Historical Fiction Library

Murder. One of the Allerdon sisters has been charged with a pre-meditated killing and taken to jail. It doesn't seem possible - but it's happening. What was supposed to be a typical summer is anything but for this seemingly ordinary family. Shortly after they arrive at their cozy family cottage on the river, Lander meets and is smitten with a handsome young man, and they begin to date. Miranda has a bad feeling about her sister's new boyfriend. And when the family must deal with an unimaginable nightmare, Miranda can't help feeling that the boyfriend has something to do with it.

Anne Boleyn is the odd girl out. Newly arrived to the court of King Henry VIII, everything about her seems wrong, from her clothes to her manners to her witty but sharp tongue. So when the dashing poet Thomas Wyatt offers to coach her on how to shine at court - and to convince the whole court they're lovers - she accepts. Before long, Anne's popularity has soared, and even the charismatic and irresistible king takes notice. More than popularity, Anne wants a voice - but she also wants love. What began as a game becomes high stakes as Anne finds herself forced to make an impossible choice between her heart's desire and the chance to make history.

1896. After he brought her home from Jamaica as a baby, Florence's father had her hair hot-combed to make her look like the other girls. But as a young woman, Florence is not so easy to tame - and when she brings scandal to his door, the bookbinder throws her onto the streets of Manchester. Intercepting her father's latest commission, Florence talks her way into the remote, forbidding Rose Hall to restore its collection of rare books. Lord Francis Belfield's library is old and full of secrets - but none so intriguing as the whispers about his late wife.

When 12-year-old Gertie Milk washes up on the island of Skuldark, she finds that all of her memories are gone. Home to helpful Slug Lamps, delicious moonberries, and a ferocious Guard Worm, the island is full of oddities, including a cozy cottage containing artifacts from every corner of history. It is there that Gertie discovers she has been chosen as the next Keeper of Lost Things, tasked with the mission of returning objects to history's most important figures right when they need them most.

Olivia can’t wait to invite her friends to the 62nd annual Main Street Block Party. But when she does, Alison says that Main Street isn’t safe. Olivia’s eyes fill with tears, and she begins to wish that she didn’t live on Main Street at all. Then, Olivia learns what happened when her neighbor Ms. Effie was about her age: Ms. Effie's family was also told that Main Street wasn’t good enough. The bank wouldn’t give them a loan to buy their house based on where it fell on a color-coded map. Mostly Black people lived near Main Street, so the neighborhood was colored red on the map.

Every day, more and more people fleeing war in the north show up at Kyung Tak and her family’s house on the southeastern shore of Korea. With nowhere else to go, the Taks' home is these migrants' last chance of refuge “before falling into the sea,” and the household quickly becomes crowded, hot, and noisy. Then war sirens cry out over Kyung's city too, and her family and their guests take shelter underground. When the sirens stop, Kyung is upset—she wishes everything could go back to the way it was before: before the sirens, before strangers started coming into their home.

Charlie and Ralph’s mom has waited a long time to vote because countless obstacles have been put in Black people’s way to stop them from having a say in elections—obstacles that it took a lot of hard work to tear down. But now, in 1969, Madear is going to vote for the very first time, and the boys are coming along on this exciting day. A day that puts a new bounce in their mom’s step, and enables them all to begin to dream of a better future.

Twelve-year-old orphan Eva Root travels the country pretending to channel spirits at séances. Her audiences swear their loved ones have spoken to them from beyond the grave. This, of course, is impossible. But one day, Eva experiences another impossibility: she hears a voice in her head telling her to come to the World’s Fair in Chicago. There, she meets a mysterious magician who needs her help to bring magic to life.

Craig Crist-Evans has written a wrenching novel of a family whose internal battles chase one son away - into the clutches of a war and an enemy he could never have imagined. Told both from a soldier’s view and by the brother he leaves behind, Amaryllis is an ideal choice for students learning about the Vietnam era, or for any reader curious about the reality of war.

It's 1932 and adventuress and plant-hunter Emily Blackwood accepts a commission from Heinrich Vogel, a former dealer of exotic animals in Manhattan, living now with his macabre collection in a remote Scottish castle. Emily is tasked to find a long-lost treasure which Heinrich believes has been hidden within the castle walls. But instead she discovers the pages of a diary, written by Hester Vogel, who died after falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. Hester's diary leads Emily to an old book The Birdcage Library and into a treasure hunt of another kind.

