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Historical Fiction June 2020
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| A Thousand Moons by Sebastian BarryWhat it's about: a makeshift family's story of growth and survival in Reconstruction-era Tennessee, a dangerous place to be for anyone who lives outside the lines.
Starring: Winona Cole, a 16-year-old Lakota girl first introduced in the novel Days Without End; Civil War veterans John Cole and Thomas McNulty, Winona's adoptive fathers; Tennyson and Rosalee, siblings and former slaves who later join the Cole family.
Read it for: the complex characters, lyrical language, and meditations on what it takes to build a family. |
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| Liberation by Imogen KealeyWhat it’s about: the life and work of Nancy Wake, a real-life operative for the French Resistance and Special Operations Executive that the Nazis called "the white mouse" for her ability to escape tight situations.
About the author: Imogen Kealey is the collective pseudonym of novelist Imogen Robertson and screenwriter Darby Kealey.
Media buzz: A film adaptation of the novel is in development and set to star Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway. |
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Red at the bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
As Melody celebrates a coming of age ceremony at her grandparents’ house in 2001 Brooklyn, her family remembers 1985, when Melody’s own mother prepared for a similar party that never took place in this novel about different social classes.
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A Bend in the Stars
by Rachel Barenbaum
Russia, 1914: When her physicist brother, Vanya, goes missing en route to observe a solar eclipse, Jewish surgeon Miri Abramov embarks on a desperate rescue mission, accompanied by a charming army deserter.
What's at stake: Vanya believes that photographing the eclipse will verify or disprove Einstein's general theory of relativity, while Miri fears that if the coming war doesn't kill them both, the Czar's pogroms will.
Reviewers say: "exhilarating" (Publishers Weekly).
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Conjure Women
by Afia Atakora
What it's about: The pre-and-post-slavery life of Rue, a midwife and healer who learned everything she knows from her late mother May Belle, a "conjure woman" whose skill set also included laying curses on their cruel master.
After the war...the recently emancipated people stay on the grounds of the old plantation, building a new community in the shadow of their former master's burned-out house. When the birth of strange-looking baby precedes an epidemic that Rue can't stop, a traveling preacher condemns her as a witch.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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