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Fictional and nonfiction works about, and from, the past. Discover authors from hundreds of years ago, and learn about history from writers working today.
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An extraordinary union
by Alyssa Cole
During the Civil War two undercover agents, Elle Burns, a former slave, and Malcolm McCall a detective in Pinkerton’s Secret Service uncover a plot that could lead to a Confederate victory and vow to preserve the Union at any cost.
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The song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
This epic retelling of the legend of Achilles follows Patroclus and Achilles, the golden son of King Peleus, as they, skilled in the arts of war and medicine, lay siege to Troy after Helen of Sparta is kidnapped--a cause that tests their friendship and forces them to make the ultimate sacrifice.
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A black women's history of the United States
by Daina Ramey Berry
Two award-winning history professors and authors focus on the stories of African-American women slaves, civilians, religious leaders, artists, queer icons, activists and criminals in a celebration of black womanhood that demonstrates its indelible role in shaping America.
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The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
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Incarnations : A History of India in Fifty Lives
by Sunil Khilnani
At once a provocative and sophisticated reinterpretation of India's history and an incisive commentary on its present-day conflicts and struggles, Incarnations is an authoritative, sweeping, and often moving account of a nation coming into its own.
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The widows of Malabar Hill
by Sujata Massey
A debut entry in a new series by the Agatha Award-winning author of The Sleeping Dictionary introduces Bombay's first female lawyer, Oxford graduate Perveen Mistry, as she investigates a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows living in strict purdah seclusion who become subject to a murderous guardian's schemes for their inheritances.
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Plain bad heroines : a novel
by Emily M. Danforth
A highly anticipated adult debut from the award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post follows the release of a best-selling book about an early 20th-century New England boarding school where gender-diverse students died under suspicious circumstances.
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Not just Jane : rediscovering seven amazing women writers who transformed British literature
by Shelley DeWees
Jane Austen and the Brontes endure as the leading ladies of English literature, but why are these reclusive parsons' daughters the only ones we remember? Funny and fascinating, Shelley DeWees's nonfiction debut, Not Just Jane, revisits British history through the extraordinary lives and work of seven long-forgotten authoresses--and wonders why they, and so many others, faded into obscurity (and what we are missing because of it).
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If not, winter : fragments of Sappho
by Sappho
A critically acclaimed poet and classicist presents a dramatic new translation of the poetry of Sappho, presenting all the extant fragments that exist of the ancient poet's works in both English and the original Greek and furnishing an incisive introduction to Sappho's life and times.
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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
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Inés of my soul : a novel
by Isabel Allende
Chronicles the brave deeds and passionate loves of Inés Suárez, a spirited woman who journeyed to the New World in search of her husband and, as the companion of Pedro de Valdivia, helped to found the nation of Chile.
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Melmoth : a novel
by Sarah Perry
"It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts--or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy. But, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. And then Karel disappears. . . "
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The Underground Railroad : a novel
by Colson Whitehead
The award-winning author of The Noble Hustle chronicles the daring survival story of a cotton plantation slave in Georgia, who, after suffering at the hands of both her owners and fellow slaves, races through the Underground Railroad with a relentless slave-catcher close behind.
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The time traveler's wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love. "The Time Traveler's Wife is an odd and enchanting love story. Most of us meet the person we love when we are adults, when the children we were are long gone. Henry and Clare--through the decidedly mixed blessing of Henry's Chrono-Displacement Disorder--have it both ways. It is a story of intense devotion filtered through time--of two people who share the best and worst of growing up as soulmates in a world that can change in an instant.
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Flappers : Six Women of a Dangerous Generation
by Judith MacKrell
The forefront British dance critic and award-nominated author of Bloomsbury Ballerina presents a revisionist assessment of the movement that shattered the boundaries of conventional femininity through the lives of six figures that exemplified it, including Lady Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka.
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The tale of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu
The classical novel of court life in tenth and eleventh-century Japan centers on the life and loves of a nobleman known as the shining Genji, son of an emperor, and those of Kaoru, grandson of Genji's best friend.
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Go tell it on the mountain
by James Baldwin
The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity asthe stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
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The Devil in the White City : Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
by Erik Larson
A compelling account of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 brings together the divergent stories of two very different men who played a key role in shaping the history of the event--visionary architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and Dr. Henry H. Holmes, an insatiable and charming serial killer who lured women to their deaths.
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Mexican Gothic
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The acclaimed author of Gods of Jade and Shadow returns with a darkly enchanting reimagining of Gothic fantasy, in which a spirited young woman discovers the haunting secrets of a beautiful old mansion in 1950s Mexico.
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Shakespeare / : The World As Stage
by Bill Bryson
In this much anticipated addition to the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright.
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Girl waits with gun
by Amy Stewart
Living in virtual isolation years after the revelation of a painful family secret, Constance Kopp is terrorized by a belligerent silk factory owner and fights back in ways outside the norm for early twentieth-century women.
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