Item category 1: Historical Fiction

Set in Brisbane, Vietnam, London, Paris and Sydney, Leopold Cloud, an ambitious young journalist, plots his own course leaving casualties behind him, and sometimes being a casualty himself. Central to his rise and rise are two women, safe and steady Muriel, herself a journalist, and the provocati...

London, 1924. Following several months abroad, Judge Dee Ren Jie has returned to the city to intercept a transaction between a Russian diplomat and a Japanese mercenary. Aided by Lao She - the Watson to his Holmes - along with several other colorful characters, Dee stops the illicit sale of an ex...

The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to...

Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective -- she doesn't, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her "pictures" foretell various inci...

Rome, 410 AD. Half-sister to Emperor Honorius, unmarried and powerless, twenty-year-old Galla Placidia watches from the shadows as imperial policies are made and unmade. Her plans to gain power and influence are halted when the city is besieged and captured by a vast army led by Alaric the Visigo...

The Federation celebrations are fast approaching but Rose hardly has time to get excited - so many other marvellous things are happening in her world, including her first real cricket match! But then she has a nasty accident, her best friend disappears and Aunt Alice is thrown in gaol. Can Rose s...

Rose's journey continues in this, the second of four books about a Federation girl who's determined to do things her way. Rose's Mother and Aunt Alice are fighting again, and Rose is caught in the middle. So when it looks as if Aunt Alice might leave, it's up to Rose to fix things! Will Rose ever...

Rose is finally allowed to go to school! But Rose has never been to school before - will she be able to keep up? Will she fit in? And will she be allowed to join the cricket team? In the meantime, change is afoot in Melbourne: Federation is imminent, and the suffragette movement is gathering forc...

Junchow, China, 1928. Lydia Ivanova has a fierce spirit. Nothing can dim it, not even the foul waters of the Peiho River. Into the river's grime bodies are tossed - those of thieves and Communists alike. So every time Lydia steals from someone to feed herself and her mother, she takes her life in...

London, Present day. As fiercely-independent Georgia clutches a precious gem stone in her hands, she has no idea how it relates to her own family. The rare pink sapphire was left for her at Hope's House, a home for unmarried mothers. Soon Georgia discovers that the sapphire was once part of a pre...

Following his recovery after a savage wounding in America, Kydd returns to England to re-assume command of his ship-of-the-line, Thunderer, which is sent to the remote station of Bermuda.

In late Victorian England, private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn find themselves in the middle of the deadly chaos when powerful forces align to take over London's criminal underworld. Private enquiry agent Cyrus Barker, along with his partner Thomas Llewelyn, has a long, accomp...

1944, Poland. Hana's heart is beating frantically as she weaves through the bombed-out streets of Warsaw. She prays she'll make it back to the safety of her family's warm, sweet-scented bakery. Just the thought of being greeted by her younger sisters and sweeping her innocent little brother into ...

London, 1592. 28-year-old William Shakespeare is the rising man of English theatre. But plague has hit the capital, and the playhouses are to be shut. Livelihoods, and lives, are at stake. Lady Celia Vernon is one of the first to perish but did she really die of plague? Her cousin, the Earl of So...

334 BC. Alexander the Great is just twenty-one years old when he sets out with a small army to challenge Persia, the largest and most powerful empire in the world. Together, his Macedonian army marches East into the unknown - winning battles against overwhelming odds, storming impregnable fortres...

Shadow of the Moon is the story of Winter de Ballesteros, a beautiful English heiress who has come to India to be married. It is also the tale of Captain Alex Randall, her escort and protector, who knows that Winter's husband-to-be has become a debauched wreck of a man.

A new translation of Persia's founding epic. Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi (940-1020 CE), one of Iran's greatest poets, versified the ancient legends of the Persian Book of Kings (Shahnameh) in verse over one thousand years ago. It is the longest poem written by a single poet. A combination of myth and h...

Daniel Lohr, sensing that the Nazis are closing in on the Jews, leaves his dying father in Berlin and boards a ship to Shanghai. His passage is dependent upon him delivering a package to his shady uncle, his father's brother, upon arrival. Daniel has no idea what the package contains. On board is...

Sergeant Akal Singh, an unwilling transplant to Fiji, is just starting to settle into his life in the capital city of Suva when he is sent to the neighboring island of Ovalau on a series of fool's errands. First: investigate strange reports of Germans, thousands of miles from the front of World W...

1910. With the disappearance of her mother and the sudden death of her father, Lena instantly loses any security she has within the circus she has known all her life. She is advised to sell the carousel her father cared for like a child and look for a husband, or a job in a factory. Until flame-h...

In Autumn of 1912, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins arrives at his new post in the fading gold town of Colley, NSW. On his first day, he is ambushed by a hidden gunman, his junior officer is killed before his eyes, and he escapes back to town to find the police station burning to the ground. Some...

Orphan, Victoria Carlton is brought up by her uncle, a banker, to be a lady and make a good marriage. Yet, she is drawn to help the poor families in the slums, much to her family's disgust. When her uncle dies suddenly, her cousins blame Victoria, and she is thrown out of the house with nothing. ...

1826. Isobel Tait finds herself, by chance, staring at a tiny human heart floating in a jar. It should be of little consequence; Dr. Burnett is renowned for his collection of oddities and medical specimens, and this, a juvenile heart with a damaged mitral valve, is not the strangest thing on disp...

For Ellen Whitfield, the betrothal of her dear friend Harriet to Ellen's brother has brought both loss and solace. But when Harriet suddenly breaks off the engagement, ostensibly at the insistence of her deceased mother, Ellen is bewildered. And when she learns that Harriet is involved with a spi...

Samson Kolechko has been assigned a most perplexing case, though it is mostly perplexing because it's hard to understand why selling the meat of one's own pig constitutes a crime. But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to "reinforce" the Lybid ...

Without parents, peerage, or merit, ducking school but barred from actual work, fourteen-year-old Charlie Matters steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he's old enough to enlist to fight the Germans. Fifteen-year-old Molly Wakefield has just returned to a nearly unrecognizable London. One...

In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets and enormous dust storms. One of its own has gone missing - six-year-old Denny Wallace - and the whole town is intent on finding him.

In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss's life seems idyllic. She works at her uncle's bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it's 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina's family hides a terrifying secret her birth mother was Jewish, m...

Late September, 1942: Jo Hardy, a 22-year-old ferry pilot, is delivering a Spitfire to Biggin Hill Aerodrome when she realizes someone is shooting at her aircraft. When she returns to the location on foot, she finds an American serviceman in a barn, tied up and gagged. Jo hurries away, but can't ...

As one of only a handful of female medical graduates working at the Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Clara Heywood refuses to be denied the chance to become a surgeon because of her sex. As her male colleagues, including her unofficial fiance Edward, head off to war, Clara grapples with a sense ...