Item category 1: Historical Fiction

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in ...

Amherst, 1857. The Dickinson family braves one of the worst winters in New England's history. Trains are snowbound and boats are frozen in the harbor. Emily Dickinson and her maid, Willa Noble, have never witnessed anything like it. As Amherst families attempt to keep their homes warm, fears of f...

France, 1531. Orphaned by the age of five, Marguerite de la Rocque was heir to a chateau with its own village and lands. But her guardian, Jean Francois de la Rocque de Roberval, sells Marguerite's property to embark on an expedition to New France, bringing Marguerite and her maidservant with him...

Jam is sweet but it can also burn. Tasmania, 1874. Growing up in the impoverished tenements along the Hobart Rivulet, Harriet Brown is used to doing whatever it takes to survive. Including, at just twelve years old, shearing off her hair and pretending to be a boy to secure a job as label-paster ...

As Allied bombs rain down on Torino in the autumn of 1942, Stella Costa's mother sends her to safety with distant relatives in a Tuscan villa. There, Stella finds her family tasked with a great responsibility: hiding nearly 300 priceless masterpieces from Florence, including Botticelli's famous P...

Tildy Barrows, Head Curator of a beautiful archival library in San Francisco, is meticulously dedicated to the century's worth of inventory housed in her beloved Beaux Art building. She loves the calm and order in the shelves of books and walls of art. But Tildy's life takes an unexpected turn wh...

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin's thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, bu...

As a child, Little Flower is sold to Linjing's wealthy family to become a muizai. In a fit of childish jealousy over her new handmaiden's ladylike bound feet and talent for embroidery, Linjing ensures Little Flower can never leave her to ascend in society. Despite their starkly different places i...

Morocco, 1928. Eighteen-year-old Frenchwoman Marie-Madeleine is not the kind of woman who goes through life sitting down, and it's a trait that not everyone is a fan of - including her husband. Her unconventionalities - rally car driving, flying planes and dabbling in intelligence work for the go...

2016: Fresh from her mother's funeral, Mari arrives on Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts to study under the enigmatic painter Elizabeth Devereux. But she soon realises that her relationship to the island runs deeper than she ever thought possible. 1942: It's World War II, and Smith...

Intelligent, beautiful Alexandra Bouvier was raised believing she could achieve anything. But when the First World War breaks out in 1914, and both her parents are killed while volunteering on the front lines, Alex's world collapses. Supported by her loving grandmother, Alex is determined to carr...

England, 1840. For the two decades following the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen has lived alone, spending her days visiting friends and relations and quietly, purposefully working to preserve her sister's reputation. Now in her sixties and increasingly frail, Cassandra goes t...

New Mexico, 1935. Painter Georgia O'Keeffe is at her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan's home, Los Gallos, a house inhabited by a colorful range of artists, authors and society figures, to attend the memorial service of the renowned writer D.H. Lawrence. Georgia has been commissioned to design the stained...

They said I would swing for the crime and I did... Surely, they can't hang me twice? 1724. In a village tavern on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Maggie Dickson's family drown their sorrows, mourning her death yet relieved she is gone. Shame haunts them. Passersby avert their eyes from the cheap-look...

Lady Alice Ancaster must find a husband quickly to protect her family's dukedom from their cousin, but she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the Duke of Blackwood, a childhood friend whose reckless lifestyle complicates her choice and challenges her ability to trust him as a hero in her time of...

Emilia del Valle was always destined for great things. Abandoned at birth by her Chilean aristocrat father, Emilia comes of age in nineteenth-century San Francisco as an independent and fiercely ambitious young woman, decades ahead of her time. She will do whatever it takes to pursue her life's p...

Quiet and reserved, Clemmie is happy in the background. Although her parents may overlook her talents, her ability to read hieroglyphs makes her invaluable at the Egyptian relic parties which have made her father the toast of Victorian society. But at one such party, the words Clemmie interprets ...

Emperor Tiberius first dispatches a traitor. Then his whole family. Next all his friends. It is as if he never existed. Into this fevered forum, a child is born. His mother is Agrippina, granddaughter of Emperor Augustus. But their imperial blood is no protection. The closer you are to the heart ...

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn'...

Northern Germany, 1945. Dead of night and dead of winter, a boy hears soldiers and sees strangers, forced labourers, fleeing across the heathland by his small town: shawls and skirts in the snowfall. The end days are close, war brings risk and chance, and Benno is witness to something he barely u...

Meet Betty: storyteller, feminist, eternally curious and phenomenally old. On the eve of her 100th birthday party, Betty tells us her story. Born into poverty in pre-war London, and growing up fast during the Blitz, Betty grabs the chance at a bigger life by migrating to Australia. On board the S...

London, present day. Blake gazes down at a scrap of shimmering silver velvet attached to a faded dress design. They were left by her great-grandmother at Hope's House, a home for unmarried mothers, and now that her beloved grandmother has passed, the designer's signature is the only clue Blake ha...

It's early in the wet season. A flock of crested terns sweeps into the bay and dives towards Batjani. The birds are saying the foreigners are coming, as they do every year, but why are they so full of menace? Batjani's beloved granddaughter Garritji is on the cusp of womanhood, about to go throug...

Rome, 1656. In Rome's shadowy backstreets lies an apothecary's shop - a place for women to take their heartbreaks and troubles. Herbs for childbirth. Tarot readings to tell their fortunes. An undetectable poison that can kill in four drops. Alongside her circle of female poisoners, Giulia Tofana ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...