193 results for "Historical Fiction"

Lady Whistledown Strikes Back

Julia Quinn,Karen Hawkins,Suzanne Enoch,Mia Ryan
Join the Bridgertons, and the rest of the ton, as they pore over (and gossip about) Lady Whistledown's latest musings. The elusive Regency-era gossip columnist -- popularized in # 1 New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels, now a series created by Shondaland for Netflix - reveals society's most recent secrets in this second glittering anthology, following the New York Times bestseller, The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown. Who Stole Lady Neeley's Bracelet Was it the fortune hunter, the gambler, the servant, or the rogue All of London is abuzz with speculation, but it is clear that one of four couples is connected to the crime. --Lady Whistledown's Society Papers, May 1816 Julia Quinn enchants: A dashing fortune hunter is captivated by the Season's most desired debutante . . . and must prove he is out to steal the lady's heart, not her dowry. Suzanne Enoch tantalizes: An innocent miss who has spent her life scrupulously avoiding scandal is suddenly--and secretly--courted by London's most notorious rogue. Karen Hawkins seduces: A roving viscount comes home to rekindle the passionate fires of his marriage . . . only to discover that his beautiful, headstrong bride will not be so easily won. Mia Ryan delights: A lovely, free-spirited servant is dazzled by the romantic attentions of a charming earl . . . sparking a scandalous affair that could ruin them both. You'll hear it first from Lady Whistledown!
HarperCollins Publishers 2022-12-27 400 pages

It's in His Kiss

Julia Quinn
Meet Our Hero . . . Gareth St. Clair is in a bind. His father, who detests him, is determined to beggar the St. Clair estates and ruin his inheritance. Gareth's sole bequest is an old family diary, which may or may not contain the secrets of his past . . . and the key to his future. The problem is--it's written in Italian, of which Gareth speaks not a word. Meet Our Heroine . . . All the ton agreed: there was no one quite like Hyacinth Bridgerton. She's fiendishly smart, devilishly outspoken, and according to Gareth, probably best in small doses. But there's something about her--something charming and vexing--that grabs him and won't quite let go . . . Meet Poor Mr. Mozart . . . Or don't. But rest assured, he's spinning in his grave when Gareth and Hyacinth cross paths at the annual--and annually discordant--Smythe-Smith musicale. To Hyacinth, Gareth's every word seems a dare, and she offers to translate his diary, even though her Italian is slightly less than perfect. But as they delve into the mysterious text, they discover that the answers they seek lie not in the diary, but in each other . . . and that there is nothing as simple--or as complicated--as a single, perfect kiss.
HarperCollins Publishers 2021 406 pages

Last of the Amazons

Steven Pressfield
"In the time before Homer, the legendary Theseus, King of Athens (an actual historical figure), set sail on a journey that brought him into the land of tal Kyrte, the "free people," a nation of proud female warriors whom the Greeks called "Amazons." The Amazons, bound to each other as lovers as well as fighters, distrusted the Greeks, with their boastful talk of "civilization." So when the great war queen Antiope fell in love with Theseus and fled with the Greeks, the mighty Amazon nation rose up in rage." Last of the Amazons is not merely a masterful tale of war and revenge. Pressfield has created a cast of extraordinarily vivid characters, from the unforgettable Selene, whose surrender to the Greeks does nothing to tame her; to her lover, Damon, an Athenian warrior who grows to cherish the wild Amazon ways; to the narrator, Bones, a young girl from a noble family who was nursed by Selene from birth and secretly taught the Amazon way; to the great Theseus, the tragic king; and to Antiope, the noble queen who betrayed tal Kyrte for the love of Theseus.
Doubleday 2002 416 pages

In Sunlight and in Shadow

Mark Helprin
A literary love story that rivals those celebrated in earlier classics. "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" In Helprin s rhapsodic rendering . . . "In Sunlight and in Shadow" is . . . the romance of life itself. " Los Angeles Times" In the summer of 1946, New York City pulses with energy. Harry Copeland, a World War II veteran, has returned home to run the family business. Yet his life is upended by a single encounter with the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, as each falls for the other in an instant. They pursue one another in a romance played out in Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, the offices of financiers, and the haunts of gangsters. Catherine s choice of Harry over her longtime fiance endangers Harry s livelihood and threatens his life. In the end, Harry must summon the strength of his wartime experience to fight for Catherine, and risk everything. In its storytelling heft, its moral rectitude, the solemn magnificence of its writing and the splendor of its hymns to New York City, ["In Sunlight and in Shadow"] is a spiritual pendant to Winter s Tale and every bit as extraordinary . . . Even the most stubbornly resistant readers will soon be disarmed by the nobility of the novel s sentiments and seduced by the pure music of its prose. "Wall Street Journal" [NO AUTHOR PHOTO] Mark Helprin is the acclaimed author of Winter s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, The Pacific, Memoir from Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka, Ellis Island, and numerous other works. "
Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2013 705 pages

