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Historical Fiction October 2020
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The Cold Millions
by Jess Walter
Starring: Orphans Gig and Ryan Dolan. The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment.
Why you might like it: The Cold Millions is a stunning portrait of class division and familial bonds. In this masterful historical take on the enduring saga of America's economic divide, Jess Walter delivers nothing less than another "literary miracle" (NPR)
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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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| Here We Are by Graham SwiftWhat it is: an engaging, character-driven story set in postwar Brighton, where a dying artform has one last great summer thanks to an equally doomed variety act.
The players: show emcee Jack Robinson, the "Compere Comedian"; Jack's army buddy Ronnie Deane, who performs sleight-of-hand as "The Great Pablo"; Evie White, newly hired as the proverbial magician's "lovely assistant" until she becomes much more than that to both men she shares the stage with. |
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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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The Calculating Stars
by Mary Robinette Kowal
On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, including Washington D.C. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs.
This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space, and requires a much larger share of humanity to take part in the process.
Elma York's experience as a WASP pilot and mathematician earns her a place in the International Aerospace Coalition's attempts to put man on the moon, as a calculator. But with so many skilled and experienced women pilots and scientists involved with the program, it doesn't take long before Elma begins to wonder why they can't go into space, too.
Elma's drive to become the first Lady Astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her
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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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