|
Historical Fiction June 2025
|
|
|
|
|
The Paper Birds
by Jeanette Lynes
Set in the sweltering summer of 1943 in Toronto, The Paper Birds, is a novel about Gemma Sullivan, who works in a top-secret government codebreaking unit in Mimico, Ontario, during World War II. Gemma is hired to work at The Cottage, where she and her female colleagues labour under a lifelong oath of secrecy, breaking codes and administering top secret information during the war. The Paper Birds is a love story that reveals the struggles and sacrifices of every day working women during the war and highlights the previously unknown codebreaking work undertaken by women in Canada during WWII.
|
|
| The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie BostwickIn 1963 suburban Virginia, four married women form a book club: arty newcomer Charlotte; former Army nurse Vivian, now pregnant with her seventh child; Ohio transplant and mom-to-three Margaret; and newlywed Bitsy, who'd dreamed of being a veterinarian. Starting with Betty Friedan's controversial The Feminine Mystique, the women read, change, and draw closer over the course of a year. |
|
|
Blonde dust
by Tatiana de Rosnay
Pauline, a young chambermaid who works at the legendary Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada, is asked to step in for a colleague and clean Suite 614. Although she was told the rooms were empty, a dazed, sleepy woman appears before her. This is Mrs. Miller, aka Marilyn Monroe, whose stay in Reno coincides with the breakdown of her marriage to Arthur Miller and the filming of what was to be her last film, The Misfits. A testament to the enduring power of female friendship and a reimagining of a side of Marilyn Monroe that has never been seen before.
|
|
|
The lost masterpiece
by Barbara A. Shapiro
In a gripping novel full of plot twists, B. A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-nineteenth-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot-the one woman in their midst who never got her due-and the story of Morisot's great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited âEdouard Manet's Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life.
|
|
|
The Phoenix Pencil Company : a novel
by Allison King
A hidden and nearly forgotten magic—of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life—holds the power to transform a young woman's relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space. A first novel.
|
|
|
The stolen life of Colette Marceau
by Kristin Harmel
A new historical novel features two jewel thieves, a priceless bracelet that disappears in 1940s Paris and a quest for answers in a decades-old murder.
|
|
|
Don't forget me, little Bessie : a novel
by James Lee Burke
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Bessie Holland finds strength in a suffragette mentor, battles forces threatening her Texas home and flees to New York, where she is drawn into a violent underworld that tests her unbreakable spirit.
|
|
| The Martha's Vineyard Beach and Book Club by Martha Hall KellyInspired by real events, this compelling novel follows Mari Starwood in 2016 as she visits reclusive Martha's Vineyard painter Elizabeth, who has ties to Mari's recently deceased mother. Elizabeth tells Mari about the island during World War II, focusing on two teenage sisters who form a book club, run the family farm, and look for German U-boats and spies. |
|
Contact your librarian for more great books!
|
|
|
|
|
|