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Historical Fiction August 2026 |
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Between Two Fires
by Christopher Buehlman
France, 1348: Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm--that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has become their battleground.
Delirium or faith? Now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission: to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and give him a chance at redemption. As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.
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The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes
by Chanel Cleeton
Boston, 1900: For Cuban school teacher and aspiring author Eva Fuentes, traveling from Havana to Harvard to study for the summer is the opportunity of a lifetime. It's a whirlwind adventure that leaves her little time to write, but a moonlit encounter with an enigmatic stranger changes everything. The story that pours out of her is one of forbidden love, secrets, and lies...
Havana, 1966: Librarian Pilar Castillo has devoted her life to books. In the chaotic days following her husband's unjust imprisonment by Fidel Castro, a neighbor fleeing Cuba asks her to return a valuable book to its rightful owner.
London, 2024: American expat Margo Reynolds is renowned for her talent at sourcing rare antiques for her clients. She's been hired to find the single copy of a mysterious book published over a century ago. But her client isn't the only person determined to procure it - at any cost.
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| Single Girls by John SearlesNew York City, 1965: Helen Gurley Brown, a soft spoken, self-professed “mouseburger,” is fresh off the runaway success of her book Sex and the Single Girl -- a revolutionary call to single women urging them not to rush into marriage on anyone’s timeline but their own, and, even more radically, to enjoy their sex lives, gloriously free of shame.
Cosmopolitan Magazine: Moved by the thousands of letters arriving at her doorstep from readers desperate for advice, Helen searches for a perch from which to dispense her unconventional wisdom. She is hired as the editor of the flailing magazine. Helen quickly assembles a team of smart, savvy single girls up to the task of reimagining the magazine, navigating gender roles and workplace power dynamics long before these issues entered the headlines. |
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| Summer of Love by Kerri MaherSan Francisco, 1967: Poet Winnie Hartley and her musician boyfriend live together in the midst of San Francisco's counterculture, but their union is volatile. Further up the coast, Winnie's sister Miranda throws herself into running the family business, Hartley Vineyard, determined to make California wine that rivals French.
2015: Dawn Hartley has a secret that she can’t share with her mother Miranda. How can she possibly admit that she has a drinking problem to her famous vintner mother? When an assignment for work requires her to research the wildly popular Vineland novels by a famously anonymous writer, she is astonished at how the books perfectly describe her family vineyard. She embarks on a quest that will shake her to the core, and just might set her life on the right path at last. |
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
by Stephen Graham Jones
Montana, 2012: A diary is discovered within a wall by a construction worker, and lands in the hands of Etsy, a professor. It is written by her ancestor, a Lutheran pastor.
1912: The diary of Pastor Arthur Beaucarne is a journal transcribing the chilling confessions of Good Stab, a Blackfeet man recounting his unnaturally long life and existence as an Indigenous vampire seeking justice and reckoning with historical atrocities. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow.
This historical horror novel is an American Indian revenge story. Warning: Brutal and bloody.
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Cuyahoga: A Novel
by Pete Beatty
Ohio, 1837: Big Son, with his broad shoulders, shiny hair, and church-organ laugh, practically made Ohio City all by himself. In pursuit of a steady wage, our hero hits the (dirt) streets of Ohio City and Cleveland, the twin towns racing to become the first great metropolis of the West. Medium Son—known as Meed—apprentice coffin maker, almanac author, orphan, is the younger brother of Big. Their rivalry reaches a boil, over the building of a bridge across the Cuyahoga River.
Resulting misadventures: Meed describes the brothers encounters involving elderly terrorists, infrastructure collapse, steamboat races, wild pigs, and multiple ruined weddings.
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Gilded Mountain
by Kate Manning
Colorado, early 1900s: Sylvie Pelletier leaves her family’s snowbound mountain cabin to work in a manor house for the Padgetts, owners of the marble-mining company that employs her father and dominates the town. Sharp-eyed Sylvie is awed by the luxury around her; fascinated by her employer, the charming “Countess” Inge, and confused by the erratic affections of Jasper, the bookish heir to the family fortune.
Outside the manor walls: The town of Moonstone is roiling with discontent. A handsome union organizer, along with labor leader Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, is stirring up the quarry workers. The editor of the local newspaper—a bold woman who takes Sylvie on as an apprentice—is publishing unflattering accounts of the Padgett Company. Sylvie navigates vastly different worlds and struggles to find her way amid conflicting loyalties. When the harsh winter brings tragedy, Sylvie decides to act.
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Go West, Young Man
by William W. Johnstone
Missouri, 1860: Rumors of war between the North and South are spreading across the land. In rural Green County, many of the farmers are already choosing sides. But not John Zachary. His loyalties lie with his family first--and his heart is telling him to go west. Hoping to build a new life in the fertile valleys of Oregon, he convinces his best friend, Emmitt Braxton, to pack up their families and join him on a wagon train across the Oregon Trail.
The journey will be long and hard: Twenty-seven wagons. Twenty-seven different hopes and dreams. The physical hardships and grueling mental challenges will bring out the best in the some--and the worst in others. But with the guidance of an experienced wagon master and scout, they are determined to reach their destiny, no matter how high the cost...
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Montana 1948
by Larry Watson
Montana, 1948: In the summer of his twelfth year, David Hayden witnessed and experienced a series of cataclysmic events that would forever change the way he saw his family. The Haydens had been pillars of their small Montana town: David's father was the town sheriff; his uncle Frank was a war hero and respected doctor.
The revelation: The Hayden's Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, tells them that Frank has been sexually assaulting his female Indian patients for years--and that she herself was his latest victim. As the tragic fallout unravels around David, he learns that truth is not always what one believes it to be.
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The Paragon Hotel
by Lyndsay Faye
Oregon, 1921: Alice James, a gun moll with a knack for disappearing, flees from Prohibition-era Harlem to Portland with a bullet wound, a lifetime's experience battling the New York Mafia, and fifty thousand dollars in illicit cash.
Safety: She befriends Max, a black Pullman porter who reminds her achingly of home and who saves Alice by leading her to the Paragon Hotel. But her unlikely sanctuary turns out to be an all-black hotel in a Jim Crow city, and its lodgers seem unduly terrified of a white woman on the premises. As she meets the churlish Dr. Pendleton, the stately Mavereen, and the club chanteuse Blossom Fontaine, she understands their dread. The Ku Klux Klan has arrived in Portland in fearful numbers--burning crosses, electing officials, infiltrating newspapers, and brutalizing blacks. And then there's the missing mulatto child Davy Lee...
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Longwood Public Library800 Middle Country RoadMiddle Island, New York 11953
(631) 924-6400
longwoodlibrary.org |
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