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Books > Fiction > Genre fiction > Historical fiction
Nothing Ventured is the first thrilling novel in the William Warwick
series, by the master storyteller and bestselling author of the Clifton
Chronicles and Kane and Abel, Jeffrey Archer.
Henry dreams of silence.
Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of the early
twentieth century. But in 1921 he is beleaguered by an unhappy
marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry.
He is also struggling to write.
For fans of The Lost Apothecary or the Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, a deliciously atmospheric historical novel about the rivalry between two female mediums during Victorian London’s obsession with Spiritualism. Mrs. Violet Wood is London’s premier medium, a woman of supreme ambition whose unique abilities have earned her the admiration and trust of London’s elite. Mrs. Wood is indeed a clever and gifted seer—her skill is unmatched in predicting exactly what her wealthy patrons want to hear from the beyond. But times are changing. First, a nosey newspaperman has begun working to expose false mediums across London. Many of Mrs. Wood’s friends—and, yes, some of her foes—have fallen to his merciless accusations. Worse yet, though Mrs. Wood’s monthly séance tables are still packed, she’s noticed that it’s been harder to snare coveted new patrons. There are rumors from America of mediums materializing full spirits. . . . How long will her audiences be content with quivering tables and candle theatrics? Then, at one of Mrs Wood’s routine gatherings, she hears that most horrifying of sounds—a yawn. When a sweet girl with an uncanny talent for the craft turns up at her door, Mrs. Wood decides that a protégé will be just the thing to spice up her brand. But is Emmie Finch indeed the naïve ingenue she appears? Or has Mrs. Wood’s own downfall come knocking at last?
The exhilarating follow-up to Pat Barker's "The Women of Troy" and "The Silence of the Girls". After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle.
For a thousand years, Concordia has maintained peace between its
provinces. To mark this incredible feat, the emperor's ship embarks
upon a twelve-day voyage to the sacred Goddess's Mountain.
A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms. Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored. With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?
In this dazzling debut novel of love and secret histories, a young woman unearths the story of a lost Shanghai pencil company and a hidden family ability which will alter the path of her life forever. Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-confessed recluse, she finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and she worries about them – especially her grandmother Yun whose memory has begun to fade. Monica has become intent on tracking down her grandmother Yun’s long-lost cousin, Meng, before it’s too late. In her search, Monica connects with a young woman archivist who presents her with a single pencil that holds a clue to a hidden family history. Through this discovery Monica comes to learn of her grandmother’s years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company. As WWII raged outside their door, Yun and Meng came into a power unique to the women in their family: the ability to reclaim stories from the pencils they were written with. But when government officials uncovered their secret ability, they were both forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive. These shocking revelations set Monica on a path that will change all their lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. At once a sweeping family epic and a powerful love story with deep emotional resonance, Allison King’s brilliantly inventive debut novel pushes us to question how well we really know our own stories and the many beguiling ways they can connect our lives.
Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, bestselling author Dennis Lehane's extraordinary eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads where past meets future. Filled with a cast of richly drawn, unforgettable characters, The Given Day tells the story of two families--one black, one white--swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Coursing through the pivotal events of a turbulent epoch, it explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself.
Fourie, or Fury as he is known by the British, is among the most wanted of men. Rose, an English beauty pursued by an officer intent on capturing Fury, finds herself in a precarious position. Bound by a love that cannot be denied and separated by a war intent on destroying them, Rose and Fury find ways to meet and the line between patriotism and treachery becomes blurred. From the greed and horror of the Anglo-Boer War, to the misery and death of the concentration camps and the bravery on the battlefield, comes a story of indominable courage that will hold you captive to the very end. This is a story that weaves fictional characters into actual events that occurred during the second Anglo Boer War, without in any way modifying the role of real people involved or altering the actual outcome of historical events. Only the first battle scene is entirely fictional; all others are as recorded in history.
