Historical Fiction 1910s-2000s

Historical fiction books set sometime between 1910 and 2010

Showing 1 - 17 of 17  There are a total of 180 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Behold the dreamers"
Star rating for Behold the dreamers
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Imbolo Mbue's debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream tells the story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.
Book cover for "City of margins"
Star rating for City of margins
Description:
"These characters cross paths in unexpected ways, guided by coincidence and the pull of blood. There are new things to be found in the rubble of their lives, too. The promise of something different beyond the barriers that have been set out for them. This is a story of revenge and retribution, of facing down the ghosts of the past, of untold desires, of yearning and forgiveness and synchronicity, of the great distance of lives lived in dangerous proximity...
Book cover for "Crossroads"
Star rating for Crossroads
Series:
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen...
Book cover for "Damnation spring"
Star rating for Damnation spring
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
A mother and midwife inadvertently threatens the fortunes and livelihoods of her family and their neighbors after noticing an increase in local miscarriages and believes it's caused by the pesticides used by the Sanderson Timber Company, her husband's employer.
Book cover for "The four winds"
Star rating for The four winds
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"[A]n epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America's most defining eras--the Great Depression. Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with...
Book cover for "The great alone"
Star rating for The great alone
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Lenora Allbright is 13 when her father convinces her mother, Cora, to forgo their inauspicious existence in Seattle and move to Kaneq, AK. It's 1974, and the former Vietnam POW sees a better future away from the noise and nightmares that plague him. Having been left a homestead by a buddy who died in the war, Ernt is secure in his beliefs, but never was a family less prepared for the reality of Alaska, the long, cold winters and isolation. Locals...
Book cover for "The great believers"
Star rating for The great believers
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic...
Book cover for "I must betray you"
Star rating for I must betray you
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
In a country governed by isolation, fear, and a tyrannical dictator, seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer, but he decides to use his position to try to outwit his handler, undermine the regime, give voice to fellow Romanians, and expose to the world what is happening in his country. Includes author's note.
Book cover for "In all good faith"
Star rating for In all good faith
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"In the summer of 1932, Americans are coming to realize that the financial crash of 1929 was only the beginning of hard times. May Marshall has returned from Paris to settle at her family home in rural Keswick, Virginia. She struggles to keep her family farm and market afloat through the economic downturn. May finds herself juggling her marriage with a tempting opportunity to revamp the family business to adapt to changing times. In a cold-water West...
Book cover for "Last night at the Telegraph Club"
Star rating for Last night at the Telegraph Club
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father--despite...
Book cover for "Paper wife"
Star rating for Paper wife
Description:
From the bestselling author of Yellow Crocus comes a heart-wrenching story about finding strength in a new world. Southern China, 1923. Desperate to secure her future, Mei Ling's parents arrange a marriage to a widower in California. To enter the country, she must pretend to be her husband's first wife--a paper wife. On the perilous voyage, Mei Ling takes an orphan girl named Siew under her wing. Dreams of a better life in America give Mei Ling the...
Book cover for "Red at the bone"
Star rating for Red at the bone
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other. Moving forward and backward in time, [the] novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child"--Publisher marketing.
Book cover for "She weeps each time you're born"
Star rating for She weeps each time you're born
Author:
Description:
A young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before the reunification of Vietnam possesses the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.
Book cover for "The stationery shop"
Star rating for The stationery shop
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"A novel set in 1953 Tehran against the backdrop of the Iranian Coup about a young couple in love who are separated on the eve of their marriage, and who are reunited sixty years later, after having moved on to live independent lives in America, to discover the truth about what happened on that fateful day in the town square"--
Book cover for "Strange flowers"
Star rating for Strange flowers
Average Rating:
2.7 stars
Description:
"In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home in Ireland and disappears. Bewildered and distraught, Paddy and Kit must confront an unbearable prospect: that they will never see their daughter again. Five years later, Moll returns from London. What--and who--she brings with her will change the course of her family's life forever"--
Book cover for "This is where I leave you"
Star rating for This is where I leave you
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
Judd Foxman is thrown together with his dysfunctional family when his father dies, while at the same time coping with his wife's infidelity and the end of his marriage.
Book cover for "A thousand splendid suns"
Star rating for A thousand splendid suns
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in wartorn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage.