664 results for "Historical Fiction"

The living wood: Saint Helena and the emperor Constantine

De Wohl, Louis
The renowned novelist De Wohl, with his usual crisp language and descriptive narrative, as well as irony and humor, presents the colorful and tumultuous times of the early Christian era in this story of intrigue, romance and power politics revolving around Helena, the devoted and saintly mother of Constantine, the first Christian emperor. This historical novel tells the story of the quest for the True Cross through fifty years of the most exciting events in Roman and Christian history. The narrative begins when the Tribune Constantius, a Roman officer stationed in Britain, meets and wins Helena, only daughter of the mystical and oracular King Coel of Britain. Through the course of their early lives together, and during their ten-year separation when Constantius returns to Britian as a conquering Caesar and Helena has become a rejected wife, devoted mother, and militant Christian, there is a sure and convincing portrayal of character growth and personal conflict. Helena's fierce determination to raise Constantine as a warrior son and her gradual discovery and dramatic acceptance of Christianity prepare her for the final miracle of her life discovery of the True Cross, the Living Wood on Calvary. The Living Wood is a chapter from the turbulent half-forgotten pages of early Christian history and legend in which the religious conflicts and problems are handled with moving simplicity. It is also an action-packed novel of those times--with a lesson for us today--that captures with equal skill and tumult and the shouting of the battlefield and the devious plots and counter-plots of the court.
Ignatius Press 2008 370 pages

City of God

E. L. Doctorow
In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain -- a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the twentieth century. But now he has a story he thinks will become his next novel: The large brass altar cross from a run-down Episcopal church in lower Manhattan disappeared, then mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. He befriends the church's maverick rector and the synagogue's young female rabbi as they try to learn who committed this strange double act of desecration and why.
Thorndike Press 2000 514 pages

Mystery men

Liss, David
Introducing Marvel's all-new, never-before-seen heroes of the 1930s! With a new evil washing over an unsuspecting New York City, the Operative, the Aviatrix, the Surgeon, the Revenant and Achilles blast through dangers from blood-soaked mob warehouses to monster-infested mansions, and fight to blow the lid off a conspiracy that could bring the nation itself to its knees! Award-winning historical thriller novelist David Liss (Black Panther: The Man Without Fear) and acclaimed artist Patrick Zircher (Spider-Man Noir) weave an edge-of-your-seat and in-continuity adventure intertwined with America's most scandalous crimes! Before the Invaders...before the Twelve...who were the Mystery Men? COLLECTING: MYSTERY MEN 1-5
Marvel 2012-01-11 120 pages

The secrets of Blythswood Square

Sheridan, Sara
LONGLISTED FOR SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS 2024. THE ENCHANTING NEW NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF THE 2022 WATERSTONES SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE YEAR, THE FAIR BOTANISTS. 'Gripping' Good Housekeeping 'S ecrets discovered, ruinous rumours scotched, happiness regained and friendships founded' Daily Mail 'A novel of feeling and intellect which will surely and deservedly be a great success' Allan Massie, The Scotsman You wouldn't suspect it, but scandalous secrets are being kept on Blythswood Square... 1846. Glasgow is a city on the cusp of great social change, but behind the curtains, neighbours are watching, and rumours of improper behaviour spread like wildfire on the respectable Blythswood Square. When Charlotte Nicholl discovers that the fortune she has been bequeathed by her father is tied up in a secret collection of erotic art, she is faced with a terrible dilemma: sell it and risk shaming her family's good name or lose her home. An encounter with Ellory Mann, a talented working-class photographer newly arrived in Glasgow, leads Charlotte to hope she has found not only someone who might help her, but also a friend. Yet Ellory is hiding secrets of her own - secrets that become harder to conceal as she finds herself drawn into Charlotte's world. As the truth begins to catch up with both women, will it destroy everything they've fought to build - or set them both free? Readers love Sara Sheridan's storytelling! 'I absolutely love Sara Sheridan's books. They're so easy to get into and so hard to put down. The Secrets of Bythwood Square is no exception. It's a great story populated with excellent, believable characters and woven with rich historical detail' 5* reader review, NetGalley 'A fascinating, atmospheric story which I greatly enjoyed' 5* reader review, NetGalley 'I absolutely loved it, finished it within 2 days' 5* reader review, NetGalley 'Wonderful characters and a beautifully interwoven story.' 4* reader review, NetGalley PRAISE FOR THE FAIR BOTANISTS : 'Sheridan creates an evocative, enjoyable portrait of two women determined to lead independent lives' SUNDAY TIMES 'Completely enchanting and fascinating . . . a rollicking and immensely readable tale' SCOTSMAN 'Lush, seductive and scandalous, this is a gorgeous read' DAILY MAIL 'A cracking good read' VAL MCDERMID 'Dazzling, original, full of wonderful characters' KATIE FFORDE 'What a beautiful, immersive gem of historical fiction' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 'An absolute treat for fans of historical fiction and rich storytelling' RED
Hodder 2024 352 pages

Berlin shuffle: a novel

Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander
"A prophetic lost classic from interwar Germany, now translated into English for the first time, following a group of Berliners on the skids as their nation unravels. Berlin in the 1920s is the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess: a hedonistic Babylon, though there's little glamour for the hundreds of thousands out of work, the war wounded, the prostitutes, and the beggars. Come evening, they too want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where they gather to drink, dance, and reassert their pride. But there's always disaster lurking in the alleys and flophouses, a disaster that the twenty-two-year-old author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz clearly saw coming for his nation. In this dark comedy of petty theft, soapbox speeches, and bar fights is the disarray of a country devouring itself. Tragically, Germany's self-destruction engulfed the author, who was killed five years after finishing this novel. When Boschwitz's The Passenger was rediscovered in 2021, it was heralded as a masterpiece that terrifyingly captured the zeitgeist of life under Nazism. Now, Berlin Shuffle-his literary debut from 1937, finally available in English, with a preface by the preeminent translator Philip Boehm-brings to life the society that would enable fascism's takeover. The triumph of one of world literature's spectacular talents, Berlin Shuffle is a dire warning, sent from a pivotal moment in history to our own time"-- Provided by publisher.
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company 2025-12-09 237 pages

Xanadu

Jane Yolen
Publication of Xanadu marks the beginning of an original anthology series that will include brand-new stories by some of the finest writers in the world. This volume opens with "The Poacher" by Ursula K. Le Guin, a fairytale in the grand tradition. Xanadu also includes "It Comes Lightly Out of the Sea, " a new poem by William Stafford, one of the best-known poets in America; "The Hound of Merlin" by Eleanor Arnason, who won both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Tiptree Award in 1992; "The Perfectly Round Bagel" by Robert Abel, who won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1989; "To Scale" by Nebula Award winner Nancy Kress; "Still Life with Woman and Apple" by Leslea Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies; "Unnalash" by Tanith Lee; "The Pale Thin God" by Hugo and Nebula award winner Mike Resnick; "Gravity" by Pat Schneider, poet and playwright; "Time Travel, The Artifact, and A Famous Historical Personage" by Minnesota Book Award-winner Will Shetterly; and a dozen other ventures into the realms of magic, including stories by Lisa Tuttle, Steven Brust, Anna Kirwan-Vogel, Gardner Dozois, and a new poem, "The Ring at Yarrow, " by Jane Yolen herself.
Tor Books 1994-02-08 384 pages

