Historical fiction Books

A Bridgerton-inspired humorous Victorian romance featuring a defiant heroine who fights to escape a bad marriage, while her love for a forbidden man jeopardizes her chance at freedom.James Standish knows how to play society's game. He'll follow the rules...

The hour between dog and wolf is twilight, when it is hard to distinguish between known and unknown, right and wrong. When one state has ended and another has not quite begun. In 1980s Russia, Soviet policies, cruel but familiar, are giving way to...

A young artist meets Stephen Crane as America's hunger for empire draws them both into warOliver Fischer, a self-styled bohemian, boardwalk caricaturist, and student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, enrages his banker father and earns the...

'Societies are oiled with the unpaid, unaccounted for, work of women. It is the very glue that binds us together, and yet we are blind to it; a woman's work remains invisible.'Rosalind Franklin knows that to be a woman in a...

A wronged woman's voice is reclaimed in this gripping tale of revenge and romance-a medieval Gone Girl.Highland Scotland was no place for a woman in the early 1500s. Life was turbulent and short, battles were waged, and sisters and daughters were traded...

'Everybody has everything to lose...'An atmospheric, violent crime caper set in 1950s New York, with everything from femme fatales to double-crosses.A heist gone wrong forces Slick to do a job for his employer, Rex, to repay the debt he...

The Second World War is over, but young Tomas learns that Europe's wounds have not yet healed.'You come to see [Tomas] is conserving himself deliberately against the old suffering, the tired old guilt of the adults... Simplicity is a great...

In a dark and grimy steam-powered alternate history, Holmes and Watson are still on the case! In this gothic horror-tinged retelling of the classic duo, they'll face down the legendary Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, a villainous card playing...

The Cellist of Dachau is an acclaimed and 'masterful' novel of the Holocaust - the legacy that haunts us, and the music that binds us.In 1938, Otto Schalmik, a 19-year-old musician from a Jewish family in Vienna, is arrested by Nazi...

The darkest days of Paris, 1790s. Riots ignite the street, classes struggle for power, and death rests at the foot of the guillotine. For Ani, the French Revolution is a catalyst for bringing down the corrupt aristocracy and avenging her fallen family,...

Johanna is one of the daughters of a migrant cobbler from the eastern backwoods of Pomerania, born in the German Empire of the 1880s. Aching for a life of accomplishment and respect, she resolves to escape her dad's fate of early death, the stigma of his...

A novel based on the shocking true eighteenth-century story of a Scottish noblewoman whose own husband faked her death and exiled her to a remote island, where she could never be found.Edinburgh, January 1732. It's the funeral of Rachel, wife of...

FEATURED ONLITHUB CBC BOOKS:2024 SPRING FICTION PREVIEW Dickinson after her death: a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson's poems out of the shadowsWhen she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of...

A lyrical, lush, evocative story about a fractured Jamaican family and a daughter determined to reclaim her home.When Pearline receives grave news about her ailing father, she abruptly leaves Brooklyn for her childhood home in Jamaica. But Pearline isn't...

A seminal novel of African decolonization available for the first time in English translation.Lisbon 1961. Aware that the secret police are watching them, four young Angolans discuss their plans for a utopian homeland free from Portuguese rule. When war...

The Isle of Iona, 825.In a bloody, brutal raid, Abbot Blathmac is slain on the steps of his monastery for refusing to give away the location of the sacred relics of St Columba, the missionary who first brought Christianity to Scotland. Following a night...

From debut Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Mapepa comes the saga of the four Taha sisters, and the indomitable matriarch who carried her daughters - and her community - through times of drought and violence in their Harare neighbourhood.From the red soil of her...

From 2022 Windham Campbell Prize winner Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, the complete collection of her multiple award-winning City of Kings trilogy, includingThe Theory of Flight,The History of Man,andThe Quality of Mercy"Perhaps the most monumental trilogy to...

A whirlwind tour of San Francisco's fabled queer bohemia in the waning days of the 20th century, as the city's budget bon vivants work to save their eccentric lifestyles in the face of tech gentrification by LAMBDA award finalist Alvin Orloff.Harris, San...

'A very accomplished novel' Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin 'Hard to put this book down' Sofka Zinovieff 'An epic, page turning story, of longing and bravery... a must read' Nadia Marks Calliope is a young schoolmistress in the...

'Fresh, authentic and darkly funny. It's a beautifully told story full of warmth and emotion without ever being sentimental - I absolutely loved it' Ruth Hogan, bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost ThingsIt's the heatwave summer of 1976 and...

Victoria Swann is a successful author of romance and adventure novels who becomes a champion of women's rights as she takes on the literary establishment and finds her true voice, both on and off the page. Everything changes for Victoria when she goes...

The novels O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My ntonia made Willa Cather's reputation and, though published separately, are nowstudied together as Willa Cather's Great Plains Trilogy. These three novels, set in Nebraska and Colorado, cemented...

In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow,...