Mary Coin A Novel

Marisa Silver
Bestselling author Marisa Silver takes Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother photograph as inspiration for a story of two women—one famous and one forgotten—and their remarkable chance encounter. In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of the road in central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting migrant laborers in search of work. Few personal details are exchanged and neither woman has any way of knowing that they have produced one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. In present day, Walker Dodge, a professor of cultural history, stumbles upon a family secret embedded in the now-famous picture. In luminous prose, Silver creates an extraordinary tale from a brief event in history and its repercussions throughout the decades that follow—a reminder that a great photograph captures the essence of a moment yet only scratches the surface of a life.
Penguin 2014-02-25 336 pages

The Agony and the Ecstasy A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo

Irving Stone
Irving Stone’s classic biographical novel of Michelangelo—the #1 New York Times bestseller in which both the artist and the man are brought to vivid, captivating life. His time—the turbulent Renaissance, the years of poisoning princes, warring Popes, and the all-powerful de'Medici family… His loves—the frail and lovely daughter of Lorenzo de'Medici, the ardent mistress of Marco Aldovrandi, and his last love, his greatest love—the beautiful, unhappy Vittoria Colonna... His genius—a God-driven fury from which he wrested brilliant work that made a grasp for heaven unmatched in half a millennium... His name—Michelangelo Buonarroti. Creator of the David, painter of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, architect of the dome of St. Peter's, Michelangelo lives once more in the tempestuous, powerful pages of Irving Stone's towering triumph. A masterpiece in its own right, this biographical novel offers a compelling portrait of one of the greatest artists the world has ever known.
National Geographic Books 2004-09-07 784 pages

Crooked

Austin Grossman
Acclaimed novelist Austin Grossman reimagines the ultimate American antihero. Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all? Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, and the truth behind the Cold War. What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest? Combining Lovecraftian suspense and international intrigue, Crooked is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.
Little, Brown 2016-08-02 368 pages

A Hunger Artist

Kafka, Franz
Written during Kafka's final years as he battled tuberculosis, A Hunger Artist was the last work he personally prepared for publication before his death in 1924. The story appeared first in Die Neue Rundschau before being published as part of a collection by Verlag Die Schmiede. Max Brod recounted that Kafka revised the text extensively while staying at the Kierling sanatorium near Vienna, perhaps seeing parallels between the artist's physical withering and his own condition. The story chronicles the decline of a professional faster whose art form - public starvation displays - falls out of fashion with changing times. Set against the backdrop of Europe's post-war transformation, the text captures the death of old cultural forms and the public's shifting appetites for entertainment. The hunger artist's insistence on fasting beyond forty days - the maximum his impresario allows - points to the gap between artistic purity and commercial demands. His body becomes a battlefield where artistic integrity clashes with market forces, while his cage in the circus suggests how art gets relegated to sideshows in an age of mass entertainment. The hunger artist's final confession - that he fasted simply because he could never find food he liked - strips away the spiritual and artistic pretensions surrounding his performance. This revelation transforms the story from allegory about artistic sacrifice into something more ambiguous and personally haunting. The text resonates with Kafka's own complicated relationship to food, his sense of alienation from Prague's literary culture, and his struggles with tuberculosis that made eating difficult in his final years. When circus workers clear away the hunger artist's body like so much straw, replacing him with a young panther full of vital energy, the story delivers its sharpest bite - showing how quickly culture discards what it once celebrated, how thoroughly new forms devour the old. This modern translation from the original German is a fresh, accessible and beautifully rendered text that brings to life Kafka's great literary work. This edition contains extra amplifying material including an illuminating afterword, a timeline of Kafka's life and works alongside of the historical events which shaped his art, and a short biography, to place this work in its socio-historical context.
Independently published 2025-01-20 103 pages

The Lions of Al-Rassan

Guy Gavriel Kay
A Master Storyteller Creates an Enduring Legend of His Own Over the centuries, the once stern rulers of Al-Rassan have been seduced by sensuous pleasures. Now King Almalik of Cartada is on the ascendancy, adding city after city to his realm, aided by his friend and advisor, the notorious Ammar ibn Khairan--poet, diplomat, soldier--until a summer day of savage brutality changes their relationship forever. Meanwhile, in the north, the Jaddite's most celebrated--and feared--military leader, Rodrigo Belmonte, and Ammar meet. Sharing the interwoven fate of both men is Jehane, the beautiful, accomplished court physician, whose own skills play an increasing role as Al-Rassan is swept to the brink of holy war, and beyond.... In a magnificent setting, hauntingly evocative of medieval Spain, The Lions of Al-Rassan is both a brilliant adventure and a deeply moving story of love, divided loyalties, and what happens to men and women when hardening beliefs begin to remake--or destroy--a world.
HarperPrism 1995 510 pages

