Historical Fiction January 2026 |
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The Curse of the Cole Women
by Marielle Thompson
The Cole women are cursed. Each generation will birth a daughter, lose their love, and, as surely as the tide beats against the rocky shore, take her own life by giving herself to the sea. For generations, the Cole women have lived as outcasts, maintaining a lighthouse on a small island off the coast of New Hampshire. Ever since their ancestor was accused of witchcraft and cast into the sea hundreds of years prior, the islanders have ostracized the Coles, distrusting their rumored magic and their control of the lighthouse. Despite their mistreatment, the Cole women are compelled to remain on the island because they know that if a Cole woman does not light the beacon on Juniper Island, anyone who is out at sea will be drowned. Out of guilt and obligation, the Cole women live out their solitary lives on the island, knowing someday their recompense for protecting the people from the sea will be to die in the sea themselves. Told in three interwoven timelines in the late twentieth century, The Curse of the Cole Women unravels the lives of three women who struggle with their relationships with each other as they contend with the reality of their fates--is it truly a curse, or is it generational madness that drives Cole women to the sea? Readers will be swept into this evocative and moving story about challenging misogyny, finding community, and struggling with fate.
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Out of Alcatraz
by Christopher Cantwell
Convicts Frank Morris and Clarence Anglin have washed ashore in San Francisco after surviving their infamous escape from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in June 1962. They soon meet their gruff and disappointed handler, a mysterious young woman who's also running from something, and hope to quickly get their way north to the border-if they can even make it out of Modesto alive. As a dogged federal manhunt and chance encounters threaten the desperate convicts, everyone involved is about to discover the same bloodstained truth: Life on the run is an even more hellish prison than Alcatraz could have ever been.
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Sharpe's Storm: Richard Sharpe and the Invasion of Southern France, 1813
by Bernard Cornwell
The year is 1813. France is a battlefield, and winter shows no mercy. Amid brutal conditions, Major Richard Sharpe finds himself saddled with an unexpected burden: Rear-Admiral Sir Joel Chase, dispatched by the Admiralty with sealed orders, unshakable confidence, and a frankly terrifying enthusiasm for combat. Sharpe's mission from Wellington is clear, yet anything but simple: keep Sir Joel alive. Sir Joel could hold the key to defeating Napoleon once and for all. But to pull off his audacious plan, he needs someone who knows how to fight dirty, think fast, and survive the impossible.
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Call of the Camino
by Suzanne Redfearn
Reina Watkins lost her father when she was eight. Seventeen years later, she still carries that grief. When her budding journalism career takes an unexpected turn, it leads her to the ancient five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain. Now she finds herself embarking on the same pilgrimage that her father made at her age, unaware of how profoundly it will change her. Back in 1997, Isabelle Vidal is a teenager on the run. Fleeing from her boarding school, she heads straight for the Way of Saint James. She's heard the Camino will provide. And so it does, in the form of a handsome young American and the promise of a new life. But it could all fall apart if her troubles catch up with her. One woman is coming to grips with her past; the other is grasping for her future. But as each treads the same hallowed trail, it will knot their destinies together in a most miraculous way.
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Books You May Have Missed
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| Strangers in Time by David BaldacciNavigating life in London as World War II rages, Ignatius Oliver (a widowed bookseller with secrets), Charlie Matters (an orphaned 14-year-old who steals for food), and Molly Wakefield (a well-to-do 15-year-old whose parents are missing), create a safe haven with each other even as bombs fall. Read-alike: The Lilac People by Milo Todd; The Keeper of Lost Art by Laura Morelli. |
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| Junie by Erin Crosby EckstineEnslaved 16-year-old Junie loves poetry and her family. As maid to Violet, the only child of Alabama plantation owners, Junie knows that if Violet marries the wealthy man her father has brought home, they'll both end up in faraway New Orleans. Distraught, Junie asks her dead sister Minnie for help, unleashing her ghost. In this moving debut, the author "evokes the earthly and supernatural to equally powerful effect" (Publishers Weekly). For fans of: Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend. |
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| Before Dorothy by Hazel GaynorEmily Gale and her new husband Henry move to Kansas to start a farm, leaving Emily's dear sister Annie and her newborn Dorothy behind in the city. Just a few years later, in 1932, Annie dies and the couple adopt Dorothy. But the youngster isn't the only big change in the couple's world -- drought and devastating dust storms threaten everything. For other Oz retellings, try: After Oz by Gordon McAlpine; Toto by A.J. Hackwith, or Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts. |
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| Last Stop Union Station by Sarah JamesWork is drying up for middle-aged Hollywood star Jackie Love, who has a reputation for being difficult. Out of options in 1942, she joins the Hollywood Victory Caravan, a cross-country train trip raising money for the war effort. But a suspicious death causes a pause in Chicago, where Jackie teams up with Officer Grace Sullivan to prove it's a case of murder, leading them to danger and homegrown Nazis. Try this next: The Starlets by Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne. |
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| Anima Rising by Christopher MooreIn 1911 Vienna, celebrated artist Gustav Klimt saves a woman from drowning in the Danube, but she has no memory of her past. That is, until Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung help out and the woman recalls, among other things, being in the Arctic over 100 years earlier with Victor Frankenstein. For fans of: offbeat novels that mix real characters and fictional ones into irreverent and compelling plots. |
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The Antidote
by Karen Russell
A gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraska town.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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