In 1638, Cassandra Southwick wonders if she has made an enormous mistake. She made the epic journey to Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony with her husband and their five children to escape religious persecution. She expects a freer life in the New World.....

In Three Fires,award-winning author Denise Mina re-imagines the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', a series of fires lit throughout Florence at the end of the fifteenth century - inspired by the fanatical Girolamo Savonarola.Girolamo Savonarola...

How far would you go to save yourself when the truth can't set you free?Scotland, 1589.Besse Craw is a young mother whose husband has mysteriously vanished. And in a time when women were powerless, she is accused of witchcraft, abused by her employer,...

17th century northern Nigeria. A royal messenger has died under suspicious circumstances. Tasked with investigating the death, a Durbar warrior and his young apprentice must endure trials of loyalty, betrayal, and sacrifice to solve the mystery and...

Banished from her parents' farm to a boarding school for young ladies, Ivy feels utterly alone. In a crumbling and isolated seminary that has seen better days, she is shunned by the other pupils for her working-class origins, and mourns for her sister,...

A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century ManhattanRavage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side-the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century-in...

A road novel, a coming-of-age tale, and a raunchy slapstick comedy that tells-in careening, charismatic prose-the (true) story of the theft of the body of Saint John of the Cross.In August 1592, a bailiff and his two assistants arrive at the monastery of...

The Arabian Nights is your magic carpet ride to exotic lands full of wonders and marvels. First collected nearly a thousand years ago, these folktales are presented as stories that crafty Scheherazade tells her husband, King Shahryar, over a...

This unabridged, annotated English translation of Jacopo Caviceo's Peregrino brings this popular Italian Renaissance romance to English readers for the first time.Jacopo Caviceo's Peregrino (1508) was a popular Renaissance prose romance in Italy, France,...

A battle lost. A daring escape. A long walk into obscurity. The ultimate failure....In the aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Culloden, a lonely figure takes flight with a small band of companions through the islands and mountains of the Hebrides. His...

'Beautifully written and sensitively observed'- Hazel Gaynor, author, The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter'Beautifully written and thought-provoking'- Ruth Hogan, author, The Keeper of Lost ThingsINSPIRED BY ONE...

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award in the Translation CategoryA Quebec bestseller based on the life of Michel Jean's great-grandmother that delivers an empathetic portrait of drastic change in an Innu community.Kukum recounts the story of...

1941, Berlin. After Police Chief Investigator Rolf Schneider is summoned to a meeting with Himmler and tasked with investigating the assassination of Heydrich, he exposes a web of corruption and secrecy involving the highest-ranking figures in the Reich...

Ryunosuke Akutagawa rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most influential modern Japanese writers. He is known as 'the father of the Japanese short story' and 'Rashmon is his best-known work. Presented with a new...

The Bee and the Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson presents a lifelong exchange of unknown letters between Dickinson, the reclusive poet, and Alcott, the most renowned author of the time.What could Alcott say to...

Amid a mountain of rain-soaked donations to the Ohnita Harbor Public Library rummage sale, Gabriela Domenici finds a small box that contains an odd-looking cross. When the carved center turns out to be ivory and a clue links the cross to Catherine of...

In the alternate history novel The New Empire, the world undergoes a drastic change in the 14th century when Chinese ships land on the west coast of what we know as the Bay Area of California. Fast forward four hundred years to a much different America...

How do you stay alive when everybody wants you dead? The Devil Hound, set in mid-eighteen century Europe and the Americas, as an evil priest dedicates his life to destroying two innocent Romani (Gypsy) brothers because of their ethnic origin and because...

During the course of his career, poet-writer Baron Wormser has investigated the hearts of many matters. In Some Months in 1968, he portrays the Brownsons, a family of five living in suburban Baltimore, who experience one of the most tumultuous moments in...

Kathryn Lasky has written an exciting new adult amateur sleuth mystery set in New Mexico in the 1930s. The sleuth is GeorgiaO'Keefe, who actually did suffer a nervous breakdown in 1933 when her husband Alfred Stieglitz had a somewhat public affair, was...

Winner of 5 major book awards, including thePublishersWeeklyU.S.2021 Selfies Award for Best Adult Fiction and winner of theIndieReader2021Discovery Award."L'Origine got me hooked-what a story! Milgrom brings the reader right along on her adventures as a...

Follow along in the story of Jesus' Silent Years in this final chapter of the hero's development as His suffering finally pays off He's survived starvation, plague, and prison. He's taken his friends for an air-walk above a castle wall. Now join Jesus as...

Winner of the Dzanc Prize for Fiction A work of brilliant and innovative historical fiction, Asylum delves into the disturbing and seductive relationship between a young hysteric named Augustine and renowned nineteenth-century French neurologist J.M...

In August of 1844, a man named Leonard Reed takes violently ill at his home near Heathsville, Illinois, and four days later he is dead. The cause? Arsenic poisoning.The suspect? His wife, Betsey.The chief witnesses against her? A hired girl, Eveline...