Historical Fiction
September 2024
Recent Releases
Beyond Summerland
by Jenny Lecoat

After World War II ends and the English island of Jersey is liberated from its German occupiers, 19-year-old Jean Parris learns that her father, arrested 15 months earlier for owning a radio, may have been turned in by a neighbor. She sets out to uncover the truth while keeping a dangerous secret of her own. Read-alikes: Kate Thompson's The Wartime Book Club; Jacqueline Winspear's The White Lady; Ruth Druart's The Last Hours in Paris. 
Wild and Distant Seas
by Tara Karr Roberts

Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island's small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together, was once all she needed-but now Hosea is gone, lost at sea. Evangeline is only able to hold on to his inn, and her place on the island, by employing a curious gift to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those who would cast her out. One night, an idealistic sailor appears on her doorstep asking her to call him Ishmael. He seeks only a warm bed and a bowl of chowder, and yet suddenly, unsettlingly, her careful illusion begins to fracture. He soon sails away with Ahab to hunt an infamous white whale, and Evangeline is left to forge a new life from the pieces that remain.
Pale Shadows 
by Dominique Fortier

Grieving the loss of her sister and alone in a big house, Lavinia goes through Emily's things and wonders what to do with her sister's poems. She enlists the help of Susan, Emily's best friend and brother Austin's wife, who rouses herself from a deep depression to put the poems into some order to approach a publisher. Lavinia also brings Austin's mistress, Mabel, into the project for her worldliness and connections. In the wings, there is Millicent, Mabel's daughter, a little girl like Emily in spirit, wise and strong-willed, and fascinated by things big and small in the world around her.
Tomorrow is for the Brave
by Kelly Bowen

In 1939 France, socialite Violet St. Croix, defying her parents' wishes, joins the war effort, and as the Allies are thwarted at every turn and her commanding officer is murdered, she is the only one who can expose a traitor and save countless lives -- if only she could find someone to trust. 
The Road from Belhaven
by Margot Livesey

In late-nineteenth-century Scotland, Lizzie Craig, gifted with the ability to see into the future, is courted by Louis, but when she follows him from Belhaven Farm to Glasgow, she learns the limits of his devotion, forcing her to make a terrible mistake until her second sight allows her a second chance.
The Triumph of the Lions
by Stefania Auci

Explores the origins of one of Italy's most powerful and notorious families, men and women whose ruthless ambition and caprice would chart the course of modern Italian history. 
The Widow Spy 
by Megan Campisi

In 1861, Kate Warner -- the country's first detective, a Pinkerton agent and a union spy -- to possibly end the Civil War, must win the trust of her captive, Confederate spy and socialite Rose Greenhow, and, with time running out, worries she'll fail the most important assignment of her career.
There's Going to Be Trouble
by Jen Silverman

Fleeing to a teaching position in Paris, Minnow falls for Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family, but when she's pulled in a daring protect, he and his friends are planning, she unknowingly repeats a secret tragedy from her family's past.
The Beautiful People
by Michelle Gable

In 1961, Margo Hightower, becoming the assistant to a society photographer, is thrown headfirst into the glamorous Jet Set world she so covets where she becomes friends with heiress and rising fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer, but when the lines between work and play blur, the golden life she desires slips from her grasp.
The Wealth of Shadows
by Graham Moore

In 1939, Ansel Luxford uproots his family and moves to Washington, D.C. to work on a clandestine project to undermine Nazi Germany, one involving economic warfare, and is plunged into a world of espionage, danger and deceit, especially when his wife takes a job with the FBI, bringing subterfuge to the home front.
The Mother of All Things
by Alexis Landau

While on a film shoot with her husband in Bulgaria for the summer, art history professor Ava Zaretsky is swept up into a circle of women who reenact ancient Greco-Roman mystery rites of initiation, giving her a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief.
The Library Thief
by Kuchenga Shenjé

In Victorian England, white-passing Florence Granger, who her father brought home from Jamaica as a baby, is kicked out after a scandal. Having learned bookbinding from him, she cleverly acquires a position restoring rare books in the forbidding Rose Hall. But events lead her to believe that Lord Belfield's late wife was murdered. 
The Paris Affair
by Maureen Marshall

Fin Tighe may be the illegitimate son of an English earl, but he hasn't spoken to his father in a decade, and his engineer's salary is barely enough to support him and his cousin Aurelie. And Fin's evenings spent in the clandestine gay community may be legal through a loophole in the Napoleonic Code, but they leave him vulnerable. So, when Fin's employer, Gustave Eiffel, announces that he needs additional investors to pay for his pet project Fin jumps at the chance, leading him to masquerade as his father’s heir. When a dear friend of Fin's is murdered above a clandestine gay club, the stakes rise even higher.
The Medicine Woman of Galveston
by Amanda Skenandore

Dr. Tucia Hatherley, who gave up medicine after a fatal mistake, works in a factory and raises her disabled son in 1900. Desperate for more money, she joins a traveling medicine show, taking her across Texas where she forms something of a family with the performers. But there are still dangers to face in this compelling, well-researched novel peopled with complex, believable characters.
All the Summers in Between
by Brooke Lea Foster

The acclaimed author of Summer Darlings and On Gin Lane returns with the story of two former friends who after a chance reunion in the Hamptons are compelled to confront the traumatic incident that severed their bond.
Contact your librarian for more great books!
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