Item category 1: Historical Fiction

In World War II England, orphaned siblings William, Edmund, and Anna are evacuated from London to live in the countryside, where they bounce from home to home in search of someone willing to adopt them permanently.

When Arabella Grant's wicked aunt dies suddenly, both Arabella and her cousin Lady Isabelle cannot help but feel relieved. She'd made their lives miserable, and now Lady Issie is free to read to her heart's content, and Bella is free from taunts about her ignoble birth. Their newfound freedom is ...

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...

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...

In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they...

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...

When Santo's father left their tiny town in Italy for America, he made Santo promise to keep their family together until he has enough money to bring the rest of them to the US. It takes a few years, but Mama finally gets word that their family can join Papa. Santo couldn't be more excited to go ...

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...

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country's wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim her: at nine years old she's been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator-a sinister, vio...

Property speculator Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine, reflecting on his youth in the early twentieth century. He recounts that after his father's sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida to join a Shaker colony. Led by Elder John, a generous man wit...

It's 1918, and it feels to Alice as if the war has been dragging on forever. It's four years since Alice's father went away to be a doctor for the army and when Papa Sir stops writing home, his family sense that something is wrong, and for the first time they contemplate the fact that he might no...

1960: Nancy Drayton, an American nurse living on Lake Sebu, is visited by a stranger who hands her some faded letters, given to her by a dying man. Reading them transports Nancy back to the terror of the war years. 1941: When Nancy's world is blown apart by the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor,...

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...

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...

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. ...

When orphaned Jake Harding is sent away from his adoptive home aged just seven, he does not understand why... Forced to make his own way in the world, Jake falls in with a gang of petty thieves, who make their living lifting valuables from those who are better off. At 16, he crosses paths with th...

Brisbane, 2024. Barista and budding artist Mia Curtis is shocked to receive a package all the way from England informing her she's the heir to her late grandmother's cottage. Feeling lost in her own life, Mia travels across the world to claim her inheritance, where she begins to unravel the secre...

For the people who live on the banks of the Thames, the river is a living, breathing thing. It can take your treasures. It can hide your treasures. And, sometimes, it can give them back... Bo and Billy are two children who have never met. Billy is an orphan. Bo's dad died when she was small and n...

An epic saga of brotherhood, betrayal and revenge. On the unforgiving streets of 1920s Sydney, the Leach family have nothing but each other. In a tale spanning decades, three children of the broken, working-class family find adventure, heartache and trouble, as their lives drift apart. John finds...

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...

April 1941: Belfast has escaped the worst of the Second World War -- so far. Over the next two months, it will be so destroyed from above that people will say, in horror, "My God, Belfast is finished." Many won't make it through, and those who do will be forever changed. Living amid the rubble ar...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here - like the glass the island's maestros spend their lives learning to control. Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creation...

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...