Eli's Promise is a masterful work of historical fiction spanning three eras—Nazi occupied Poland, the American Zone of post-war Germany, and Chicago at the height of the Vietnam War. Award-winning author Ronald H. Balson explores the human cost of war, the mixed blessings of survival, and the enduring strength of family bonds. 1939: Eli Rosen lives with his wife Esther and their young son in the Polish town of Lublin, where his family owns a construction company. As a consequence of the Nazi occupation, Eli’s company is Aryanized, appropriated and transferred to Maximilian Poleski—an unprincipled profiteer who peddles favors to Lublin’s subjugated residents. An uneasy alliance is formed; Poleski will keep the Rosen family safe if Eli will manage the business. Will Poleski honor his promise or will their relationship end in betrayal and tragedy? 1946: Eli resides with his son in a displaced persons camp in Allied-occupied Germany hoping for a visa to America. His wife has been missing since the war. One man is sneaking around the camps selling illegal visas; might he know what has happened to her? 1965: Eli rents a room in Albany Park, Chicago. He is on a mission. With patience, cunning, and relentless focus, he navigates unfamiliar streets and dangerous political backrooms, searching for the truth. Powerful and emotional, Ronald H. Balson's Eli's Promise is a rich, rewarding novel of World War II and a husband’s quest for justice.
An atmospheric, exuberant novel about love and sex, art and revolution, experimentation and creativity from the best-selling author of The Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, the acclaimed novelist Claire Berest, based on the life of their great grandmother. The year is 1908, the height of the Belle Epoque, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabriële, newly graduated from the most elite music school in Europe, meets a volcanic Spanish artist named Francis. Following a whirlwind romance, they marry and fall headlong into a Paris that is experimenting with new forms of living, thinking, and creating. Soon after marrying Francis, Gabriële meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabriële are all three involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde. Surrealism, Dada, and Abstraction are among the new artistic practices and new ideas that emerge from this electric love triangle in the following decade, during which the Belle Epoque sours and the world descends into the devastation of World War I. Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Gabriele Buffet―the protagonists of this brilliantly imagined “true novel”―are vividly reimagined by the Berests. Moving between Paris, New York, Berlin, Zurich, Barcelona, and Saint-Tropez, Gabriële is as audacious, uninhibited, and unforgettable as its central character, the mercurial, pioneering Gabriële Buffet.
After escaping the grip of the workhouse, Lily has kept her fiance's business afloat while he is away fighting on the Western Front. Still battling on, she's now doing her bit for her country as an auxiliary nurse - but one thing above all else continues to weigh heavily on her heart: her long-lost sister. Born just before her mother died, the scandal was hushed-up and the baby spirited away. But now, at last, there is hope Lily could find her little sister for she has a clue to go on: the name of the notorious baby farmer who bought the child all those years ago. Mrs Jolley. Using all her pluck, and with the help of her two friends Margie and Fanny, Lily will do anything in her power to find her little sister and save her from the dark streets of London. With Winter drawing in, and the war with no end in sight, will she be able to bring her family together?
In this timeless survival story, four indentured servants escape
their Russian Alaska work camp in a stolen canoe, only to face a
harrowing journey down the Pacific Northwest coast. Battling
unrelenting high seas and fierce weather from New Archangel,
Alaska, to Astoria, Oregon, the men struggle to avoid hostile
Tlingit Indians, to fend off starvation and exhaustion, and to
endure their own doubt and distrust. Based on an actual incident in
1853, "The Sea Runners" is a spare and awe-inspiring tale of the
human quest for freedom.
A lost gem of twentieth-century literature, Josephine Johnson’s 1934
Pulitzer Prize–winning “exquisite…heartbreakingly real” (The New York
Times Book Review) novel follows a year in the life of a family
struggling to survive the Dust Bowl.
