1169 results for "Historical Fiction"

The Blindness of the Heart

Julia Franck
A story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station in 1945, amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west. Having survived with him through the horror and deprivation of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. The story quickly circles back to Helene's childhood with her sister Martha in rural Germany, which came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War. Their father is sent to the eastern front, and their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. As we follow Helene into adulthood, we watch riveted as the costs of survival and ill-fated love turn her into a woman capable of the unforgivable.
Thorndike Press 2011 655 pages

The Journey Back

Johanna Reiss
How does it feel to leave the people you've grown to love -- and go back to a family you no longer know? Holland,1945 -- World War II has finally ended. For thirteen-year-old Annie de Leeuw and her sister Sini, Almost three years of hiding from the Germans in the upstairs room of a remote farmhouse have also ended. Saying good-bye to the courageous family who hid them is very difficult. And Annie finds that being home again isn't easy either. Her mother is dead; her father, distant and distracted. Sini is out dancing with the soldiers every night , trying to make up for lost time, and Annie's oldest sister, Rachel, has become a Christian. Soon Annie has another problem -- getting used to a new stepmother she cannot seem to please. Annie learns that though the fighting is over, some of the wounds of the war still remain. Her old home is gone. Now she must build a new life for herself.
HarperCollins 1987-09-25 224 pages

Mendelssohn is on the roof

Weil, Jiří
On the roof of Prague's concert hall, Julius Schlesinger, aspiring SS officer, is charged with the removal of the statue of the Jew Mendelssohn--but which one is he? Remembering his course on "racial science," Schlesinger instructs his men to pull down the statue with the biggest nose. Only as the statue topples does he recognize the face of Richard Wagner. This is just the beginning in Weil's novel, which traces the transformation of ordinary liveds in Nazi-occupied Prague.
Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1991-04-12 227 pages

Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell

Howard Engel
Howard Engel is the award winning writer whose Benny Cooperman mysteries garner rave international reviews-fans stretch from Canada to Japan, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the United States. His latest, Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell, is a brilliant departure from the Cooperman series. The year is 1879 and in Edinburgh, Alan Lambert has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang for the murder of a dazzling opera star and her lover. But Lambert's brother believes he's innocent and pleads with Dr. Bell, a celebrated professor of anatomy, to uncover the truth. Bell agrees and sets out to crack the case with his keen powers of deduction and the help of his student, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Harry N. Abrams 2004-06-29 224 pages

The Novel of Ferrara

Giorgio Bassani
Giorgio Bassani’s six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be. Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and his Northern Italian hometown of Ferrara “are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste” (from the Introduction). Now published in English for the first time as the unified masterwork Bassani intended, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani’s six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls , The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles , The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , Behind the Door , The Heron , and The Smell of Hay . Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliatingly exposed by an exploitative youth; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose neighbors’ celebration of his return gradually turns to ostracism; a young man discovering the ugly, treacherous price that people will pay for a sense of belonging; the Jewish aristocrat whose social position has been erased; the indomitable schoolteacher, Celia Trotti, whose Communist idealism disturbs and challenges a postwar generation. The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, this seminal work seals Bassani’s reputation as “a quietly insistent chronicler of our age’s various menaces to liberty” (Jonathan Keates).
National Geographic Books 2020-12-01 800 pages

Sunday's Silence

Gina B. Nahai
How different is Iran from Appalachia? Iranian-born writer Nahai's first two novels, Cry of the Peacock and Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, were set in her native land, to great effect and rave reviews. Now, in a thoughtfully executed third novel, Nahai takes on Appalachia, illuminating another region whose people are united by a fundamentalist faith, their beliefs as exotic to, and misunderstood by, most Western readers as those of the people of Iran. Foreign correspondent Adam Watkins is stationed in Lebanon when he receives news that Little Sam Jenkins, the father he barely knew, has died of snakebite. A snake-handling preacher who had survived nine decades of hard living and 446 snakebites, Sam finally succumbed to the venom of a snake given to him by Blue, a gorgeous Kurdish woman born in Iraq, and herself a skilled snake-handler who never fit in with the Holy Rollers. Adam, having tried for 18 years to create a new life for himself, returns home looking for answers: What drove Sam? And was Blue merely testing Sam's faith, or did she intend to kill him? A strong sense of geography and religious history provides the backdrop as Nahai explores the enigma of charisma, opening a window on an insular world and rendering the "other" America explicable. Alternating with Adam's story is the first-person account of Blue, her voice charged with the mythic, seductive power of a Scheherazade. Faith versus fanaticism, fear as a motivating force for seeking salvation these themes are examined, as events both tragic and redemptive unfold. This multifaceted work expands Nahai's fictional universe in new and curiously fitting directions. Agent, Barbara Lowenstein. (Nov. 1)Forecast: Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith was a bestseller on the West Coast and has been translated into 16 languages. The Appalachia setting of Nahai's latest may startle her fans and lead to slow sales at first, but strong reviews should attract new readers.
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2015-02-24 320 pages

