by Margaret Atwood

Grace Marks is serving a life sentence for her part in the vicious murders of Thomas Kinnear, a wealthy landowner, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Grace herself now claims to have no memory of the murders.

by Melanie Benjamin

As a child, Mercy Lavinia "Vinnie" Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P. T. Barnum, married the tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century, and transformed into the world's most unexpected celebrity.

by Sarah Bird
 

Cathy Williams was born and lived a slave until the Union army came and destroyed the only world she had ever known. Separated from her family, she makes the impossible decision: to fight with the Buffalo Soldiers disguised as a man.

by Edward Carey

In 1761 a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation.

Ella May Wiggins, a young mother desperately trying to hold her family together with the paltry nine dollars a week she earns from the textile mill two miles away, makes up her mind to join the labor union -- a decision that will have lasting consequences for her children, her friends, her town, and all that she loves.

All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is told that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest. She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel.  During the summer of 1950, Forugh's passion for poetry takes flight -- and tradition seeks to clip her wings.
 

by Emma Donoghue

Spinster Emily Faithfull is a rarity in Victorian England -- the successful owner of a printing press and a leader in the fledgling British women's movement. But she's also naive and overly trusting (her nickname, Fido, says it all), especially when it comes to her vibrant, beautiful, and unhappily married friend Helen Codrington.

by Therese Fowler

Born Zelda Sayre in Alabama, she is a Southern belle whose energy and indulgences prompt her to follow F. Scott Fitzgerald north to New York City and later to Paris. Tumultuous love, literary jealousies, alcoholism, and masculine rivalries all play key roles in the drama of American literature's "It" couple. 

by C. W Gortner

As the 16th century dawns, Columbus has brought word of new lands to Queen Isabella, Savonarola leads a reign of terror in Florence, and Rodrigo Borgia is bargaining his daughter, Lucrezia, to claim the Throne of Peter in Rome. 

A fictional account of the real-life 1940s kidnapping that inspired Lolita. On a dare, 11-year-old Sally Horner tries to steal a composition notebook from Woolworth's one afternoon after school. A man at the lunch counter sees her and poses as an FBI agent, spinning an elaborate story of a court date and house arrest, unless Sally meets him the next day after school.

Civil War General David Hunter places Harriet "Moses" Tubman in charge of a team of black scouts even though skeptical of what one woman can accomplish. For her gamble to succeed, "Moses" must outwit alligators, overseers, slave catchers, sharpshooters, and even hostile Union soldiers to lead gunships up the Combahee River.

by Nancy Horan

At the age of thirty-five, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne has left her philandering husband in San Francisco -- a chance for this adventurous woman to start over, to make a better life, and to pursue her own desires. Fanny and her children repair to a quiet artists' colony in France where she can recuperate. She meets a lively Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, ten years her junior, who falls instantly in love with the earthy, independent, and opinionated "belle Americaine."

 

by Hannah Kent

It is March 1829, and Agnes Magnusdottir has been sentenced to be beheaded for murdering her employer. Due to the cost of keeping her imprisoned, she is sent to a farm, where she arrives filthy, bruised, and bleeding due to the cruelty with which she has been treated during her imprisonment.

by Julie Kibler

In turn-of-the-20th century Texas, the Berachah Home for the Redemption and Protection of Erring Girls is a beacon of hope for young women consigned to the streets by birth, circumstance, or personal tragedy.

 

by Greer Macallister

The Amazing Arden is the most famous female illusionist of her day, renowned for her notorious trick of sawing a man in half on stage. One night she swaps her trademark saw for a fire ax. Is it a new version of the illusion, or an all-too-real murder? When Arden's husband is found lifeless beneath the stage later that night, the answer seems clear.

by Karen Mack

A novel based loosely on unsubstantiated conjecture that Sigmund Freud and his wife's sister, Minna Bernays, had a love affair while living under the same roof.

by Courtney Maum

Fourteen-year-old Lara Calaway just wants her mother to notice her. Instead, Leonora, a wealthy New York socialite, is more interested in collecting members of the avant-garde. There's Konrad, a traumatized painter, whom Leonora marries; C., Konrad's longtime lover, a forceful and dedicated writer with hair that "floats around her face like an evil halo".  Based on the lives of mother and daughter, Peg and Pegeen Guggenheim.

by Priya Parmar

Before becoming the celebrated writer Virginia Woolf, young Virginia Stephens lived with her sister, Vanessa, and her brothers in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, where they surrounded themselves with other artists and intellectuals..

by Jennie Rooney

Joan Stanley thought her past was in the past but when she gets a knock on her door one day all the secrets she worked so hard to hide from fifty years ago are threatened to be exposed.

by Ashley Warlick

Mary Frances and Al no longer share the things that once bound them together -- a good glass of wine, a fine meal, their creative energy, and even their affection and intimacy. After a night's transgression with Tim, it's only a matter of time before Mary Frances (M.F.K. Fisher) claims what she truly desires, plunging all three of them into a tangled triangle of affection that will have far-reaching effects on their families, their careers, and their lives.