These stories are works of Historical Fiction that cover many eras from the beginning of history, often in several settings.
The Guest Book
Sarah Blake
Kitty and Ogden Milton appear to have everything--perfect children, good looks, a love everyone envies. But after a tragedy befalls them, Ogden tries to bring Kitty back to life by purchasing an island in Maine. That island, and its house, come to define and burnish the Milton family, year after year after year. And it is there that Kitty issues a refusal that will haunt her till the day she dies. In 1959 a young Jewish man, Len Levy, will get a job in Ogden's bank and earn the admiration of Ogden and one of his daughters, but the scorn of everyone else. Len's best friend, Reg Pauling, has always been the only black man in the room--at Harvard, at work, and finally at the Miltons' island in Maine. An island that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this last generation doesn't have the money to keep. When Kitty's granddaughter hears that she and her cousins might be forced to sell it, and when her husband brings back disturbing evidence about her grandfather's past, she realizes she is on the verge of finally understanding the silences that seemed to hover just below the surface of her family all her life.
Read More View in CatalogIsland Beneath the Sea
Isabel Allende
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité -- known as Tété -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint-Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.
Read More View in CatalogHouse of Falconer Series, Book 2
In the Lion’s Den
Barbara Taylor Bradford
James Lionel Falconer has risen quickly from a mere shop worker to being the right-hand man of Henry Malvern, head of the most prestigious shipping company in London. With Malvern's daughter Alexis running away to the country after a terrible tragedy and refusing to return, James' ascent to head of the company seems inevitable. But even a charmed life like James' is not without its setbacks. A terrible fire threatens to end his merchant career before it's had a chance to truly begin. Mrs. Ward, James' former paramour, has a secret that could change his life forever. And his distaste for Alexis Malvern is slowly growing into feelings of quite a different sort. Can James continue to be the master of his own fate, or will all of his charm, intelligence, and wit finally fail him when he has to enter the lion's den?
Read More View in CatalogClifton Chronicles Series, Book 4
Be Careful What You Wish For
Jeffrey Archer
When Ross Buchanan is forced to resign as chairman of the Barrington Shipping Company, Emma Clifton wants to take his place, but Don Pedro Martinez plans to install his puppet, the egregious Major Alex Fisher, so he can destroy the Barrington family firm once and for all. The talented Jessica Clifton, Harry and Emma's adopted daughter, wins a scholarship to the Slade Academy of Art and falls in love with a fellow student, Clive Bingham, who asks her to marry him. Both families are delighted and preparations for the nuptials are well under way, when Charlotte Bingham, Jessica's future mother-in-law, has a visit from an old friend, Lady Virginia Fenwick, who drops her particular brand of poison into the wedding chalice. But then, without warning, a man no one had ever heard of takes his place on the board of Barringtons and causes an upheaval that none of them could have anticipated. Cedric Hardcastle, a bluff Yorkshire banker, quickly decides who he should support, Emma Clifton or Don Pedro Martinez, and the story takes yet another twist.
Read More View in CatalogThe Lost Book of Eleanor Dare
Kimberly Brock
What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book. Brought from England on Eleanor's fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age. Thirteen-year-old Alice had been next in line to receive it, but her mother's tragic death fractured the unbroken legacy and the Dare Stone and the shadowy history recorded in the book faded into memory. Or so Alice hoped. In the waning days of World War II, Alice is a young widow and a mother herself when she is unexpectedly presented with her birthright: the deed to Evertell, her abandoned family home and the history she thought forgotten. Determined to sell the property and step into a future free of the past, Alice returns to Savannah with her own thirteen-year-old daughter, Penn, in tow. But when Penn's curiosity over the lineage she never knew begins to unveil secrets from beneath every stone and bone and shell of the old house and Eleanor's book is finally found, Alice is forced to reckon with the sacrifices made for love and the realities of their true inheritance as daughters of Eleanor Dare.
Read More View in CatalogSend for Me
Lauren Fox
Annelise is a dreamer: imagining her future while working at her parents' popular bakery in Feldenheim, Germany, anticipating all the delicious possibilities yet to come. There are rumors that anti-Jewish sentiment is on the rise, but Annelise and her parents can't quite believe that it will affect them; they're hardly religious at all. But as Annelise falls in love, marries, and gives birth to her daughter, the dangers grow closer: a brick thrown through her window; a childhood friend who cuts ties with her; customers refusing to patronize the bakery. Luckily Annelise and her husband are given the chance to leave for America, but they must go without her parents, whose future and safety are uncertain. Two generations later, in a small Midwestern city, Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, is a young woman newly in love. But when she stumbles upon a trove of her grandmother's letters from Germany, she sees the history of her family's sacrifices in a new light, and suddenly she's faced with an impossible choice: the past, or her future.
Read More View in CatalogThe Son
Philipp Meyer
Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men-complicating his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong-a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny. Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and JA, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world.
Read More View in CatalogThe Grace Kelly Dress
Brenda Janowitz
Two years after Grace Kelly's royal wedding, her iconic dress is still all the rage in Paris--and one replica, and the secrets it carries, will inspire three generations of women to forge their own paths in life and in love. Paris, 1958: Rose, a seamstress at a fashionable atelier, has been entrusted with sewing a Grace Kelly--look-alike gown for a wealthy bride-to-be. But when, against better judgment, she finds herself falling in love with the bride's handsome brother, Rose must make an impossible choice, one that could put all she's worked for at risk: love, security and of course, the dress. Sixty years later, tech CEO Rachel, who goes by the childhood nickname "Rocky," has inherited the dress for her upcoming wedding in New York City. But there's just one problem: Rocky doesn't want to wear it. A family heirloom dating back to the 1950s, the dress just isn't her. Rocky knows this admission will break her mother Joan's heart. But what she doesn't know is why Joan insists on the dress--or the heartbreaking secret that changed her mother's life decades before, as she herself prepared to wear it. As the lives of these three women come together in surprising ways, the revelation of the dress's history collides with long-buried family heartaches. And in the lead-up to Rocky's wedding, they'll have to confront the past before they can embrace the beautiful possibilities of the future.
Read More View in CatalogThe Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Ayana Mathis
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.
Read More View in CatalogThe Shoemaker’s Wife
Adriana Trigiani
The lives of two young Italian lovers, Enza Ravanelli, a practical girl born into poverty and Ciro Amadei, a dreamer raised in a convent orphanage, are woven together in this lush, epic novel set against the landscape of world events in the first half of the 20thcentury. The Shoemaker's Wifespans two world wars, immigration, the birth of American manufacturing, the rigors of assimilation and the perils of the Great Depression. Like the times they were born into, Enza and Ciro's story is filled with surprising twists and turns. Together, they embrace the promise of a new and better life as they attempt to survive by the labour of their own hands. But when Ciro is diagnosed with a deadly cancer from the bombs he endured in World War I, he returns home alone to Italy to say goodbye, and solve a final mystery about his family.
Read More View in CatalogThe Signature of All Things
Elizabeth Gilbert
Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma's research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction — into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist — but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life.
Read More View in CatalogMiddlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction.
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