Historical fiction 
Showing 1 - 20 of 65
There are a total of 567 valid entries on the list.
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Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with hope that they could now give their three daughters--Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa--a chance at a better life. Their dreams are short-lived. Just months after they arrive, the Spanish Flu reaches the...
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation's capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman's...
Author:
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"They came on boats, on trains, great unceasing waves of them-the poor, the disenfranchised, the seekers, the dreamers. Second and third generations of farmers eking out an existence on scraps of farms divided up among too many sons. Political agitators no longer welcome in their homelands. Young men fleeing conscription in a king's army. Married couples starting out. Bachelors from towns with few women. The poor in tenements with air so stifling...
Author:
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the brutal double murder of her employers, renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Crowds pack the courtroom, eagerly following every twist, while the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings and the mysterious woman being tried at the Old Bailey ... But Frannie claims she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening, even...
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
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Description:
The hopes and dreams of four generations of Southern women are revealed in the stories they pass down from grandmother, to mother, to daughter, to granddaughter
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Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Formats:
Description:
"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...
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Series:
The Davenports (Krystal Marquis) volume 1.
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
The Davenports are one of the few Black families of immense wealth and status in 1910 Chicago, and the two daughters, Olivia and Helen, are finding their way and finding love--even where they are not supposed to.
8. Eternal
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta's heart. But in the autumn of 1937,...
9. The fraud
Author:
Average Rating:
2.2 stars
Description:
"It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper-and cousin by marriage-of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully...
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"A gripping historical mystery based on the real-life diary entries of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who found herself at the center of a murder trial"--
"A gripping historical mystery based on the real-life diary entries of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history. Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine...
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head...
Author:
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"A thrilling departure: a short, piercing, deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in 15th century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman--a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder...
13. Happy Land
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Description:
"Inspired by distant memories of African kingdoms, a community of formerly enslaved men and women grasped freedom and started lives on mountain land that they owned. They worked hard, lived well, and loved there. For a time the kingdom thrived...and then it disappeared. Present Day. Nikki hasn't seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request...
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Average Rating:
3.6 stars
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Description:
The House of Mirth is an uncompromising depiction of 19th-century New York society. Lily Bart is a society lady who is unwilling to marry for love, but equally unwilling to marry as society dictates. She sabotages every advantageous opportunity she receives, until her society friends begin to hasten her downfall for their own ends.
Author:
Average Rating:
2.8 stars
Description:
In 1931 Germany, bookshop owner Max meets concert violinist Hanna and fall in love, but Hanna is Jewish and Hitler is coming to power; in 1946 outside Berlin, Hanna wakes up in a field with no memory of the past ten years.
Author:
Series:
In the country of others volume 1.
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farm's rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules...
Author:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Making a Faustian bargain to live forever but never be remembered, a woman from early eighteenth-century France endures unacknowledged centuries before meeting a man who remembers her name.
Author:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Ireland, 1845. To Briana Walsh, no place on earth is more beautiful than Carrowteige, County Mayo, with its sloping fields and rocky cliffs perched above the wild Atlantic. The small farms that surround the centuries-old Lear House are managed by her father, agent to the wealthy, reckless Sir Thomas Blakely. Tenant farmers sell the oats and rye they grow to pay rent to Sir Thomas, surviving on the potatoes that flourish in the remaining scraps of...
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Series:
Wright Family saga (John Ehle) volume 1.
Average Rating:
4 stars
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Description:
"First published fifty years ago in 1964 to great acclaim, The Land Breakers is John Ehle's best-known work of historical fiction, chronicling the hard-won settlement of southern Appalachia. A cinematic saga spanning the Revolutionary War years of 1779 to 1784, The Land Breakers recounts in spare, unflinching prose the challenges, setbacks, and small triumphs of the defiant men and women who were drawn to the wilderness of provincial North Carolina....
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
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Description:
"For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest meets the shore, Leah's country life is as natural as the Loblolly pines that rise to greet the Southern sky. When an accident takes her father's life, Leah is wrenched from her small community and cast into a family of strangers with a terrible secret. Separated from...