The Collaborator

Diane Armstrong
Is he a hero or a traitor? Based on astonishing true events set in the darkest days of World War II in Budapest, this is an enthralling story of heroism, vengeance, passion, and betrayal. It is also the story of three women linked by a secret that threatens to destroy their lives. For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, All That I Am and Schindler's Ark (List). An act of heroism, the taint of collaboration, a doomed love affair, and an Australian woman who travels across the world to discover the truth... It is 1944 in Budapest and the Germans have invaded. Jewish journalist Miklos Nagy risks his life and confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences... It is 2005 in Sydney, and Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest and Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944. By the time her odyssey is over, history has been turned on its head, past and present collide, and the secret that has poisoned the lives of three generations is finally revealed in a shocking climax that holds the key to their redemption. PRAISE: 'Guaranteed to hook you with its powerful and emotive journey back into a turbulent history, The Collaborator is a superb and compelling novel that comes highly recommended' - Canberra Weekly
Harlequin Enterprises (Australia) Pty, Limited 2020-07-08 496 pages

The Last Flight of Poxl West

Daniel Torday
Poxl West fled the Nazis' onslaught in Czechoslovakia. He escaped their clutches again in Holland. He pulled Londoners from the Blitz's rubble. He wooed intoxicating, unconventional beauties. He rained fire on Germany from his RAF bomber. Poxl West is the epitome of manhood and something of an idol to his teenage nephew, Eli Goldstein, who reveres him as a brave, singular, Jewish war hero. Poxl fills Eli's head with electric accounts of his derring-do, adventures and romances, as he collects the best episodes from his storied life into a memoir. He publishes that memoir, Skylock, to great acclaim, and its success takes him on the road, and out of Eli's life. With his uncle gone, Eli throws himself into reading his opus and becomes fixated on all things Poxl. But as he delves deeper into Poxl's history, Eli begins to see that the life of the fearless superman he's adored has been much darker than he let on, and filled with unimaginable loss from which he may have not recovered. As the truth about Poxl emerges, it forces Eli to face irreconcilable facts about the war he's romanticized and the vision of the man he's held so dear. Daniel Torday's debut novel, "The Last Flight of Poxl West, " beautifully weaves together the two unforgettable voices of Eli Goldstein and Poxl West, exploring what it really means to be a hero, and to be a family, in the long shadow of war.
Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning 2015 421 pages

The Director A Novel

Daniel Kehlmann
A New York Times Notable Book • An NYPL Best Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Book A Late Show with Stephen Colbert Book Club Pick “Nothing short of brilliant.” — The Wall Street Journal From “a surpassingly gifted storyteller” ( The New York Times ), a visionary novel inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to return to his homeland to create propaganda films for the German Reich. An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator.
S&S/Summit Books 2026-05-12 352 pages

No bed for bacon

Brahms, Caryl
First published in 1941, No Bed for Bacon is a comic classic. Out of print since 1985, but much-discussed in the press following the release of the Oscar-showered film Shakespeare in Love, the novel fizzes with wit, warmth and the occasional custard pie. It is a festive celebration of 'The Great Bard' par excellence. Five o'clock and all's well in Merrie England. But not for long. Good Queen Bess is stirring in her four-poster and is feeling neither happy nor glorious. Down at the Globe, Will Shakespeare is chewing the end of his quill: something's amiss with Love's Labours Wunne. And Walter Raleigh, boiling his new potato in the depths of the regal kitchens, is getting very hot under the collar of his latest cloak - will his spud achieve the perfect fluffiness for The Royal Tasting? Heads are sure to roll before the day is out.
Black Swan 2012-05 256 pages

P.K. Pinkerton and the Petrified Man

Caroline Lawrence
The second book in a rip-roaring adventure series set in the wild west! After escaping the ruthless desperados, P.K. finally feels safe in Virginia City and is ready to set up a new private eye business. But all the mysteries in town seem to be pranks—until the day P.K. meets a young maid named Martha. Martha’s employer has been found dead . . . and now the killer is after her. The mystery takes a grave turn when Martha disappears, so P.K. consults Poker Face Jace, an expert at people reading. With his help, P.K. inspects saloons and billiard rooms, and even tries sneaking into the coroner’s office. But time is quickly running out for P.K., and Martha’s life has never been in more danger.
Penguin Young Readers Group 2014-01-09 336 pages

