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Historical Fiction July 2020
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The Lions of Fifth Avenue
by
Fiona Davis
It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life: her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. But when valuable books are stolen back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves, she's forced to confront her shifting priorities head on . . . and may just lose everything in the process.
Eighty years later, in 1993, Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the famous essayist Laura Lyons, especially after she's wrangled her dream job as a curator at the New York Public Library. But the job quickly becomes a nightmare when rare manuscripts, notes, and books for the exhibit Sadie's running begin disappearing from the library's famous Berg Collection.
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Bonnie
by
Christina Schwarz
Born in a small town in the desolate reaches of western Texas and shaped by her girlhood in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Dallas, Bonnie Parker was a natural performer and a star student. She dreamed of being a movie star or a singer or a poet. But her dramatic nature, contorted by her limited opportunities and her overwhelming love for Clyde Barrow, pushed her into a course from which there was no escape but death.
Infusing the psychological acuity of literary fiction with the relentless pacing of a thriller, Bonnie follows Bonnie from her bright, promising youth to her final month of shoot-outs, kidnappings, and desperate car chases through America's hinterland in the grip of the Great Depression, as the noose of the law tightened around her.
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Truths I Never Told You by Kelly Rimmer Beth Walsh is dealing with postpartum depression when she stumbles upon a copy of her deceased mother Grace's journals, which detail her own struggle with the disease in the 1950s.
Instead of the solace and validation she expected to find reading her mother's story, Beth uncovers a disturbing family secret that can only be explained by her father, who would have been uncooperative even before he developed advanced dementia. | | Katheryn Howard: The Scandalous Queen by Alison Weir The tragic story of Henry VIII's fifth wife, a nineteen-year-old beauty with a hidden past, in this fifth novel in the sweeping Six Tudor Queens series. In the spring of 1540, Henry VIII, desperate to be rid of his queen, Anna of Kleve, first sets eyes on the enchanting Katheryn Howard. Although the king is now an ailing forty-nine-year-old measuring fifty-four inches around his waist, his amorous gaze lights upon the pretty teenager. Seated near him intentionally by her ambitious Catholic family, Katheryn readily succumbs to the courtship. Henry is besotted with his bride. He tells the world she is a rose without a thorn, and extols her beauty and her virtue. Katherine delights in the pleasures of being queen and the power she has to do good to others. She comes to love the ailing, obese king and tolerate his nightly attentions. If she can bear him a son, her triumph will be complete. But Katheryn has a past of which Henry knows nothing, and which comes back increasingly to haunt her--even as she courts danger yet again. | | Above the Bay of Angels by Rhys Bowen A tragic accident presents an unexpected opportunity for Bella Waverly to pursue her seemingly impossible dream of becoming a chef, but only if she's willing to lie about who she is.
Now known as Helen, Bella is able to get a job working in Queen Victoria's kitchens, where she begins to make a name for herself. But when a duke dies by poison, Bella is a suspect and must find a way to save herself without revealing that she entered the Queen's service under false pretenses. | | His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae by Graeme Macrae Burnet Everyone agrees that the young crofter Roderick Macrae is obviously guilty of the 1869 brutal triple murder that occurred in his remote Scottish village, but no one -- not the investigators, not his neighbors, not the courts -- can agree on why.
The story is told from multiple perspectives and is framed as a journey through the documents generated over the course of the investigation, including newspapers, the testimony of Roderick's community, extracts from the book of an "expert" in the emerging field of forensics, and trial transcripts. | | Chariot on the Mountain by Jack Ford Based on a real trial, this compelling and suspenseful novel tells the story of Kitty Payne, a freed slave who successfully brought a court case against a white man in antebellum Virginia who kidnapped and attempted to make her a slave again.
Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Jack Ford is also the author of The Walls of Jericho, a murder mystery set in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era. | | The Unquiet Grave by Sharyn McCrumb An atmospheric and richly detailed look at the 1897 "Greenbrier Ghost" murder case, in which a West Virginia mother convinced the authorities to reopen the investigation of her daughter's death after testifying that the young woman's ghost paid her a visit.
The story of the trial is told through the eyes of James Gardner, a black attorney who was part of the defense team during the Greenbrier trial and who readers first meet in 1930, after he has been committed to an insane asylum. | |
Contact your librarian for more great books!
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