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Historical Fiction October 2020
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| Northernmost by Peter GeyeWhat it's about: the parallel narratives of two members of a Norwegian family living a century apart -- tundra-stranded 19th-century fisherman Odd Einar and modern day Minnesota journalist Greta Nansen -- and their shared struggles with isolation, grief, and marital problems.
Series alert: This is the 3rd and final entry in Peter Geye's series following the Eide family, preceded by The Lighthouse Road and Wintering. |
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| The Two Mrs. Carlyles by Suzanne RindellStarring: Violet, a resourceful young woman who grew up in a San Francisco orphanage and has recently married a wealthy man; Violet's new husband Harry Carlyle, who says first wife Madeleine died in the massive earthquake that recently hit the city (in 1906).
For fans of: Daphne DuMaurier's classic novel Rebecca, which inspired this novel's gothic tone and Violet's suspicious curiosity about her husband's first wife. |
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| Jack by Marilynne RobinsonSeries alert: Jack is the 4th novel starring the characters from the Gilead series, which began as a letter from dying Presbyterian minister John Ames Broughton to his son and spans events from the Civil War to the 1950s.
This time with more...moving, star-crossed romance (it's 1957 and the titular Jack's love interest is Della, a Black woman he met in St. Louis); well-crafted dialogue (much of the story unfolds in conversations between Jack and Della); and reflections on faith (in the divine and in each other). |
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| The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. SchwabWhat it's about: Village girl Addie is chafing at the restrictions of life as a woman in early 17th-century France, so she makes a deal with the devil for "a chance to live and be free."
The problem: The devil grants her wish...literally. So now Addie is immortal, and for 300 years everyone she meets forgets her. Everyone but the man who just caught her returning some books she previously "borrowed" from a New York bookshop.
For fans of: other time-focused tales of loss, love, and loneliness such as Kate Atkinson's Life After Life or Laura Barnett's The Versions of Us. |
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The voyage of the Morning Light : a novel
by Marina Endicott
"From a critically acclaimed and beloved storyteller comes a sweeping novel set aboard the Morning Light, a Nova Scotian merchant ship sailing through the South Pacific in 1912. Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost twenty years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea travels to Nova Scotia for her long-promised marriage to the captain of the Morning Light. But she cannot abandon her orphaned young sister, so Kay too embarks on a life-changing journey to the other side of the world. At the heart of The Voyage of the Morning Light is a crystallizing moment in Micronesia: Thea, still mourning a miscarriage, forms a bond with a young boy from a remote island and takes him on board as her own son. Over time, the repercussions of this act force Kay, who considers the boy her brother, to examine her own assumptions-which are increasingly at odds with those of society around her-about what is forgivable and what is right. Inspired by a true story, Marina Endicott shows us a now-vanished world in all its wonder, and in its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty, too. She also brilliantly illuminates our present time through Kay's examination of the idea of "difference"-between people, classes, continents, cultures, customs and species. The Voyage of the Morning Light is a breathtaking novel by a writer who has an astonishing ability to bring past worlds vividly to life while revealing the moral complexity of our own"
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A Hundred Suns
by Karin Tanabe
Starring: Jessie Lesage, the American wife of a Michelin heir who travels French Indochina with her husband and daughter to oversee the family's rubber plantations.
Read it for: the heady mix of glamour, scandal, and danger surrounding Jessie's new life, especially once she learns about the abuse and oppression the Vietnamese people endure under French control.
Reviewers say: "A smart, riveting psychological thriller" (Kirkus Reviews).
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Jackie and Maria : a novel of Jackie Kennedy & Maria Callas
by Gill Paul
"Jackie Kennedy was beautiful, sophisticated, and contemplating leaving her ambitious young senator husband. Life in the public eye with an overly ambitious--and unfaithful-man who could hardly be coaxed to return from a vacation after the birth of a stillborn child was breaking her spirit. So when she's offered a holiday on the luxurious yacht owned by billionaire Ari Onassis, she says yes...to a meeting that will ultimately change her life. Maria Callas is at the height of her operatic career and widely considered to be the finest soprano in the world. And then she's introduced to Aristotle Onassis, the world's richest man and her fellow Greek. Stuck in a childless, sexless marriage, and with pressures on all sides from opera house managers and a hostile press, she finds her life being turned upside down by this hyper-intelligent and impeccably charming man... Little by little, Maria's and Jackie's lives begin to overlap, and they come closer and closer until everything they know about the world changes on a dime."
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| Breath of Earth by Beth CatoThe setting: an alternate version of the early 20th century, where magic is real and geopolitics are centered around the United Pacific alliance, a pact between Japan and the U.S. to oppose China and Great Britain respectively.
Read it for: the gutsy heroine Ingrid, the first woman geomancer who finds herself neck-deep in the conspiracy that allowed the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake to occur. |
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| The City of Brass by S.A. ChakrabortyThe setting: Eighteenth-century Cairo, where a young woman who survives as a con artist accidentally summons a djinn, who takes her back to the parallel world of the djinn to face her destiny.
Reviewers say: "This lyrical historical fantasy debut brings to vivid life the ancient mythological traditions of an Islamic world unfamiliar to most American readers" (Library Journal). |
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| Hystopia by David MeansThe setting: A version of the late 1960s where John F. Kennedy survived not only the attempt on his life in Dallas but several subsequent assassination plots, and is now in his third term in office.
What goes wrong: the president's Vietnam strategy flounders, and the influx of returning vets leads him to create a new government agency called the Psych Corps, dedicated to erasing their wartime experiences from their memories. |
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| First Cosmic Velocity by Zach PowersThe setting: It's 1964 and the USSR is completely trouncing the West in the space race. Or at least that's what the determined, inscrutable chief of the Soviet space program wants the world to believe.
The plan: to use pairs of twins (one sent on the mission and one left behind) to hide the fact that no one makes it safely back to Earth, and never tell anyone -- not even Khrushchev himself, who so believes in the program that he volunteers his own pet dog for an upcoming spaceflight. |
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| The Underground Railroad by Colson WhiteheadThe setting: an antebellum South that looks quite like the one in our reality, only the Underground Railroad literally has train tracks, inspiring the slavecatchers to create increasingly bizarre, elaborate, and disturbing obstacles between escapees and their freedom.
Reviewers say: "Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft's rococo fantasies" (Kirkus Reviews). |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Patchogue-Medford Library 54-60 East Main Street Patchogue, New York 11772 (631) 654-4700www.pmlib.org/ |
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