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Historical Fiction June 2026 |
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| The Foursome by Christina Baker KlineUsing their tour earnings, famous cojoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker settle in 1839 North Carolina, buying land and enslaved people and making powerful local friends. Sarah and Adelaide Yates, sisters from a once-prominent family, become their wives and collectively they have 21 children. Told from Sarah's perspective over the course of several decades, this "remarkable" (Publishers Weekly) novel is based on the author's family history. |
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Land
by Maggie O'Farrell
The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tom and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tom, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster. Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion.
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The Other Bennet Sister
by Janice Hadlow
Mary, the bookish ugly duckling of Pride and Prejudice's five Bennet sisters, emerges from the shadows and transforms into a desired woman with choices of her own. What if Mary Bennet's life took a different path from that laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice? What if the frustrated intellectual of the Bennet family, the marginalized middle daughter, the plain girl who takes refuge in her books, eventually found the fulfillment enjoyed by her prettier, more confident sisters? This is the plot of Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister, a debut novel with exactly the affection and authority to satisfy Jane Austen fans.
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The Double Life of Eve Sinclair
by C. C. Humphreys
The Alice Network meets The Nightingale in this romantic and suspenseful novel about a female spy who must push herself to her very limits to save herself and everything she holds dear--from nationally bestselling author and master of historical fiction C.C. Humphreys.
It's 1939, and Stockholm is a sea of spies. Yet Eve Sinclair couldn't care less. Nineteen years old, beautiful, born in Montreal into privilege and educated to do little more than make a good marriage, she appears to have succeeded when she weds handsome diplomat Richard Spence and follows him to Stockholm. But, like so much in this city, Eve will discover that her marriage is not what it seems. Raised to expect only one life, she soon finds herself thrust into another one entirely--dark, corrupt and very, very dangerous.
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The Hired Man
by Sandra Dallas
The Dust Bowl sweeps a handsome stranger into a small Colorado town to dangerous effect. It's been seven years since the dust storms started in Colorado. Folks can barely remember a time when the clouds were filled with rain instead of dirt, and when the fields were green instead of brown. High school student Martha Helen Kessler and her family are luckier than most; they still eke out a living from the land. Even so, evidence of the Dust Bowl's grim impact on families, especially on the women who bear the brunt of their husbands' frustration and their children's hunger, is everywhere. When Martha Helen's compassionate mother insists they take in Otis Hobbs, a handsome drifter who saves a local boy from a vicious storm, she quickly discovers a darker side to their rural community.
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Daughters of the Sun and Moon
by Lisa See
In 1870, three Chinese women arrive in the small, dusty, and violent pueblo of Los Angeles. Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar, is entrancing and innocent. Petal, the big-footed daughter of peasants, has grown up hungry and with dirt between her toes. Moon is married to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. She is educated, speaks fluent English, and has been endowed with a face of great beauty, yet her failed footbinding as a child has left her with a limp that lessens her value in the eyes of many. Each woman has her own desires.
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| The Mountains We Call Home by Kim Michele RichardsonPack horse librarian Cussy marries for love, but she's a Blue (caused by methemoglobinemia) and her husband is white, so in 1953 both are thrown into Kentucky prisons for miscegenation. Cussy works her way to a prison librarian position, but incarceration holds many dangers. Newcomers can start here, but fans of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, which begins Cussy's story, will best enjoy this atmospheric, well-researched novel. |
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The Novice of Holloway Hall
by Wayne Johnston
At twenty-eight, Vivvy Holloway is nearly the same height as when she was five. Though she hides her face behind a veil, a different colour and fabric for each day of the week, she brandishes an acerbic wit that far outweighs her small stature. Having just spent eight years of the 1930s in a convent failing to become a nun, Vivvy is now returning to Holloway Hall, the largest private dwelling in Newfoundland and the crumbling seat of her formidable family.
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| A Perfect Hand by Ayelet WaldmanIn 1879 England, clever Alice Lockey has risen from tenant farmer's daughter to lady's maid for the eldest daughter at Alderwick Park. In a ploy to spend time with handsome valet Charlie, Alice tries to end her lady's infatuation with one (no-good) man and push her toward Charlie's employer. If they marry, then Alice and Charlie can work together as husband and wife. But soon the women's suffrage movement causes Alice to ponder what she really wants. For fans of: amusing, richly detailed stories of class, gender, and changing times. |
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A Pair of Aces
by Marie Benedict
A gripping novel about two trailblazing women on opposite sides of the law--a prosecutor and a madam--who team up to bring down notorious Mob boss Lucky Luciano in 1930s New York, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the million-copy bestseller The Personal Librarian.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (English Edition): The Enduring American Classic of Sin and Redemption
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter, ranked No. 16 in The Guardian's Best 100 Novels in English (2015), is Nathaniel Hawthorne's haunting masterpiece of sin, secrecy, and moral judgment. In Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet A as a public mark of adultery, yet she refuses to betray the father of her child. This is the English-language paperback edition of the classic novel. First published by Ticknor, Reed and Fields, Boston, 1850. The present text follows the second edition of 1850, including Hawthorne's added preface.
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The Windsor Affair
by Melanie Benjamin
A scandalous affair. A power struggle for the throne. A sensational rivalry between an English queen and an American social climber. Feuding Windsor brothers and their wives--some things, it seems, never change. The Windsor Affair recreates the cataclysmic events that nearly toppled the monarchy and incited the power struggle between Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and Wallis Simpson. Told from the perspective of both women, the novel propels readers into the fabulous world of the debonair Prince of Wales and the glittering private lives of the Windsors.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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