Showing titles in Historical

The Bestselling Richard & Judy Summer Book Club Pick 2021 The Bestselling Radio 2 Book Club Selection ‘Tight, clever and riddled with wit. Like discovering Adrian Mole or Bridget Jones for the first time.’ Joanna Nadin, author of The Queen of Bloody Everything ‘A sweet, fizzy sherbet...

Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick", as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have. 

London. 1928. For centuries, the establishment has suppressed public knowledge of lesbian love. Now, a celebrated writer is set to fight back. Award-winning author, Radclyffe Hall, hopes her new novel, The Well of Loneliness, will transform attitudes to same-sex relationships. It soon comes...

In 1860s Montana Territory, Kate Beecher, a young woman from Boston, faces the hardships and hard choices of life on the frontier. Just 18 and quietly struggling against the social constraints of the era, Kate meets a woman who fires first her imagination and then her dreams. Jessie Forbes, a fiercely independent rancher, finds in Kate the passion she never knew she had been missing. This is the story of their struggle to love in a land, and time, as cruel as it was beautiful.

From Susan Rebecca White, award-winning author of A Soft Place to Land and Bound South, comes a breathtaking story of three richly nuanced outcasts whose paths converge in a chic Manhattan café as they realize they must give up everything they thought they knew to find a home at last. Alice...

Gunpowder, treason and a plot like no other… **AN OBSERVER TOP 10 DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2024** **WINNER OF THE UNICORNS CULTURE AWARD 2024** **SHORTLISTED FOR SCOTLAND’S NATIONAL BOOK AWARD – FIRST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024** 'Ignites a fire in your heart' ANYA BERGMAN 'An explosive re-imagining...

After enduring unimaginable tragedy and heartbreaking loss, Jessica “Jesse” Pratt has actually found happiness in her life again. A relationship she once thought lost forever has been restored. She has managed to win the heart of Abby, the woman she loves. And, she is no longer forced to hide her true identity. Just when it feels like she will finally get the happy ending she never dreamed possible, things take an unforeseen twist. Now, Abby is the one harboring a secret - one so powerful it could rip apart the threads of their newly woven relationship.

1791. The dressmaker, his lover and his lover's wife. A house full of secrets where danger lies behind every door. Matthew came from nothing. Now he is a skilled corset-maker adored by high society. But he must hide his true self from prying eyes, seeking love in the riotous underbelly of...

1816. Mary, 18 years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities, haunted by the loss of her baby daughter. Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary. Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits.

The war is over, but Berlin is a desolate sea of rubble. There is a shortage of everything: Food, clothing, tobacco. The local population is scrabbling to get by. Kasper Meier is one of these Germans, and his solution is to trade on the black market to feed himself and his elderly father. He can find anything that people need, for the right price. Even other people. When a young woman, Eva, arrives at Kasper's door seeking the whereabouts of a British pilot, he feels a reluctant sympathy for her but won't interfere in military affairs.

At 18, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape. 

1881 - Special Agent Gillian Hamilton, magic caster for the Federal Bureau of Magic and Steam, has recovered from injuries obtained while in Shallow Grave, Arizona. Now back in New York City, Gillian makes an arrest on New Year’s Eve that leads to information on a gangster, known only as Tick Tock, who’s perfected utilizing elemental magic ammunition. This report complicates Gillian’s holiday plans, specifically those with infamous outlaw, Gunner the Deadly, who promised they’d ring in 1882 together.

Once upon a time, there was a winter that wouldn't end. And all that stands between the people of White Meadows and starvation is a young man called Lance. Lance is 16 years old, and for all his courage and hunting skills, he's running out of fight. His family has been wiped out in a border raid, and he's drowning in loneliness. When strangers arrive at White Meadows, all Lance can think of is using his last strength to drive them away. But these men have come in peace, not to burn and destroy. Among them is a hot-headed, utterly charming prince-in-training named Arthur.

Can two outcasts find refuge in one another's hearts? Dr. Vance Phelps lost everything in the War Between the States - her career and her faith in herself. Mae is a frontier madam, used to standing and fighting alone. She guards the well-being of the lost young women who come under her care - she just never expected one of them to be a doctor. A bold story of redemption amidst the wild landscape of the heart, where lost promises find new hope.

Between his bullying father and dissolute brother, Percival Endicott Whyborne has quite enough problematic family members to deal with. So when his sister returns to Widdershins asking for help solving the mystery of a derelict ship, Whyborne is reluctant to get involved. Until, that is, a brutal murderer strikes, leaving Whyborne and his lover Griffin no choice but to take the case. The investigation leads them deep into a conspiracy of blackmail, murder, and darkest sorcery.

After the success of The Northern Clemency, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us another slice of contemporary life, this time the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of a small English town. After the success of The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency...

It is 1597 and Kit Skevy and Mariner Elgin have just robbed the wrong grave. They are young criminals in the pocket of a gang Lord named Will Twentyman, the Grave Eorl of Southwark. Mariner is the best cutpurse around, a strange Calvinist girl who dresses like a boy and is partner in crime to Kit Skevy, Southwark's best brawler who carries a secret: he cannot feel pain. When caught out in their unfortunate larceny, Kit is kidnapped by the menacing alchemist Lord Isherwood.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother.

My father once told me, above all else...Live and die for Sparta. Honor. Loyalty. Duty. These were the things that mattered most. And then Axios came into my life, teaching me other lessons: Humility, brotherhood...love. There were moments when the brutal training stripped me of my humanity, where it turned me into a mindless beast of flesh and muscle set to destroy everything in my way. But then Axios stood in my way, ever vigilant, never failing to bring me back to myself. Love had no place in Sparta, they said. It made you weak. So why did I feel stronger with him by my side?

Lord Devlin White, Duke of Winterbourne, is the last in a long line of powerful witches who assist the Demon Lord of London in keeping control of the nightwalkers. With all but one of his siblings gone to the American colonies and his proud family line all but ended, Devlin is kept from gloom and despair by his unusual ward, Midnight. Neither alive nor dead and sustained by magic , Midnight is happy to spend his life by Devlin's side - though he longs for the day that Devlin sees him as more than a ward.