The wall: a novel

Adler, H. G.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Compared by critics to Kafka, Joyce, and Musil, H. G. Adler is becoming recognized as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century fiction. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti wrote that “Adler has restored hope to modern literature,” and the first two novels rediscovered after his death, Panorama and The Journey, were acclaimed as “modernist masterpieces” by The New Yorker . Now his magnum opus, The Wall, the final installment of Adler’s Shoah trilogy and his crowning achievement as a novelist, is available for the first time in English. Drawing upon Adler’s own experiences in the Holocaust and his postwar life, The Wall , like the other works in the trilogy, nonetheless avoids detailed historical specifics. The novel tells the story of Arthur Landau, survivor of a wartime atrocity, a man struggling with his nightmares and his memories of the past as he strives to forge a new life for himself. Haunted by the death of his wife, Franziska, he returns to the city of his youth and receives confirmation of his parents’ fates, then crosses the border and leaves his homeland for good. Embarking on a life of exile, he continues searching for his place within the world. He attempts to publish his study of the victims of the war, yet he is treated with curiosity, competitiveness, and contempt by fellow intellectuals who escaped the conflict unscathed. Afflicted with survivor’s guilt, Arthur tries to leave behind the horrors of the past and find a foothold in the present. Ultimately, it is the love of his second wife, Johanna, and his two children that allows him to reaffirm his humanity while remembering all he’s left behind. The Wall is a magnificent epic of survival and redemption, powerfully told through stream of consciousness and suffused with daydream, fantasy, memory, nightmare, and pure imagination. More than a portrait of a Holocaust survivor’s journey, it is a universal novel about recovering from the traumas of the past and finding a way to live again. Praise for The Wall “[A] majestic novel . . . Adler’s prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy.” —Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review “A towering meditation on the self and spirit . . . The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Masterful and utterly unique.” —The Jerusalem Post “Haunting and utterly heart-wrenching . . . a literary masterpiece.” —Historical Novels Review “An epic novel . . . an unforgettable portrait.” —The Jewish Week “[A] pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity . . . an eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well.” — Kirkus Reviews Praise for H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey and Panorama, translated by Peter Filkins “Modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil.” — The New Yorker “Haunting . . . as remarkable for its literary experimentation as for its historical testimony.” —San Francisco Chronicle , on Panorama
Modern Library 2015-09-08 656 pages

Fatal Crossroads A Novel of Vietnam, 1945

Seymour Topping
"Ho Chi Minh was not always an enemy of the United States. There was a time near the close of World War II when American agents of Wild Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, lived with Ho Chi Minh, trained and armed his Vietminh cadres. One of them, a medic, saved his life. This novel, based on those OSS operations, unfolds as the United States is poised at a fatal crossroads-to pursue President Roosevelt's vision of a trusteeship for Indochina leading to independence or allow France to resume its colonial control. On a secret mission to realize Roosevelt's vision, Travis Duncan, a special agent of the OSS, undertakes a perilous journey across the China border, eluding bandits and Japanese patrols, to Ho Chi Minh's jungle camp. Duncan is witness in North and South Vietnam to the brutality of the no-holds struggle between Vietnamese nationalists and the French for control of the country. Two women out of Duncan's past become key actors in his mission, one, an aide to Ho Chi Minh, and the other, a Gaullist agent. The reader will recognize the historical characters in this novel; the other characters are based on real individuals or are fictional personages. They speak to a lost opportunity in dealing with Ho Chi Minh and the French at a turning point in history that might have spared America the agony of the Vietnam War."--Publisher's website.
EastBridge 2005 275 pages

Tigerheart A Novel

Peter David
Paul Dear is a good and clever boy, but he’s special in ways that even his adoring parents could never have imagined. For by day, in London’s Kensington Gardens, he walks and talks with the pixies and sprites and other magical creatures that dwell among the living–but are unseen by most. Then everything changes when tragedy strikes–and a quest begins that will lead Paul to a curio shop where a magical ally awaits him and launches him into the starry skies, bound for a realm where anything is possible. Far from home, Paul will run with fierce Indian warriors, cross swords with fearsome pirates, befriend a magnificent white tiger, and soar beside an extraordinary, ageless boy who reigns in a boundless world of imagination.
Random House Worlds 2009-05-12 320 pages

Beyond the pale

Dykewomon, Elana
Beyond the Pale -- winner of the Lambda Literary Award -- tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York. Interwoven with her tale is that Chava Meyer, who was attended by Gurvich at her birth and grew up to survive the pogrom that took the lives of her parents. Throughout the book, historical background plays a large part: Jewish faith and traditions, the practice of midwifery, the horrific conditions in prerevolutionary Russia and New York sweatshops, and the determined work of labor unionists and suffragists.
Raincoast Books 2003 406 pages

