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Historical Fiction August 2025 |
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Bellevue: A Novel
by Robin Cook
New York, Present: Twenty-three-year-old Michael “Mitt” Fuller starts his surgical residency with great anticipation at the nearly three-hundred-year-old, iconic Bellevue Hospital, following in the footsteps of four previous, celebrated Fuller generations.
Visions begin to plague Mitt: Visions of a little girl in a bloodstained dress, bloodcurdling screams in the distance, and worse. As bodies mount and Mitt’s stress level rises, he finds himself drawn to the monumental, abandoned Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital building, which to his astonishment has somehow defied the wrecking-ball and still stands a few doors north of the modern Bellevue Hospital high-rise.
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Mrs. Winchester's Biographer
by Deanna Lynn Sletten
California, 1918: Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, has read and heard all the newspaper stories written about her. Snob. Crazy. Insane. Spiritualist. Ghosts. Séances. The list goes on and on. At the age of seventy-nine, she’s lived an incredible life and her wealth has allowed her to live as she pleased. She has decided to compile her life story. Her lawyer sends Olivia Collins to assist her.
Today: Morgan Connors is helping her mother go through her recently deceased grandmother’s possessions when she comes upon an old manuscript - Sarah Winchester’s Autobiography. Morgan works as an acquisition editor at a publisher in San Francisco and knows that no such book has ever been published. When her mother explains that Morgan’s great-great-grandmother, Olivia Collins, once worked for Mrs. Winchester, she’s intrigued. Who was Olivia Collins, and why did she have a manuscript of Sarah Winchester’s life story?
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| Typewriter Beach by Meg Waite ClaytonCalifornia, 1957: Isabella Giori is ten months into a standard seven-year studio contract when she auditions with Hitchcock. Just weeks later, she is sequestered by the studio’s “fixer” in a tiny Carmel cottage, waiting and dreading. Her nextdoor neighbor, Léon Chazan is annoyed as hell when Iz interrupts his work on yet another screenplay he won’t be able to sell, because he’s been blacklisted. Soon, they’re together in his roadster, speeding down the fog-shrouded Big Sur coast.
2018: Twenty-six-year-old screenwriter Gemma Chazan, in Carmel to sell her grandfather’s cottage, finds a hidden safe full of secrets—raising questions about who the screenwriter known simply as Chazan really was, and whether she can live up to his name. |
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| Tyrant by Conn IgguldenAncient Rome, 50 AD: Agrippina has skillfully maneuvered her way to power by becoming Emperor Claudius' fourth wife and now works to ensure her position and that of her son, Lucius, by manipulating Claudius into adopting him.
Vying for power: Lucius becomes Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, a member of the imperial family. But, this is merely the first of many moves in the game of power, as mother and son risk everything—their alliances and betrayals, their cruelties and crimes, their brilliance and their ambition. |
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| Wayward Girls by Susan WiggsBuffalo, New York, 1968: Good Shepherd is a dark and secretive institution controlled by Sisters of Charity nuns. Girls are condemned to forced labor in the laundry of this Catholic reform school. Their 'crimes' include being gay, pregnant, or simply unruly.
6 of the girls: Mairin is a free-spirited daughter of Irish immigrants, who is committed to keep her safe from her stepfather; Angela, denounced for her attraction to girls, is sent to the nuns for reform, but instead finds herself the victim of a predator; Helen is the daughter of intellectuals who are detained in Communist China - her “temporary” stay at the Good Shepherd stretches into years; Odessa is caught up in a police dragnet over a racial incident, and finds the physical and mental toughness to endure her sentence; Denise, sentenced for brawling in a foster home, dared to dream of a better life; and Janice, deeply insecure, can't decide where her loyalties lie—except when it comes to her friend Kay.
Based on a real place. |
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| Angel Down by Daniel KrausFrance, WWI: Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.
What they find: Amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell. |
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The Granddaughter
by Bernhard Schlink / Charlotte Collins
Germany, 1964: When Birgit dies suddenly her husband, Kaspar discovers the price she paid years earlier, when she fled East Germany to join him - she had to abandon her baby. Shattered by grief, yet animated by a new hope, Kaspar closes up his bookshop in present day Berlin and sets off to find her lost child in the east.
His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, intent on reclaiming and settling ancestral lands to the East. Among them, Kaspar encounters Svenja, a woman whose eyes, hair, and even voice remind him of Birgit. Beside her is a red-haired, slouching, fifteen-year-old girl. His granddaughter? Their worlds could not be more different— an ideological gulf of mistrust yawns between them— but he is determined to accept her as his own.
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins.
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Homeseeking
by Karissa Chen
Los Angeles, Present: Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.
Beginnings: Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.
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| How to Dodge a Cannonball by Dennard DayleUnited States, Civil War: Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler—until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate—until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.
His new brothers: They include a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle’s satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone’s definition of loyalty. |
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| The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau by Kristin HarmelFrance, 1942: Colette's mother, Annabel, is arrested by the Germans, and her four-year-old sister, Liliane, disappears in the chaos of the raid, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel is executed, and Liliane’s body is found floating in the Seine—but the bracelet is nowhere to be found.
Boston, 2018: Colette, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother Annabel - take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need has done her best to put her tragic past behind her. But her life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston. If Colette can discover where it has been all this time—and who owns it now—she may finally learn the truth about what happened to her sister. |
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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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