Doc

Mary Doria Russell
The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holliday, the frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House. Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given an awful choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone and everything he loves in the hope that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Young, scared, lonely, and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier just as an economic crash wrecks the dreams of a nation. Soon, with few alternatives open to him, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally; he is also living with Maria Katarina Harony, a high-strung Hungarian whore with dazzling turquoise eyes, who can quote Latin classics right back at him. Kate makes it her business to find Doc the high-stakes poker games that will support them both in high style. It is Kate who insists that the couple travel to Dodge City, because "that's where the money is." And that is where the unlikely friendship of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp really begins--before Wyatt Earp is the prototype of the square-jawed, fearless lawman; before Doc Holliday is the quintessential frontier gambler; before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral links their names forever in American frontier mythology--when neither man wanted fame or deserved notoriety. Authentic, moving, and witty, Mary Doria Russell's fifth novel redefines these two towering figures of the American West and brings to life an extraordinary cast of historical characters, including Holliday's unforgettable companion, Kate. First and last, however, "Doc "is John Henry Holliday's story, written with compassion, humor, and respect by one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.
Thorndike Press 2011 695 pages

A brightness long ago

Kay, Guy Gavriel
"International bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay's latest work is set in a world evoking early Renaissance Italy and offers an extraordinary cast of characters whose lives come together through destiny, love, and ambition. A Brightness Long Ago offers both compelling drama and deeply moving reflections on the nature of memory, the choices we make in life, and the role played by the turning of Fortune's wheel"--
Berkley 2019 422 pages

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch A Novel

Rivka Galchen
The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances . The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch. Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.
Picador 2022-06-21 288 pages

We all want impossible things

Newman, Catherine
Who knows you better than your best friend? Who knows your secrets, your fears, your desires, your strange imperfect self? Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life's milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes,[Bokinfo]
Doubleday 2022 210 pages

Swann's War

Michael Oren
A thrilling literary fiction whodunit for fans of Delia Owens and Jacqueline Winspear World War II is raging overseas, but life remains painfully quiet on the rugged New England fishing island of Fourth Cliff. With most of its able-bodied male inhabitants away in the service, the island is now home only to aged fishermen, concerned women and children, and second-rate soldiers guarding a low-priority military emplacement and camp for Italian POWs. With her husband Archie, Fourth Cliff's beloved police captain, off fighting in the Marines, Mary Beth Swann steps into his role. Though a cop herself, she has to fight for the respect of Fourth Cliff's hardscrabble residents. And that's before a murdered POW surfaces in a fisherman's net, followed by more bodies. Determined to find the killer, Swann must rely only on the help of a simple-minded deputy, a disgraced doctor, and a mob-connected mainlander to prove her worth to Fourth Cliff--and to herself. In the tradition of Where the Crawdads Sing and the BBC's Foyle's War, Michael Oren's novel seizes the reader and doesn't let go until the very last page.
Dzanc Books 2022-10-25 256 pages

The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant
"New York Times" bestseller An unforgettable novel about a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century, told "with humor and optimism...through the eyes of an irresistible heroine" ("People")--from the acclaimed author of "The Red Tent." Anita Diamant's "vivid, affectionate portrait of American womanhood" ("Los Angeles Times"), follows the life of one woman, Addie Baum, through a period of dramatic change. Addie is The Boston Girl, the spirited daughter of an immigrant Jewish family, born in 1900 to parents who were unprepared for America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End of Boston, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine--a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, to finding the love of her life, eighty-five-year-old Addie recounts her adventures with humor and compassion for the naive girl she once was. Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Diamant's previous novels bestsellers, "The" "Boston Girl" is a moving portrait of one woman's complicated life in twentieth century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world. "Diamant brings to life a piece of feminism's forgotten history" ("Good Housekeeping") in this "inspirational...page-turning portrait of immigrant life in the early twentieth century" ("Booklist").
Thorndike Press 2015-08-20 410 pages

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

Franz Werfel
"In every sense a true and thrilling novel."-- New York Times Book Review The heroic story of resistance during the Armenian genocide. When the Turkish government ordered the deportation of Armenians, several villages in the mountains chose not to obey. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while holding out hope that the warships of the Allies would save them. An international bestseller when first published in 1933, and the first novel in modern times to capture genocide by a state, Franz Werfel's masterpiece brought the world's attention to this devastating crime against humanity and the Armenian people.
David R. Godine Publisher 2025-11-18 936 pages

The Pacific and Other Stories

Mark Helprin
A dazzling collection of short stories by Mark Helprin, bestselling author of Winter's Tale , which is now a major motion picture starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, William Hurt, and Jennifer Connelly The Pacific and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen stories that display the remarkable scope, incomparable wit, and deft prose that have come to be Mark Helprin's signature. A British paratrooper jumps into occupied territory; the 1958 New York Yankees gain an unexpected teammate in a puny, teenaged Hasidic Jew; a September 11th widow receives an astonishing gift from the contractor working on her new apartment—these and other stories exhibit the constantly changing variety of the ocean itself, the peaks and troughs of life. Lighthearted, glittering fables are met with starker tales that sound the depths of sacrifice and duty. The Pacific and Other Stories is a resplendent, powerful collection of lasting substance and emotional import.
Penguin 2005-06-28 384 pages