Paris Requiem

Lisa Appignanesi
Paris 1899. Theaters and galleries are vibrant with artistic energy. The new Metro is under construction, and so is the site for the centennial Universal Exhibition. But there is also savage political upheaval. Asylums and jails are overcrowded. The Dreyfus Affair has released a riotous surge of anti-Semitism. Bostonian lawyer James Norton has been sent by his mother to bring back his invalid sister Elie and his younger brother Raf, a journalist., but the brutal deaths of the actress Olympe Fabre, and then of her sister Judith in the asylum of Salpêtrière, draw the siblings into a dark web of violence.
McArthur 2002 590 pages

Right and Left

Joseph Roth
Joseph Roth has been described as ?one of the greatest writers in German of this century? ("The Times"). With tragic foresight, "Right and Left," first published in 1929, evokes the nightlife, corruption, political unrest, and economic tyranny of Berlin in the twenties, the same territory covered trenchantly in Roth's reportage, recently published as "What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33." After serving in World War I, Paul Bernheim returns to Berlin to find himself heir to his recently deceased father's banking empire. Increasingly beset by skyrocketing inflation, and dismayed by his brother's infatuation with the brownshirts, Bernheim turns to an outsider for help?a profiteering Russian ?migr? whose advice proves alternately advantageous and disastrous. Too late to change his fate, he realizes he has been decieved by a master in the craft of manipulation.
Harry N. Abrams 2004-02-24 235 pages

The Harvest

Meyer Levin
THE HARVEST is the great, definitive novel of the creation of the Jewish state and the triumphant efforts of the Jewish people to survive and become a nation. In 1972, the Los Angeles Times called Meyer Levin "the most significant American Jewish writer of his time." Norman Mailer referred to him as "one of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition." In addition, Ernest Hemingway called Levin's book CITIZENS "a fine American novel -- one of the best I ever read." Is it any wonder then that the work of Meyer Levin is considered to be among the finest and most important of any twentieth century writer? In the historical novels THE SETTLERS (1972) and THE HARVEST (1978), Levin wove an epic tale of pioneering life in the early Palestine settlements. The works were the culmination of decades of research, and reviewers hailed the duo as the author's masterwork, a Jewish WAR AND PEACE.
Bantam Books 1979 672 pages

The slaughterman's daughter

Iczkovits, Yaniv
True, the husbands of Motal have been vanishing for years, but a wife and mother? Whoever heard of such a thing. What on earth possessed her?Could it have anything to do with Fanny's missing brother-in-law, who left her sister almost a year ago and ran away to Minsk, abandoning their family to destitution and despair?Or could Fanny have been lured away by Zizek Breshov, the mysterious ferryman on the Yaselda river, who, in a strange twist of events, seems to have disappeared on the same night?Surely there can be no link between Fanny and the peculiar roadside murder on the way to Minsk, which has left Colonel Piotr Novak, head of the Russian secret police, scratching his head. Surely a crime like that could have nothing to do with Fanny Keismann, however the people of Motal might mutter about her reputation as a vilde chaya, a wild animal . . . -- Provided by publisher.
MacLehose Press 2021 525 pages

The fair botanists

Sheridan, Sara
It's the summer of 1822 and Edinburgh is abuzz with rumours of King George IV's impending visit. In botanical circles, however, a different kind of excitement has gripped the city. In the newly-installed Botanic Garden, the Agave Americana plant looks set to flower, an event that only occurs once every few decades. When newly widowed Elizabeth arrives in Edinburgh to live with her late husband's aunt Clementina, she's determined to put her unhappy past in London behind her. As she settles into her new home, she becomes fascinated by the beautiful Botanic Garden which borders the grand house and offers her services as an artist to record the rare plant's impending bloom. In this pursuit, she meets Belle Brodie, a vivacious young woman with a passion for botany and the lucrative, dark art of perfume creation. Belle is determined to keep both her real identity and the reason for her interest the Garden secret from her new friend. But as Elizabeth and Belle are about to discover, secrets don't last long in this Enlightenment city.
Hodder & Stoughton 2022 371 pages

Feast your eyes

Goldberg, Myla
"After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school's photo club, Lillian rejects her parents' expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter, Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter's sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian's career as she continues a lifelong quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition. Narrated by Samantha, Feast Your Eyes reads as a collection of Samantha's memories, interviews with Lillian's friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian's journals and letters--a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity"--Provided by publisher.
Scribner 2019-04-16 326 pages