Showing results by publisher "Black Rose Writing" in Historical Fiction

Quebec, Canada, 1847. While trying to escape the Potato Famine, shipwrecked Irish immigrant Breanna Clarey awakens injured and alone on an unfamiliar beach. To make matters worse, she has been separated from her family, and her friend, Crow, is lying dead at her feet. But when Dawson Roberts, a reclusive fisherman with a guarded past and big dreams for his future, finds Breanna, he puts his plans on hold to offer her shelter and help find her family. But life for an Irish immigrant isn't easy.

Piran Chegwin had known since he was just a boy that he wanted to be a priest—to bring comfort and care to ordinary folk in a little parish church. So when his father manages to scrape together the money for him to study theology at Oxford, it seems his future is set. That is, until he encounters Martin de Villiers, an ambitious, self-important fellow student who takes an instant dislike to Piran. Piran's only offense? Having been born a Cornishman. But to Martin's eyes, it's an offense that must be set right.

In 1941, Manila, Philippines was the hidden gem of the Far East and set to become an independent sovereignty in a few short years. On December 8, 1941, immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack 5,200 miles away in Honolulu, the Japanese Imperial Army bombed the city of Manila and began an occupation that would last more than three years and culminate in a battle for the capital city that would go down as one of the deadliest in World War II history.

March, 1366. Amid the chaos of a war-torn Spain, Geoffrey Chaucer—page to King Edward III and the son of a wine merchant—finds himself thrust into the heart of a boiling conflict between two brothers: King Pedro the Cruel of Castile and his half-brother, Enrique Trastámara. But Chaucer’s task is far from simple. Sent as a reluctant spy by the king, he must locate the elusive mercenary Sir Hugh Calveley and persuade him to change sides in a war that could alter the fate of kingdoms.

Early in the French Revolutionary War, a young British naval officer, Lieutenant Joseph Duncan, finds himself unexpectedly in charge of a powerful frigate. Sailing alone in the Caribbean Sea with no one to ask for advice, he makes a fateful decision to engage a superior enemy force.

Born into a world of privilege and power, Mary Tudor expected to live the life of every other European Princess during the Renaissance. She knew it was her duty to marry well, and provide sons and heirs to her future husband, while remaining in the political shadows of a world dominated by ruthless men. Her father's desperate need for a male heir and his willingness to send everybody who got in his way to their deaths, meant that Mary had very little hope of obtaining the English Crown.

Burr, Oklahoma, summer, 1976: On the eve of America’s Bicentennial celebration, a notorious local politician is assassinated at a campaign rally. The case seems open and shut; the killer—a young, anonymous homeless woman—is shot by police at the scene. With the death of the assassin, the lead investigator is content to write off the crime as a random act. Burr’s Chief of Police, Emmett Hardy, isn’t so sure.

Civil unrest sweeps the mountains of Jalisco, displacing Mexico's elite. Under the cover of darkness, Catalina steals away from her vast ranch with her two daughters. Stuffed into their saddlebags, the precious jewels of the Hernandez-Castañeda family fortune begin their journey across time and legend. Over one hundred years later, in the United States, Sophie's marriage takes its dying breath after she catches Adam cheating. The demise of her marriage shakes her to the core, and she hopes it isn't too late to build the stable family of her dreams.

Two women, nearly a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives when they reluctantly leave their homelands. Arriving in Singapore, they find romance in a tropical paradise, but also find they haven't left behind the dangers that caused them to flee.

Duke Boleslav, brother to Wenceslas, reveals to his young son his own life's dreadful tale, and why this boy must dedicate his life to his father's salvation. Pagan priests vie with one another and with the growing power of Christianity. Prague is a trading center with an important slave market, a thriving iron industry, and is a crossroads of far-reaching trade routes. It is growing in wealth, yet threatened by jealous enemies and forces, both external and within its borders.

In Egypt, all things are possible. So discovers Albion Stanley, a recent Cambridge graduate and brilliant linguist, newly arrived in Cairo in 1902. Albion sees the unseen, including ghosts. It is a less than comfortable reality, which he tends to with copious amounts of whiskey and numerous other vices. Also in Cairo is Aleister Crowley, the famed occultist. Aleister is a dangerous man, but not an unsympathetic one and never a dull one. Together, they discover the world of dead Egyptians, some of whom are older than the pyramids.

1934. Isabel longs to escape her squalid San Francisco neighborhood. While her mother struggles to make ends meet and her older brother serves with the CCC at Yosemite, she manages the household and comforts her younger sister with stories about an idyllic imaginary world. Desperate for a taste of freedom, she takes matters into her own hands-with tragic consequences.

In the winter of 1942, an army vanishes into the icefields of the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1945, a massacre in small-town Italy makes international headlines. Today, an ordinary man is about to stumble onto a horrifying secret. Alex Lago is a jaded journalist whose family, marriage, and career are fading fast. So, when the accidental discovery of an aged photo from World War II offers him a last gasp at bonding with his dying father, Alex can't help but scratch at the scabs of a mystery seventy years in the making.

Land Where My Fathers Died is the story of a young man's search for identity, love, and his place in the world. While incarcerated six years for a murder he never committed, Jo Shelby Ferguson lost his only family in a highway accident. Upon his release from the Mississippi state penal farm, a trunk, the only earthly possession left to him, yields several bundles of old letters. Upon reading the first letter, he discovers they are written by his great-great-great grandmother.

Grieving her fiancé’s death, Lizzie Walker struggles to find purpose to her life in Rugby, Tennessee, a utopian community in the Appalachian Mountains. But that changes when William, a wealthy flatlander mourning the loss of his sister, arrives. Teaching together in the community’s school sparks a budding relationship as they embrace Rugby’s classless society and equality for women. However, their peace is short-lived.

It’s January 1947, and Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, well-known acting couple, invite six theater people–writers, actors, spouses–to Ten Chimneys, their rural Wisconsin estate, to work on a play. But once there, a blizzard strands them far from town without telephone service, though heat and electricity are still working.

Beginning in 1930s Germany and based on their real lives, four cousins as close as siblings—Bettina, Trudi, Gustav, and Gertrud—share the experiences of the young, including first loves, marriages, and children. Bettina, the oldest, struggles to help her parents with their failing business. Trudi dresses in the latest fashions and tries to make everything look beautiful. Gustav is an artist at heart and hopes to one day open a tailoring shop. Gertrud, the youngest, is forced by her parents to keep secrets, but that doesn’t stop her from chasing boys.

It’s the 1950s in Massachusetts when Beth Robbins’ world is shattered by her husband’s hit-and-run accident compounded by his mysterious disappearance. The police investigating the accident include Graham Jackson, the only Black officer on the force, and a man Beth feels strangely drawn to. As Beth navigates a complex web of secrets, racial tensions, and moral dilemmas, she must face the truth about her husband's actions while forging her own path forward, perhaps toward fulfilling her dream of becoming an artist.

In 1942, eighteen-year-old Marisol Mazaria arrives with her Romani family at Ohio's Buckeye Lake Amusement Park where big bands come to play and thousands of wartime-weary visitors long for an escape. She is desperate for work and haunted by tragedy after her abusive husband's violent death. Marisol faces a future of tarot card fortune-telling and servitude—until a chance encounter with Will Worthington changes everything.

The most highly decorated Native American in the history of the United States Cavalry, Jolon Winterhawk is a combat veteran of countless bloody skirmishes during the American Civil War. He's a man of honor, struggling with sworn allegiances to two different nations-the country he's sworn to protect, and the tribe he's promised to defend.