Genet: A BiographyIn June 1897, the young Constantine Cavafy arrives in Paris on the last stop of a long European tour, a trip that will deeply shape his future and push him toward his poetic...

From debut novelist Maris Lawyer, The Blue Line Down is a breakneck tale of betrayal, loyalty, and unexpected homecoming.Jude Washer wants to run: away from the coal mines where he is destined to work, away from his father's abuse of his little brother,...

A woman's feminist awakening drives a hypocritical village to madness in rural Uruguay in this "wild, brutal paean to freedom" (NPR.org). Shortlisted for the National Translation Award "Somers' feminism is profound, and complicated." -NPR.org "A...

There's No Story There is about the lives of conscripted workers at Statevale, an enormous rural munitions factory somewhere in England during the Second World War.The workers are making shells and bombs, and no chances can be taken with so much...