Three women, five centuries, one spellbinding story
Set in the 1960s before Roe, a poignant and powerful novel in the vein of Lessons in Chemistry and Big Little Lies, about the friendship between a group of suburban housewives who help one another navigate through their personal challenges, marriages, and their pregnancies—both wanted and unwanted. In 1965 America, women can’t have their own bank accounts, credit cards, or sign their own leases; divorce is scandalous and difficult; and abortion is illegal. Every week, a group of suburban housewives meet for their Tuesday canasta game. As cards are drawn and discarded, the women share advice and confidences. When prim and proper Lily Berg, a doctor’s wife, discovers she’s pregnant with their second child, she follows her friend Becca’s suggestion and takes in Betsy, a pregnant teen from the local home for unwed mothers. Betsy, who’s never met anyone Jewish before, is to live with the Bergs for six months, help with babysitting and housekeeping, have her own baby, and agree never to contact the family again. But things quickly get complicated. Lily, who’s opened her home to the teenager, never planned on opening her heart, yet that’s exactly what happens. Meanwhile, Becca is pregnant with her fourth, and comes up with a scheme to get a legal, therapeutic abortion, and Lily’s sister, Rose, discovers the man she married isn’t who he purported to be, and turns to Lily and her husband for help. Moving and atmospheric, full of history and heart, In the Family Way is a timely novel that captures the experiences of women on the cusp of liberation as they struggle with their own complex feelings about being wives, mothers, and women with their own dreams and ambitions.
Jacob Hochstetler is a peace-loving Amish settler on the Pennsylvania frontier when Native American warriors, goaded on by the hostilities of the French and Indian War, attack his family one September night in 1757. Taken captive by the warriors and grieving for the family members just killed, Jacob finds his beliefs about love and nonresistance severely tested. Jacob endures a hard winter as a prisoner in an Indian longhouse. Meanwhile, some members of his congregation the first Amish settlement in America move away for fear of further attacks. Based on actual events, Jacob's Choice describes how one man's commitment to pacifism leads to a season of captivity, a complicated romance, an unrelenting search for missing family members, and an astounding act of forgiveness and reconciliation. This expanded edition of Jacob's Choice includes maps, photographs, family tree charts, and other historical documents to help readers enter the story and era of the Hochstetler family.
Now a major Disney+ original series
The Lady knows the stories: that her eyes induce madness in men.
Set in Renaissance-era Florence, this ravishing debut reimagines the intersecting lives of three ambitious young men―a banker, a priest, and a gay painter named Leonardo. Leonardo da Vinci, twelve years old and a bastard, leaves the Tuscan countryside to join his father in Florence with dreams of becoming a painter. Francesco Salviati, also a bastard and scorned for his too-dark skin, dedicates himself to the Catholic Church with grand hopes of salvation. Towering above them both is Lorenzo de’ Medici, barely a man, yet soon to be the patriarch of the world’s wealthiest and most influential bank. Each of these young men harbors profound ambition, anxious to prove their potential to their superiors―and to themselves. Each is, in his own way, a son of Florence. Each will, when their paths cross, shed blood on Florence’s streets. Fifteenth-century Florence flourishes as a haven of breathtaking artistic, cultural, and technological innovation, but discord churns below the surface: the Medici’s bank exacerbates the city’s staggering wealth inequality, and rumors swirl of a rift between Lorenzo and the new pope. Meanwhile, the city has become Europe’s preeminent destination for gay men―or “florenzers,” as they come to be crudely called. For Leonardo, an astonishingly gifted painter’s apprentice, being a florenzer might feel like personal liberation―but risk lingers around every corner. Brash and breathtaking, this lush historical drama unfolds the machinations of a city on the brink of a new age as it contends with the tensions between public and private lives, the entanglement of erotic and creative impulse, the sacrifices of the determinedly pious, and the risks of fantastic power. With his “unforgettable characters and an ever-twisting plot, all told with style, skill, and wry black humor” (Tim Leach), Phil Melanson emerges as an enthralling new voice in contemporary fiction.
THE FUN FACTORY is set in the golden decade before the Great War, when the music halls were the people's entertainment, before radio, television or cinema, and bigger than all of them. Arthur Dandoe is a gifted young comedian trying to make his way within the prestigious Fred Karno theatre company. Determined to thwart him at any cost is another ruthlessly ambitious performer - one Charlie Chaplin. Things turn even nastier when Arthur and Charlie both fall for the same girl, the irresistibly alluring Tilly Beckett. One of the two rivals is destined to become the most celebrated man on the planet, with more girls than he can shake his famous stick at. The other. . . well, you'll just have to read this book - his book. It could have been so different. |
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