Item category 1: Historical Fiction

Charlotte Sauvin has always seen the world differently. At home on 33 Place Brugmann, in the heart of Brussels, her father and her closest friends and neighbours the Raphaels from the fourth floor, and Masha from the fifth have ensured her secret is safe. But when the Nazis invade Belgium, and Ma...

1924. When Anastasia's beloved mother dies, she has no choice but to go to rural Skimpole and move in with 'the Aunt' - too fearsome for a first name, an outcast from the village who lives in a dilapidated mansion with two servants and an unruly pack of dogs. The many mysteries of Skimpole are ir...

Caroline lives in two eras simultaneously - disguised as a pirate in 1727 and hunting down mobsters during Prohibition. The secret to her time-crossing gift lies with her mother, who disappeared in the Caribbean. While searching for her, Caroline finds more questions than answers as she embarks o...

London, 1815: Lady Petra Forsyth, daughter of the Earl of Holbrook, has made a shocking proclamation. After losing her beloved fiancé in an accident three years earlier, Petra sees no reason to cede her wealth and freedom to any man now that the love of her life is gone. Instead, she plans to con...

1814: Ashore on leave, Captain Sir Thomas Kydd learns of a dismal harvest and general hardship among the population. In Germany, Napoleon Bonaparte is celebrating victories that once again make his name feared throughout Europe. An armistice is signed and while the Allies lick their wounds Bonapa...

The Nazis want everyone to be the same. If you're different, you don't belong. Not belonging is dangerous... Anna's little sister, Eva, is frail and needs time to learn new things. She has a huge heart and a gift for loving, but Hitler doesn't value such riches. And so she's hidden away. Safe for...

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childho...

21 June, 1815. London may be cheering the news of Napoleon's surrender at Waterloo, but Lady Petra Forsyth has little to celebrate after discovering that the death of her viscount fiancé three years earlier was no accident. Instead, it was murder, and the man responsible is her handsome, half-Sco...

Three young people find themselves face-to-face with deadly animals -- and must summon all their courage to survive. From the shark-infested waters of the HMS Birkenhead in 1852 to the haunting roars of the Tsavo lions in 1898 and the ruthless Sankebetsu brown bear in 1915, three short stories br...

A spell-binding, multi-generational novel, set in the ruthless world of movie-making. On a blistering hot day in 1850, George and Richard Ross take their first steps on Australian soil after three long months at sea. All they have is each other, and a quarterly remittance from their irate father ...

Provence 1920. The place is a remote farmhouse in France, home to the reclusive painter Edouard Tartuffe and his niece, Ettie. Into this strange, silent house walks Joseph: a young journalist hoping to write an article about Tartuffe. But the more he entangles himself in the peculiar household, t...

May 1915. Nineteen-year-old German-American Ilse Stahl experiences the tragedy of war firsthand when a German U-boat attacks the RMS Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, killing more than a thousand passengers, including her parents. Somehow, she survives and conceals her German heritage to become...

The boy was murdered in Auschwitz. The killer isn't a Nazi. Poland, 1944: Adam Lapid used to be a police detective. Now he's a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. Reduced to a slave after losing his family in the gas chambers, Adam struggles to find a reason to carry on living. But when a boy is found ...

June 1946. As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker...

England 1940: Paris has fallen to the Third Reich. Farmer John Cook and society heiress Lady Margaret are waiting for the day when German tanks roll across the green fields of their homes. Both are ready for the moment they will disappear into the woods and the fields to carry out their top-secre...

Tuscany, November 1943. The village of Le Case is miles from any big city and remains rooted in an earlier century. Seen from Le Case, even the war looks different, mostly a matter of waiting, praying, and mourning. As a fierce winter threatens, an ominous order is issued by the local Fascist aut...

Sydney, 1871. Twenty-five-year-old widow Tatty Crowe is the owner of busy undertaking firm Crowe Funerals. Life and business are good until Tatty notices how many women are dying after unlawful abortions, and after a terrible tragedy strikes close to home, she vows to expose the culprit. And then...

Everything in the Kingdom of Arrow is a lie. Leith of Grey has nothing left, except his dying sister and his battle-scarred human body, fuelled by rage and hardened by years of fighting. So when the chance comes to fight as a gladiator in a vicious, bloodthirsty tournament, he seizes it with both...

In Roman-occupied Britain, the Iceni tribe crowns an extraordinary new queen. Tall and flame-haired, Boudicca is devoted to Andraste, the Iceni's patron goddess, known for her raven familiar, her fierceness and her swirling blue tattoos. Boudicca and her two young daughters will carry the tribe f...

1942: As the Vichy government hunts for Jews across France, Claudette Pelletier, a young and talented seamstress and lover of romance novels, falls in love with a Jewish man who seeks shelter at the château where she works. Their whirlwind and desperate romance before he must flee leaves her preg...

Peak District, Mercia, AD 910: a young girl, Freda works hard to avoid her father's temper, while longing for his approval. She loves foraging in the woods and hearthside stories of heroes. Secretly she thinks in poetry and dreams of one day being able to write; her quills are grass stalks and st...

Harriet Morrow has long been drawn to the idea of whizzing around the city on her bicycle as a professional detective, solving crimes for a living without having to take a husband. Just twenty-one with a younger brother to support, she seizes the chance when the prestigious Prescott Agency hires ...

Tyrannical communist rule based on state terror begins as the repressive regime launches a campaign of international espionage. Working against all odds, British lieutenant Ben Fletcher goes undercover to level the score and to gain vital nuclear intelligence for the West. Pursuing the same goal,...

In 1932, Wanny Woldstad, a young widow, travels to Svalbard, daring to enter the Norwegian trappers' fiercely guarded male domain. She must prove to Anders Saeterdal, her trapping partner who makes no secret of his disdain, that a woman is fit for the task. Over the course of a Svalbard winter, W...

Winter, 1947. Britain's secret services have been penetrated. The country is more vulnerable than ever - and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin knows it. He decides it is time to send his master of 'Special Tasks' to create extra chaos. But Stalin has a more important motive than mere disruption. He has...

Welcome to a glamorous gateway to the jet age. Judy Goodman and Beverly Caldwell have different reasons for putting continents and oceans between themselves and their disparate pasts, but they have the same desire to earn a coveted position on an elite team of stewardesses for Pan American Airlin...

Paris, 1933: Two days before Christmas, the express train to Strasbourg crashes into a local train in the winter darkness outside Paris. On board in Gilles Malroux, a man with a strong reason to avoid the police. In the mayhem of the accident, he swaps identity papers with one of the other victim...

Will Campbell is a Templar Knight, trained for war. But as a member of the secret brotherhood known as the Brethren, he is also a man of peace. After years of bloodshed, the Brethren have helped to create an uneasy truce between the Christian and Muslim forces in the Holy Land. But there are thos...

The bombing of Rome in 1943 leaves fourteen-year-old Massimo orphaned and with no choice but to set out on a perilous journey to find his remaining family in Naples. A chance meeting with the mysterious and charismatic Pietro Houdini will deliver both of them to the doors of the monastery of Mont...

London, 1952. Seven years after the chaotic aftermath of World War II, London has is coming alive again, with jazz clubs and flickering cinema awnings lighting up the night sky. But for widowed Helen 'Dexie' Dexter, she's still a woman in a man's world. She longs to prove herself as an officer in...