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Historical Fiction October 2025 |
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Jamaica Road
by Lisa Smith
England, 1891: Daphne lives in South London, and is the only Black girl in her class. All she wants is to keep her head down, preferably in a book - the easiest way to survive is to go unnoticed. Daphne’s attempts at invisibility are upended when a boy named Connie Small arrives from Jamaica. Connie is the opposite of small - he's lanky, outgoing, and unapologetically himself. Daphne tries to keep her distance, but Connie is magnetic, and they form an intense bond. As they navigate growing up in a volatile, rapidly changing city, their families become close, and their friendship begins to shift into something more complicated.
Trouble: When Connie reveals that he and his mother are “nuh land”—meaning they’re in England illegally—Daphne realizes that she is dangerously entangled in Connie’s fragile home life. Soon, long-buried secrets in both families threaten to tear them apart permanently.
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The Lilac People
by Milo Todd
Berlin, 1932: Bertie, a trans man, works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond. He and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. But everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The Institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.
In the final days of the war: With their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country.
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Sons and Daughters
by Chaim Grade
Poland and Lithuania, 1930s: In the tiny village of Morehdalye, gangs of Poles are beginning to boycott Jewish merchants and the modern, secular world is pressing in on the shtetl from all sides. It’s a clash, between the freethinking secular life and a life bound by religious duty.
Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s world: The world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. And now the rabbi’s youngest, Refael’ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zionists.
Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York–based Yiddish newspapers.
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The Stolen Child: A Novel
by Ann Hood
France, 1917: Nick Burns was a young soldier in the trenches of World War I, when a French artist he’d befriended thrusted both her paintings and her baby into his hands—and disappeared.
Rhode Island, 1974: Haunted by the decision he made as a young soldier and with only months left to live, Nick enlists Jenny, a college dropout desperate for adventure, to help him unravel the mystery of the child. The journey leads them from Paris galleries and provincial towns to a surprising place: the Museum of Tears, the life’s work of a lonely Italian craftsman. Determined to find the baby and the artist, hopeless romantic Jenny and curmudgeonly Nick must reckon with regret, betrayal, and the lives they’ve left behind.
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Only the Beautiful
by Susan Meissner
California, 1938: When she loses her parents in an accident, sixteen-year-old Rosanne is taken in by the owners of the vineyard where she has lived her whole life as the vinedresser’s daughter. Living in Celine and Truman Calvert’s spacious house, she feels isolated and lonely and lets her guard down. She becomes pregnant, and reveals that she sees colors when she hears sound. When she is banished by the Calverts, Rosanne believes she is bound for a home for unwed mothers, but soon finds out that she is not going to a home of any kind, but to a place far worse than anything she could have imagined.
Austria, 1947: After witnessing firsthand Adolf Hitler’s brutal pursuit of hereditary purity - especially with regard to “different children” - Helen Calvert, Truman's sister, is ready to return to America for good. But when she arrives at her brother’s peaceful vineyard after decades working abroad, she is shocked to learn what really happened nine years earlier to the vinedresser’s daughter, a girl whom Helen had long ago befriended. In her determination to find Rosanne, Helen discovers that while the war had been won in Europe, there are still terrifying battles to be fought at home.
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The Foundling
by Ann Leary
Pennsylvania, 1927: Eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She’s immediately in awe of her employer—brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel.
Changes: Mary's pride in her job and respect for her employer begin to crumble when she discovers that Lillian, her childhood best friend, was wrongfully incarcerated in the facility and begs Mary to help her escape.
Inspired by a true story about the author’s grandmother.
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The Last Carolina Girl: A Novel
by Meagan Church
North Carolina, 1935: For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest meets the shore, Leah's country life is as natural as the Loblolly pines that rise to greet the Southern sky.
Then an accident takes her father's life: Leah is wrenched from her small community and cast into a family of strangers with a terrible secret. Separated from her only home, Leah is kept apart from the family and forced to act as a helpmate for a well-to-do household. When a moment of violence and prejudice thrusts Leah into the center of the state's shameful darkness, she must fight for her own future against a world that doesn't always value the wild spirit of a Carolina girl.
Set against the very real backdrop of a newly formed state eugenics board.
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Necessary Lies
by Diane Chamberlain
North Carolina, 1960: Fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart lives with her family as tenants on a small tobacco farm, but when her parents die, Ivy is left to care for her grandmother, older sister, and nephew. As she struggles with her grandmother's aging, her sister's mental illness, and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.
Jane Forrester: When Jane takes a position as Grace County's newest social worker, she gets to know the Hart family. She wrestles with one of her responsibilities - recommending which of her clients should be sterilized without their knowledge or consent. The state's rationalization is that if her clients are poor, or ill, or deemed in some way "unfit" they should not be allowed to have children.
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Take My Hand
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she hopes to help women shape their destinies, to make their own choices for their lives and bodies.
Civil is shocked: Her new patients, Erica and India, are children—just eleven and thirteen years old - but because they are poor and Black, those handling the family’s welfare benefits have put the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica, and their family into her heart. Until one day she arrives at their door to learn the unthinkable has happened, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.
Inspired by true events.
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This Other Eden: A Novel
by Paul Harding
Maine, 1792: Formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.
1912: Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced school teacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community's fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, influenced by the popular eugenics-thinking among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination.
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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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