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Historical Fiction August 2020
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Aria : a novel
by Nazanine Hozar
Tehran, Iran, 1953: A driver named Behrouz discovers an abandoned baby in an alleyway and adopts her, naming her Aria. As she grows, Aria is torn between the three women fated to mother her: the wife of Behrouz, who beats her; the wealthy widow Fereshteh, who offers her refuge but cannot offer her love, and the impoverished Mehri, whose secrets will shatter everything Aria thought she knew about her life.
Winds of Change: Aria's story is told against the backdrop of Iran's political and religious changes and eventual revolution in 1979.
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The lost jewels : a novel
by Kirsty Manning
London, England, 1912: Essie Murphy, an impoverished Irish immigrant is visiting her brother when a workman uncovers a stash of treasure beneath the floor of an old tenement house in Cheapside.
Boston, Present Day: Respected American jewelry historian, Kate Kirby, has uncovered a series of sketches in her great-grandmother’s papers linking her suffragette great-grandmother Essie to the Cheapside collection. When she receives a call about the lost Cheapside jewels she and photographer Marcus Holt, chase down the history of the Cheapside gems and jewels, especially the story of a small diamond champlevé enamel ring.
Based on a true story.
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The orphan collector
by Ellen Marie Wiseman
Philadelphia, 1918: Pia Lange, a thirteen-year-old German immigrant longs to be far from her overcrowded streets and slums, and the anti-German sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army, hoping to prove his loyalty. With no food at home, Pia must venture out in search of supplies, leaving her infant twin brothers alone.
Spanish influenza is spreading through the city: Since her baby died days ago, Bernice Groves has been lost in grief and bitterness. She makes a shocking, life-altering decision that leads her on a sinister mission: to transform the city’s orphans and immigrant children into what she feels are “true Americans.”
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The two Mrs. Carlyles
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Suzanne Rindell
San Francisco, Early 1900's: Rendered unexpectedly wealthy by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Violet reinvents herself as the second wife of the city’s most eligible widower only to find her happiness overshadowed by the specter of her predecessor and her own violent past.
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Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell London, 1967-1968: Folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet, and blues bassist Dean Moss are Utopia Avenue, a fictional rock band. Follow them from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 through the clubs of Soho and drafty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, and on to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.
What you will find: Their journey to stardom, which takes them through a tangled web of drugs, social upheaval, clashing egos, and mental illness. | | 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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Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey
by Kathleen Rooney
A tale based on true events follows the experiences of an army officer who answers the call to service during World War II before his life is astonishingly reshaped by his battlefield encounters with a messenger pigeon.
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Enchantress of Numbers: a Novel of Ada Lovelace by Jennifer Chiaverini What it's about: the unusual childhood and later life of mathematician and aristocrat Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate child of legendary English poet Lord Byron and creator of the first computer program.
Don't miss: the development of Ada's complex relationship with her mother, who was desperate to keep Ada from turning out like her dissolute father.
Reviewers say: "a wonderful blend of history and fiction, poetry and math" (Publishers Weekly). | | The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry What it's about: Victorian era widow and aspiring naturalist Cora Seaborne relocates to coastal Essex to look for evidence of a local cryptid, a huge sea serpent that allegedly has the wings of a dragon.
You might also like: Other novels that deal with the intersection of natural (and unnatural) phenomena and the social expectations placed on young women, such as The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff, Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, or The Great Unknown by Peg Kingman. | | Trinity by Louisa Hall What it is: a mosaic novel about physicist and Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, told from the perspectives of seven different characters.
About the author: Louisa Hall's previous novel, Speak, also employed interconnected narratives to explore humanity's conflicted relationship with world-altering technologies.
Reviewers say: "Its genius is not to explain but to embody the science and politics that shaped Oppenheimer’s life" (The New York Times). | |
Contact your librarian for more great books!
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