Showing titles in Historical

On a mission deep in the jungle, Oxford anthropologist James Litchfield comes face-to-face with a local legend: a wild man who wanders with mountain gorillas and lives as one of their own. The chance encounter with the savage, whom James calls Michael, leads to a game of observation and exploration. Their mutual curiosity turns to an attraction, one that Michael has never experienced and James is desperate to deny.

When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's shortlist to be president. Rough and reticent, he's a country lawyer lacking money and manners, living above a dry goods shop, but with a gift for oratory. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with a tireless interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. "I can only hope," she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, "that his waters being so very still, they also run deep."

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 under attack from the right-wing press, concerned about its potential impact on readers. One such reader is Maggie Dillon, a young trainee firefighter, who has been struggling with fears that she is an abomination after kissing another woman at a party.

Set in a declining textile town in North Carolina, Hide is the love story of Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, and Frank Clifton, a veteran of World War II. They meet after the war, in a time when such love holds real danger. But, severing nearly all ties with the rest of the world, they carve out a home for themselves on the outskirts of town and for decades the routine of self-reliant domesticity - Wendell's cooking, Frank's care for a yard no one sees, and the vicarious drama of courtroom TV - seems to protect them.

After Constantine's death, his son, Constantius, took power as Caesar Augustus, high ruler of the empire in Byzantium - the new capital of Rome and home of the Senate - then executed all that remained of their family save his two cousins, Gallus and Julian. Constantius appointed Julian, only 23, Caesar of the West, custodian of Rome against the pillaging tribes. An academic at heart, no one in the empire believed he stood a chance leading the armies of Rome - until one day in Gaul.

Raef, a lonely merman, spends his days watching the dashing Lord Haverford from afar and dreaming of love. When Haverford is robbed by a pirate, Raef vows to reclaim the stolen goods, hoping his victory will buy him the happiness he yearns for with Haverford. But Jon Kemp does not match what Raef knows about pirates, and the simple quest Raef anticipated turns out to be an epic journey. For while Jon might be a nobler man than Raef believed, he's still a pirate. Love and loyalty are not on Jon's agenda, and he certainly has no plans to love someone not entirely human....

At the beginning of Virginia Woolf's fantastical and satirical 1928 novel, Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan, England. At the age of 30, Orlando awakens to have found he's now a woman. Moving through the following centuries, the novel stretches over 300 years, during which time Orlando meets several key figures of English literary history.

New York City, 1932: Eva Le Gallienne is trying to save her theatre company from the jaws of the Depression by mounting an innovative new production of Alice in Wonderland. She agrees to give a radio interview for the sake of publicity, but while revisiting the moments that shaped her career...

How far would you travel for love? Intelligent but isolated recent physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. Her childhood memories dimmed by loss, she has left behind her home, her family, and her first love in pursuit of intellectual fulfillment. When she finally lands...

Amelia Cole—Lia for short—is one of the first women studying abroad at Oxford University in the 1920s. Finally free from her overbearing Brooklyn parents, she finds a welcome sense of independence in British college life. Lia quickly falls for Scarlett Daniels, an aspiring actress and hardheaded protester. Scarlett introduces her to an exciting gender-equality movement with high stakes. But when their secret love clashes with political uprising, their relationship is one of the casualties.

England 1881. Being gay is both a sin and a crime. Parents disowning their children is considered honourable. Consensual sex risks life in prison. Sodomy scandals ruin careers and reputations. Homosexuals have to choose between safety and happiness. After an unspeakable incident gets him exiled from his idyllic Irish hometown, twenty-four-year-old Jack Branson rebuilds his life in fog-and-mould London as a house call prostitute for closeted members of the British aristocracy.

Gaius Fabius knows a healthy son will secure his claim to the throne of Rome, but his devotion to his illegal Dacian pleasure slave, Allerix, could destroy his dreams of supreme power. Determined to solve the mysterious murder of a dear friend, Gaius searches for clues hidden deep in the palace that threaten his future and his family.

One of the most famous partnerships in literature yields, over time, to a peculiar romantic triangle. Sherlock Holmes. Dr. John Watson. And the good doctor's second wife, whom Doyle never named. In L.A. Fields's novel, Mrs. Watson is a clever woman who realizes, through examining all the prior cases her husband shared with the world's greatest consulting detective, that the two men shared more than adventures: they were lovers, as well.

When the speakeasy Sasha Wolfe and her friends frequent is raided by police during prohibition 1928, they make it their mission to open another where they can be exactly who they want to be — which includes loving who they want. When Sasha falls in love with the fiancé of Chicago's newest police detective, everything becomes more dangerous. Once you enter the curtain of The 412 Lounge, everything is forbidden — from the booze to the gay affair. Now Sasha and her beloved lounge are in a race against time to save the secret of not only the speakeasy, but their lives.

In 1465 a simple pocketful of herbs could get you burned at the stake, but Luccia Alimenti, daughter of one of the legendary women doctors called Salernistas, travels Europe secretly distributing medical texts to midwives and herbalists. Despite dodging the Inquisition and battling the Plague with her beloved Irish godmother, Luccia finds love as well as heartbreak. Pushed to the edge, however, she must use her skill as an archer to rescue women being taken to the pyre.

Berlin, 1942. Lilly Wust, 29, verheiratet, vier Kinder, führt das Leben von Millionen deutscher Frauen. Doch dann lernt sie die 21-jährige Felice Schragenheim kennen. Es ist Liebe, fast auf den ersten Blick. Als Jaguar-Felice ihrer Geliebten gesteht, dass sie Jüdin ist, bindet dieses gefährliche Geheimnis die beiden Frauen noch enger aneinander.

Aristide, Léandre, and Perrin pledge only three loyalties in life: their king, their captain, and their passion for each other. So when the musketeers discover a plan to accuse M. de Tréville of treason, their reactions vary from the desire to kill the messenger, Benoît, to the need to unmask the man behind the plot to discredit their captain. The first two suspects, the English ambassador and Cardinal Richelieu, prove to be innocent, and the musketeers are forced to delve deeper into the inner machinations of the French court.

Trapped in a necromancer’s tower on the longest night of the year. Merek is a pillar of his country community and a confirmed bachelor. He had his chance at love, and he let it slip away. But he’s got friends, a faithful dog, and a snug home. Holidays can be difficult, but Merek knows how to handle loneliness. When he volunteers to house-sit for a necromancer on the day before Solstice, Merek expects to be doing the job with no companion apart from his dog. He’s displeased to be trapped in the tower overnight by a sudden snow storm.

From acclaimed fantasy author T. Frohock comes a dark, lyrical historical thriller, set in 1930s Spain and Germany, that brings to life the world of angels and demons from the novellas collected in Los Nefilim: Spanish Nephilim battling daimons in a supernatural war to save humankind. Born of...

A conqueror's decree can't separate Aillil Callaghan from his Scottish heritage. He wears his clan's forbidden plaid with pride, awaiting the day he becomes Laird, restores his family's name, and fights to free Scotland from English tyranny. An Englishman in his home? Abomination!