The Cabala

Bernhard Pick
Kabbalah is a mystical and esoteric system of Jewish thought and spirituality, which dates back to ancient times and has continued to evolve throughout history. It involves the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and the quest for understanding the hidden meanings and secrets of the universe. In "The Cabala," Bernhard Pick explores the origins, history, and development of Kabbalah within Judaism. He also examines how Kabbalistic ideas and concepts have influenced Christian mysticism and esotericism over the centuries. The book delves into various aspects of Kabbalah, including its teachings on the nature of God, the Sephirot (emanations or attributes of the divine), the concept of Ein Sof (the infinite and unknowable divine essence), and the use of mystical symbols and diagrams. Bernhard Pick's work on the Cabala is considered significant in the study of Jewish mysticism and the transmission of Kabbalistic ideas beyond Jewish circles into Christian thought.
Zinc Read 2023-07-31 66 pages

No Pretty Pictures

Anita Lobel
The beloved Caldecott Honor artist now recounts a tale of vastly different kind -- her own achingly potent memoir of a childhood of flight, imprisonment, and uncommon bravery in Nazi-occupied Poland. Anita Lobel was barely five when the war began and sixteen by the time she came to America from Sweden, where she had been sent to recover at the end of the war. This haunting book, illustrated with the author's archival photographs, is the remarkable account of her life during those years. Poised, forthright, and always ready to embrace life, Anita Lobel is the main character in the most personal story she will ever tell.Anita Lobel was barely five years old when World War II began and the Nazis burst into her home in Krakow, Poland, changing her life forever. She spent the days of her childhood in hiding with her brother--who was disguised as a girl--and their Catholic nanny in the countryside, the ghetto, and finally in a convent where the Nazis caught up with her. She was imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps until the end of the war. Sent by the Red Cross to recuperate in Sweden, she slowly blossomed as she discovered books and language and art. Since coming to the United States as a teenager, Anita Lobel has spent her life making pictures. She has never gone back. She has never looked back. Until now. 00-01 Tayshas High School Reading List Anita Lobel was barely five years old when World War II began and the Nazis burst into her home in Krakow, Poland, changing her life forever. She spent the days of her childhood in hiding with her brother--who was disguised as a girl--and their Catholic nanny in the countryside, the ghetto, and finally in a convent where the Nazis caught up with her. She was imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps until the end of the war. Sent by the Red Cross to recuperate in Sweden, she slowly blossomed as she discovered books and language and art. Since coming to the United States as a teenager, Anita Lobel has spent her life making pictures. She has never gone back. She has never looked back. Until now.
HarperCollins 2000-02-02 193 pages

Damnation Street

Andrew Klavan
They are two sworn enemies with a single obsession: a woman on the run from them both. Scott Weiss is a private detective. John Foy is a professional killer. The woman is Julie Wyant, a hooker with the face of an angel. Julie spent one night with Foy--a night of psychopathic cruelty that Foy called love. Desperate to get away from him, she vanished without a trace. And Foy wants her back. There's only one man who can find her: Weiss, the best locate operative in the business. She's begged him not to look for her, fearing he'll bring the killer in his wake. But Weiss can't stay away. Now, from a town called Paradise, through a wilderness that feels like hell, Weiss searches for Julie--and the killer follows, waiting for his chance. They are two expert hunters matching move for move--until it ends on Damnation Street.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2007-09-10 320 pages

The death of Virgil

Broch, Hermann
It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem -- and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.
Vintage Books 1995-01-15 493 pages

A shtetl and other Yiddish novellas

Wisse, Ruth R.
The five short novellas which comprise this anthology were written between 1890 and World War I. All share a common setting-the Eastern European Jewish town or shtetl, and all deal in different ways with a single topic-the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The authors of these novellas are among the greatest masters of Yiddish prose. In their work, today's reader will discover a literary tradition of considerable scope, energy, and variety and will come face to face with an exceptionally memorable cast of characters and with a human community now irrevocably lost.In her general introduction, Professor Wisse traces the development of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the many shifts that took place between the Yiddish writers and the world about which they wrote. She also furnishes a brief introduction for each novella, giving the historical and biographical background and offering a critical interpretation of the work.
Behrman House 1973 364 pages

