Item category 1: Historical Fiction

'There's a track winding back, to an old-fashioned shack, Along the road to Gundagai...' The words are familiar, but the story they tell may not be. Andrew McLean's illustrations bring to life the story of the men who went to the Great War, many of them never to return home.

Reimagines the life of American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt as the reluctant and bullied bride of the Duke of Marlborough before she finds the inner strength to fight for women's equality.

The iconic song about the Battle of Gallipoli, written by Eric Bogle in 1972 at the height of the anti-war movement, re-imagined by esteemed children's illustrator Bruce Whatley.

The soldiers she saved called her the Angel of Waterloo. The husband she loved and lost called her Hen. The patients she treated in secret called her Auntie Love. She was Henrietta Bartlett, a surgeon's daughter, a survivor of the Napoleonic Wars. But now the battlefield is just a blood-soaked me...

It is 1953 and five very different girls are arriving at the nurses' home in Lovely Lane, Liverpool, to start their training at St Angelus Hospital. Dana has escaped from her family farm on the west coast of Ireland. Victoria is running away from a debt-ridden aristocratic background. Beth is an ...

It is 1953 and five very different girls are arriving at the nurses' home in Lovely Lane, Liverpool, to start their training at St Angelus Hospital.

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...

August 1939. Thirty-year-old Hetty Cartwright is tasked with the evacuation and safekeeping of the natural history museums collection of mammals. Once she and her exhibits arrive at Lockwood Manor, however, where they are to stay for the duration of the war, Hetty soon realizes that she's taken o...

Fresh from the cultivated hothouse of Renaissance France, Anne draws attention at the English court. A nobleman, a poet and a king vie for her love. She has a spirit worthy of a crown, and a crown is what she seeks. It is a more powerful aphrodisiac than love and so she embarks on her perilous co...

You have heard, no doubt, the tale of Master Oliver Twist - that rags-to-riches boy; the parish orphan who became heir to the Brownlow fortune. But what few know is that there was a second Twist - a girl, brought into this world moments ahead of her brother. This is the story of Twill Twist and h...

Austria 1767: Maria Carolina Charlotte -- ninth daughter and sixteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria knows her position as a Hapsburg archduchess will inevitably force her to leave her home, her family, and her beloved country. But not yet. The Hapsburg family is celebrating a great t...

During World War I, Australian and New Zealand soldiers on the front were sent Christmas care packages in a tin billy. The Anzac Billy is the heartwarming story of a little boy packing a billy with all his father’s favourite things, added to by mum and grandma, even though he realises there is n...

This a WWI-era picture book is based on true events and a real-life young soldier from Dunedin named Alexander Aitken, who was a brilliant mathematician and a gifted violinist, as well as an artifact - the violin - that has survived the war and remains on display at Otago Boys High to this day.

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 ...

As Princesses of Crete and daughters of the fearsome King Minos, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra grow up hearing the hoofbeats and bellows of the Minotaur echo from the Labyrinth beneath the palace. The Minotaur - Minos's greatest shame and Ariadne's brother - demands blood every year. When Theseu...

Revolution is in the air 1792. A tyrannical government is determined to make England a mighty commercial empire. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte begins his rise to power, and with dissent rife, Frances neighbours are on high alert. Kingsbridge is on the edge Unprecedented industrial change sweeps t...

Years have passed since the clash of shield-walls echoed across the land. . . The Saxons are now the lords of Britain. And yet the bards still sing of Arthur - 'In our darkest time, when we need him most, shall he come again.' Old Beran has no love of bards' songs. Nor of people, unless they are ...

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...

James Goodenough, whose family had originally settled in Connecticut from England brings his family to Ohio to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp in 1838. As swamp fever gradually picks off their children and they wrestle daily with survival. This course will see their family engulf...

A stirring story of love and hope, based on the incredible true story of Australia's first Japanese war bride and a love that changed a nation forever. Gordon Parker is just an eager eighteen-year-old Australian boy desperate to fight for his country, and Nobuko 'Cherry' Sakuramoto is a sixteen-y...

"From bestselling author Genevieve Graham comes a sweeping new historical novel of love, tragedy, and redemption set during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. In 1897, the discovery of gold in the desolate reaches of the Yukon has the world abuzz with excitement, and thousands of prospectors s...

1928, Paris: A boy is found, moments from death, and taken in by a kindly family. Gentle, precocious, talented, he flourishes in his new home, and the family show him a life he hadn't dreamed possible. But he refuses to speak a word about who he really is. 2008, the Aegean. The seven sisters are ...

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 ...

Daniel Pitt has seen a lot of action. He was an RAF fighter in the First World War and an espionage agent for the SOE in the Second. Now the conflicts he faces are closer to home. Daniel and Rosie's marriage has fractured beyond repair and Daniel's relationship with their son, Bertie, has been a ...

Ancient Assyria, 9th century BC. An orphan is raised on the outskirts of a brutal empire. Heir to a tragic prophecy, Semiramis dreams of wielding power and escaping her destiny. Far away, a reluctant prince walks the corridors of his gilded palace in a city built by the gods. Ninus would rather s...

1811. The Adriatic, the 'French Lake', is now the most valuable territory Napoleon Bonaparte possesses. Captain Sir Thomas Kydd finds his glorious return to England cut short when the Admiralty summons him to lead a squadron of frigates into these waters to cause havoc and distress to the enemy. ...

A scholarship girl from Brooklyn, Kate Moran thought she found a place among Smith's Mayflower descendants, only to have her illusions dashed the summer after graduation. When charismatic alumna Betsy Rutherford delivers a rousing speech at the Smith College Club in April of 1917, looking for vol...

From the age of twelve, the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo makes his home among ash, elm, magnolia, plum and almond, living up in the trees. He walks through paths made from the twisted branches of olive, makes his bed in a holly oak, bathes in a fountain constructed from poplar bark. An aerial l...

Chris Kraus' The Bastard Factory tells the story of an entire epoch: a drama of betrayal and self-delusion spanning the years 1905 to 1975, taking us from Riga to Moscow, Berlin and Munich all the way to Tel Aviv. Hubert and Konstantin Solm are brothers, born in Riga at the beginning of the twent...