'The Library Window' is a ghost story. A young girl, visiting her aunt in Scotland, finds herself increasingly intrigued by a mysterious window in the house opposite her own favourite window, where she sits to read. There seems to be a local mystery about the window, including a dispute about whether there is even a window there at all. Increasingly this doubt seems odd to the girl as the days go by, as she can see into the room opposite and make out furniture and objects there. Then one day she sees someone in that room....

It's 1944. World War II is raging. Jayna's big brother, Rob, is her only family. When Rob is called to duty on a destroyer, Jayna is left in their small town in upstate New York with their cranky landlady. But right before he leaves, Rob tells Jayna a secret: they may have a grandmother in Brooklyn. Rob found a little blue recipe book with her name and an address for a bakery. When Jayna learns that Rob is missing in action, she's devastated. Along with her turtle, Theresa; the recipe book; and an encouraging, ghostly voice as her guide, Jayna sets out for Brooklyn in hopes of finding the family she so desperately needs.

Johanna is a servant girl to Dame Margery Kempe, a renowned medieval holy woman. Dame Margery feels the suffering the Virgin Mary felt for her son but cares little for the misery she sees every day. When she announces that Johanna will accompany her on a pilgrimage to Rome, the suffering truly begins. After walking all day, Johanna must fetch water, wash clothes, and cook for the entire party of pilgrims. Then arguing breaks out between Dame Margery and the other travelers, and Johanna is caught in the middle. As the fighting escalates, Dame Margery turns her back on the whole group.

Once the sheltered son of nobility, Will has become an exile. While his father, Lord Shackley, has been on the Crusades with King Richard, a treacherous plot to unseat Richard has swept across England, and Shackley House has fallen. Will flees the only home he's ever known into neighboring Sherwood Forest, where he joins the elusive gang of bandits known as the Merry Men.

It is 1918, six months after the end of World War I, and Rosalind awaits the return of her father from the war. While it is common practice for British children in India to be packed off to boarding school at the age of 6, Rosalind is unusual because she lives and is schooled in India because her mother insists.

Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to remarry, Molly’s life is thrown off course by the arrival of her vain, shallow, and selfish stepmother. There is some solace in the shape of her new stepsister, Cynthia, who is beautiful, sophisticated and irresistible to every man she meets. Soon the girls become close, and Molly finds herself cajoled into becoming a go-between in Cynthia’s love affairs. But in doing so, Molly risks ruining her reputation in the gossiping village of Hollingford - and jeopardizing everything with the man she is secretly in love with.

Staid, responsible Elodie Buchanan is the eldest of 10 sisters growing up in a small English market town in 1861. The girls barely know their father, a plant hunter usually off adventuring through China, more myth than man. Then disaster strikes: Mr. Buchanan reneges on his contract to collect an extremely rare and valuable orchid. He will be thrown into debtors' prison while his daughters are sent to the orphanage and the workhouse.

Long before they became famous writers, Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) were childhood friends in Monroeville, Alabama. This fictionalized account of their time together opens at the beginning of the Great Depression, when Tru is seven and Nelle is six. They love playing pirates, but they like playing Sherlock and Watson-style detectives even more. It’s their pursuit of a case of drugstore theft that lands the daring duo in real trouble. Humor and heartache intermingle in this lively look at two budding writers in the 1930s South.

Penguin Classics presents Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, adapted for listening and now available as a digital audiobook as part of the Penguin English Library series. The text is read by the actor David Timson. Trollope's comic masterpiece of plotting and backstabbing opens as the Bishop of Barchester lies on his deathbed. Soon a pitched battle breaks out over who will take power, involving, among others, the zealous reformer Dr Proudie, his fiendish wife, and the unctuous schemer Obadiah Slope.

Kevin is trying to remember what he's supposed to do if there's an intruder in the house: stay calm, don't look scared, call 911. At the same time, he's doing his best to figure out how the heck some guy with a bow and arrow got into the room. The archer's explanation - "I lost my balance, fell off the tiger, and landed here" - just adds to Kevin's bewilderment.