Showing results for "grief" in Historical Fiction

It’s 1963, two years since Barbara Feldman’s husband died. Raising two kids, she’s finally emerging from her cocoon of grief. Not yet a butterfly, but she’s anxious to spread her wings. Then one day her mother-in-law, Ruth, shows up on her doorstep with five suitcases, expecting a room of her own with a suitable mattress. Abrasive and stuck in her ways yet well meaning, Mother Ruth arrives without warning to help with the children. How can Barbara say no to a woman who is not only a widow herself but also a grieving mother?

Acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte has earned a distinguished reputation as a master of the literary thriller. Now, he gives us his most accomplished novel to date. Andrés Faulques, a world-renowned war photographer, has retired to a life of solitude on the Spanish coast. He spends his days...

In a powerfully imagined Russia at the height of the pogroms, a grief-stricken family turn to ancient magic to bring their daughter back from the grave. “A triumph ... Count me in for whatever Sher writes next.” ―Nat Cassidy, author of Mary and When the Wolf Comes Home Yetta is a bright...

A mesmerizing coming-of-age story of an extraordinary young woman in turn-of-the-century France as she rises to find a life she’d never dreamed possible She had always felt that she must stay in the shadows, that if she asked for little, she could not feel loss. But here was life and joy...

A young Yemeni Israeli woman learns of her mother’s secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter—the debut novel of an award-winning literary voice. “A gorgeous, gripping novel filled with unforgettable...

National Bestseller Winner of the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and shortlisted for The Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Childhood is renowned and critically acclaimed author André Alexis' stunning first novel. Originally published in 1998...

In nineteenth-century France, a young woman with a magical sense of taste saves a duc from poison, and her new role as poison taster thrusts her into the world of the nobility, where secrets and danger lurk around every corner. Minha is born on the backstreets of late nineteenth-century London...

After the fall of Troy, an eleven-year-old boy sets off for the razed city when his father and sister vanish into the war zone; this "gorgeously drawn" novel offers an intimate vision of the most storied war in history, as seen through the eyes of a child. (Laird Hunt) His family farm and the...

In this debut novel, a young woman in the Rocky Mountains, separated from the ancestral rhythms of her home in Scotland, turns to ancient rituals to find solace and connection. With shades of Olga Tokarczuk, Ali Smith, and Rachel Cusk, Hovel is a book for those fascinated by female interiority...

Sergeant Frank Hardy and his wife Mette travel to the southernmost point of New Zealand to chase gold thieves and to retrieve a manuscript for Mette to translate. But they have chosen to travel on an ill-fated voyage. Twenty miles from Bluff, on the south coast of the South Island of New Zealand, the SS Tararua hits a reef and sinks, with massive loss of life. This real event was the second-worst maritime disaster in New Zealand's history, in a country heavily reliant on shipping at that time. But the couple has more than a shipwreck to deal with.

July 1969. While men are walking on the moon, life in London for 16-year-old Jane takes unexpected turns. On the point of falling in love with her best friend Karl, she discovers that there's more to her father's spectacular girlfriend than at first meets the eye. In the sweltering heat of a fast-moving evening, other revelations quickly follow, reconciling Jane with her father but also reopening wounds from the past, laying bare raw emotions kept suppressed for too long.

In 1932, Hitler and the Nazi Party were threatening to take control of Germany, and there was a growing fear of another war. In the summer of that year, John and Annie Williams make their annual trip to visit their son's grave in the Flanders region of Belgium. Their son, Herbert Edward Williams, had been killed while fighting at the battle of Passchendaele in 1917. Erich and Martina Lehmann from Germany are also in Flanders to pay their respects to the memory of their son, Kurt, who died in the same campaign.