Showing results for "Bittersweet" in Historical Fiction

Best-selling author Nevada Barr delights contemporary mystery fans with novels like Deep South and Blood Lure. In Bittersweet, she departs the mystery genre for a touching story of hardship, perseverance, and love in the old West.

North London, 1916. When Olivia Bone and Lieutenant Lucas Black shared a passionate kiss one summer's evening, it seemed as if their love might finally have a chance to bloom. But their brief happiness is cut short when Lucas is sent to fight on the front line, leaving Livvie uncertain if she'll ever see him again. And after a chance encounter with one of Lucas's old flames, Livvie is left doubting whether an ex-factory girl like her will ever fit into his world - and wondering if she would be better off protecting her heart.

Wood Green, North London, November 1913. The storm clouds of war gather overhead while one brave girl fights to save her family.... After her mother dies, Livvie Bone knows it's down to her to protect her younger siblings from their drunken father. But life on the worst street in London is dark and dangerous, and one night she needs protection herself. When the mysterious Joe Hunter steps in to help her, Livvie's fascinated by him, in spite of his unsavoury reputation.

A story of dark themes where toxic relationships, control, abuse and emotional trauma threaten to destroy the lives of three generations. Love and loss feature throughout. It takes hope to carry on. It takes resilience to survive. Set mainly on the Ards Peninsular in Northern Ireland, this is a novel with strong emotional arcs, and would appeal to book clubs, listeners of women's fiction, historical fiction and Irish family sagas. Fans of Celeste Ng or Alice Munro would enjoy this novel.

Growing up in fear of their cruel, drunken father, Olivia Bone and her siblings haven't had an easy start in life. But when Livvie's fiancé, Joe, is killed at Ypres, and he bequeaths her his house in Islington, it seems like the Bone family might finally escape the worst street in North London. Though their new life is anything but settled, at least Livvie has a good friend in Matilda Keiver and a better one in Lieutenant Lucas Black, her old boss at the Barratt's sweet factory. Lucas and Livvie might be from very different worlds, but he treats her with kindness and respect.

Home-brewed medicines, a mysterious family of women making them, and a threat to the local funding of the Abolition movement: 15-year-old Almyra Alexander struggles with all of these, as well as adapting to the rough, unpolished life in a northern Vermont village. She’s determined to become a minister, like her politically involved but very absent father. Moving in with her aunt and uncle in Vermont seems the quickest way toward the higher education she craves, and a pulpit of her own.

A 2025 CHRISTY AWARD WINNER! "A poignant story of sisterhood, motherhood, and new love found in old places. McKnight's writing is as delectable as the Gullah cuisine at the heart of the novel." --Denny S. Bryce, bestselling author of The Other Princess and Wild Women and the Blues From the...

Everything changed for Laura Taylor when the South lost the Civil War. The Yankees' arrival in South Carolina drove Laura and her soldier husband, Jesse, westward to seek a new beginning. But Laura's hopes crumble when Jesse dies, and she finds herself pregnant and alone in a wild railroad camp with winter coming in fast. The only one she can turn to is Dr. Spencer Hardin.

Although Laney's been sweet on Galen for a while, he's always considered her his best friend's tag-along sister. But when Galen finally sees Laney as the wife of his dreams, a vile lie shatters his hopes and a leveled shotgun repays his kindness - on the very day he plans to pop the question.

On Bittersweet Place is the powerful coming-of-age story of Lena Czernitski, a young Russian Jew whose family flees their homeland in the Ukraine after the October Revolution. The story unfolds in Chicago during the Jazz Age of the 1920s, where Lena's impoverished family has settled and where she must traverse the early years of adolescence. Lena's new world is large and beautiful and full of promise, but it is also cold and unwelcoming and laden with danger.

Widow Theodosia Cecil needs a husband to help protect her son. The former flower seller turned estate owner posts an ad in the newspaper, and no one is more surprised than she when her first love, the man she thought dead, reappears.

After midnight, Thelma Lorber enters her brother Abie’s hangout under the Williamsburg Bridge, finding Jewish mobster Louis “Pretty” Amberg in a puddle of blood on the kitchen floor. She could flee. Instead, in the dark hours of that October 1935 night before the dawn of Murder, Inc., she remains beside the fierce, funny brother who has protected her since childhood. There are many kinds of love a woman can feel for a man, but few compare to that of the baby sister for her older brother. For Thelma, a wild widow tethered to a young son, Abie is the center of her world.

The Middle East, 76 BCE. Internal power struggles consume Jerusalem’s attention while surrounding nations manipulate events for their own purposes. Two young women from opposite worlds—Pninah, a poor Jewish girl prone to seizures and Cypros, a Nabataean princess—are thrust by violent events into a collision course with each other and history. By capturing the era and its people with his characteristic raw intimacy and plainsong prose style, Daryl Potter brings the story of Herod the Great’s mother and a fateful Roman invitation vividly to life.