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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world's most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight. They have come here from all walks of life, and t...

In November 2018 Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American Southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on whic...

In July 1944, Arielle von Auspeck arrives at the glamorous Hotel Ritz in occupied Paris. Half French, half German, she is happy to be back in France, where her husband, Gregor, a retired colonel, will join her soon from Germany. Arielle and Gregor have thus far been able to hide their private opp...

Winter, 1900. A little boy washes up on the beach of a small fishing village in Scotland, barely alive. He bears an uncanny resemblance to teacher Dorothy's son, lost to the sea many years before. When the village is snowed in, Dorothy agrees to look after the child until he can be returned home....

Italy, 1940. With Florence on the cusp of war, Il Scorpione, the no-nonsense Englishwomen of the city, find their genteel livelihoods under grave threat by the approach of the Nazis. Tea rooms and bookshops are closed by the Fascists, and the women are forced to join the war effort. Desperate to ...

February 1944. Six months since Nazi forces occupied Rome. Inside the beleaguered city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is a member of the band of Escape Line activists known as 'The Choir'. Their mission is to smuggle refugees to safety and help Allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss ...

1940. Whip-smart librarian Peggy Sparks is determined to make sure that her brother Joe returns from the frontline to their London home, which they share with their beloved mother and grandmother. So when she is offered a once-in-a-lifetime job at the heart of the war effort, Peggy jumps at the p...

1915, the Cabrach, Aberdeenshire. An isolated Scottish community is disturbed by a strange discovery, a body in a peat bog, perfectly preserved. Two people haul the body from the ground, Lizzie, the wife of a wealthy local landowner, and Johnny, a nomadic singer and farm hand. At hearth side and ...

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...

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...

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...