Guardian of the Dawn

Richard Zimler
From The Highly Acclaimed Author Of The Last Kabbalist Of Lisbon And Hunting Midnight Comes A Sweeping Tale Of Devotion, Persecution And Vengeance In Colonial India By The Time The 16Th Century Was Drawing To A Close In The Portuguese Colony Of Goa, The Catholic Inquisition Was Making Excellent Progress In Its Mission To Keep All Sorcerers Whether Native Hindus Or Immigrant Jews From Practising Their Traditional Beliefs. Those Who Refused To Denounce Others And Give Up Their Ways Were Either Strangled By Executioners Or Burnt Alive In Public Autos-Da-Fé. By Living Just Outside Colonial Territory, The Zarco Family Manages To Stick Firm To Its Portuguese Jewish Roots. Tiago And His Sister Sofia Enjoy A Peaceful Childhood Learning To Illustrate Manuscripts With Their Father, And Secretly Dipping Into The Heady Chaos Of The Hindu Festivals Celebrated By Their Beloved Cook Nupi. As The Children Reach Adulthood, The Family Is Torn Apart When First The Father And Then The Son Are Imprisoned By The Inquisition. But Who Could Have Betrayed Them? Impeccably Researched, Guardian Of The Dawn Is Both A Riveting Historical Mystery And, In Its Profound Exploration Of The Nature Of Evil, A Powerful Reinterpretation Of Othello. This Is Richard Zimler At His Imaginative, Energetic, And Insightful Best. Praise For The Last Kabbalist Of Lisbon Zimler [Is] A Present-Day Scholar And Writer Of Remarkable Erudition And Compelling Imagination, An American Umberto Eco. Francis King, Spectator Drenched In Atmosphere And Period Detail. Wall Street Journal A Riveting Literary Murder Mystery, His Novel Is Also A Harrowing Picture Of The Persecution Of 16Th-Century Jews, And In Passing, The Atmospheric Introduction To The Hermetic Jewish Tradition Of The Kabbalah. Independent On Sunday A Fascinating Novel With Spellbinding Subject Matter. Elle Praise For Hunting Midnight Enthralling&Hunting Midnight Is A Shamelessly Sprawling Historical Novel, Spanning Continents, Napoleonic Wars, A Secret Jewish Family, Kalahari Magic, And Slavery In South Carolina. Sydney Morning Herald Zimler Is Always An Exhilaratingly Free Writer, Free Of Ordinary Taboos&Hunting Midnight Shows Zimler At The Height Of His Powers. London Magazine This Is An Epic Melodrama, Spanning Three Continents And More Than Twenty-Five Years, Building Up To A Genuinely Moving Climax. Literary Review This Is A Rousing Roaring Roller Coaster Of A Read. Climb Aboard And Have Zimler Rattle You Off Into The Sort Of Expansive Imaginative Realm That Readers Dream Of And Lesser Writers Steer Clear Of&Bracing, Spine-Tingling Stuff. Australian Reading Hunting Midnight Was Like Discovering A Rare Gem. Richard Zimler Is A Brilliant Author With A Touch Of Genius. Rendezvous Magazine (Usa)
Penguin Books India 2008 386 pages

King Zeno

Rich, Nathaniel
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Paris Review Staff Pick A January Pick by Salon , Town and Country, Southern Living, and LA Magazine New Orleans, 1918. The birth of jazz, the Spanish flu, an ax murderer on the loose. The lives of a traumatized cop, a conflicted Mafia matriarch, and a brilliant trumpeter converge—and the Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping novel it so deserves. From one of the most inventive writers of his generation, King Zeno is a historical crime novel and a searching inquiry into man’s dreams of immortality. New Orleans, a century ago: a city determined to reshape its destiny and, with it, the nation’s. Downtown, a new American music is born. In Storyville, prostitution is outlawed and the police retake the streets with maximum violence. In the Ninth Ward, laborers break ground on a gigantic canal that will split the city, a work of staggering human ingenuity intended to restore New Orleans’s faded mercantile glory. The war is ending and a prosperous new age dawns. But everything is thrown into chaos by a series of murders committed by an ax-wielding maniac with a peculiar taste in music. The ax murders scramble the fates of three people from different corners of town. Detective William Bastrop is an army veteran haunted by an act of wartime cowardice, recklessly bent on redemption. Isadore Zeno is a jazz cornetist with a dangerous side hustle. Beatrice Vizzini is the widow of a crime boss who yearns to take the family business straight. Each nurtures private dreams of worldly glory and eternal life, their ambitions carrying them into dark territories of obsession, paranoia, and madness. In New Orleans, a city built on swamp, nothing stays buried long.
MCD 2018-01-09 386 pages