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Historical Fiction July 2024
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| Rednecks by Taylor BrownSet in 1920-1921 against the backdrop of the West Virginia Mine Wars, Rednecks follows a group of coal miners donning red bandanas and fighting back against unfair labor practices. The compelling story focuses on a variety of characters, including a Black World War I veteran, a Lebanese American doctor, and Ireland-born labor organizer Mother Jones. Read-alikes: Émile Zola's classic novel Germinal; Wiley Cash's The Last Ballad. |
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The lost letters from Martha's Vineyard : a novel
by Michael Callahan
When TV producer Kit O'Neill discovers her late grandmother was Mercy Welles, an Oscar-nominated actress who disappeared just as her career was taking off, she puts her investigative skills to good use, which leads her to Martha's Vineyard—the island that holds the key to the fateful summer that changed everything forever.
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| Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. ChungUsing her family history, debut novelist Eve J. Chung depicts an aristocratic mother and three daughters in 1948 China after the men of the family flee the communists, leaving them behind. But the quartet fight for survival, traveling from the country to British Hong Kong and finally Taiwan, as the middle daughter dreams of more. Read-alikes: Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah; The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. |
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A governess's guide to passion and peril
by Manda Collins
After her employer is murdered, a governess finds herself forced to work with a lord who once broke her heart in the fourth novel of the series following A Spinster's Guide to Danger and Dukes.
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The song of Sourwood Mountain
by Ann H. Gabhart
"Mira Dean is reconciled to her life as a spinster schoolteacher until preacher Gordon Covington shows up in town with an audacious marriage proposal. Following him to the mountains takes courage, but Mira will see that doors she thought closed forever may be opening after all"
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| 1795: The Order of the Furies by Niklas Natt och DagIn a Sweden roiled by revolution, amputee war veteran Mikel Cardell and investigator Cecil Winge search for a depraved killer and try to find their missing friend Anna. The final book in the Bellman Noir trilogy, this is "a brutal, satisfying end to a superior series" (Publishers Weekly). To best appreciate the history of the books, newcomers should start with the 1st entry, 1793: The Wolf and the Watchman. Read-alikes: The Alienist by Caleb Carr; the Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries by C.S. Harris. |
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| Spitting Gold by Carmella LowkisTwenty-something Baroness Sylvie Devereux agrees to help her estranged younger sister with one last spiritualist con in 1866 Paris. They target the de Jacquinots, who believe they are being haunted by an ancestor...and they just might be right. This "twisty debut plays with the conventions of the gothic novel" (Kirkus Reviews) and depicts intriguing relationships and compelling characters. Read-alikes: The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner; The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas. |
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| Ella by Diane RichardsThis "electrifying" (Publishers Weekly) first novel focuses on three pivotal years in the life of legendary singer Ella Fitzgerald. In 1932, at the age of 15, Ella begins working for the mob after her mother dies. Later, she ends up at an infamous reform school for girls. Then in 1934, she's on stage for the Apollo Theatre's famed amateur night, preparing to dance. Read-alikes: Can’t We Be Friends by Denny S. Bryce and Eliza Knight; On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. |
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| The Library Thief by Kuchenga ShenjéIn Victorian England, white-passing Florence Granger, who her father brought home from Jamaica as a baby, is kicked out after a scandal. Having learned bookbinding from him, she cleverly acquires a position restoring rare books in the forbidding Rose Hall. But events lead her to believe that Lord Belfield's late wife was murdered. For fans of: The Fraud by Zadie Smith; The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. |
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Rebel falls : a novel
by Tim Wendel
"Late in the summer of 1864, Rory Chase, a young woman with a troubled past, returns to Niagara Falls and the border with British Canada to stop Confederate spies from seizing the lone Union warship on the Great Lakes"
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The comfort of ghosts
by Jacqueline Winspear
In 1945 London, psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs visits a vacant Belgravia mansion where she finds four adolescent orphans and a demobilized, gravely ill soldier and as she tries to bring comfort to them all, she is forced to examine her own painful past and the beliefs she has always accepted as true.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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