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Historical Fiction April 2017
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| The Hollywood Daughter: A Novel by Kate AlcottJessica "Jesse" Malloy's father is a PR executive for Selznick International Pictures; her mother is a devout Catholic homemaker who disapproves of the film industry. These worldviews clash when Jesse's idol, glamorous starlet Ingrid Bergman, begins an affair with married Italian director Roberto Rossellini -- a scandal that places her father's career, her parents' marriage, and the family's livelihood in jeopardy. Although it's set in the 1950s instead of the 1930s, this coming-of-age story by the author of A Touch of Stardust may appeal to fans of Adriana Trigiani's All the Stars in the Heavens, which also features a young Catholic woman who observes a Hollywood scandal and the moral hypocrisy that accompanies it. |
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The spy : a novel
by Paulo Coelho
In his new novel, Paulo Coelho, best-selling author of The Alchemist and Adultery , brings to life one of history's most enigmatic women: Mata Hari. When Mata Hari arrived in Paris she was penniless. Within months she was the most celebrated woman in the city. As a dancer, she shocked and delighted audiences; as a courtesan, she bewitched the era's richest and most powerful men. But as paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari's lifestyle brought her under suspicion. In 1917, she was arrested in her hotel room on the Champs Elysees, and accused of espionage. Told in Mata Hari's voice through her final letter, The Spy is the unforgettable story of a woman who dared to defy convention and who paid the ultimate price.
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The Wonder
by Emma Donoghue
Fresh from the battlefields of the Crimea (where she was trained by Florence Nightingale), English nurse Lib Wright has seen it all. Or so she thinks, until she travels to the Irish village of Athlone, where 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell reportedly survives on nothing but "manna from heaven." Is she a saint or a fraud? Hired by a committee of villagers to watch over the girl, Lib has two weeks to determine the truth of the matter -- a task complicated by Anna's uncooperative family and the steady stream of pilgrims who travel to the village to witness the "wonder." Faith and family secrets add a layer of psychological suspense to this haunting novel, which is inspired by true stories of "Fasting Girls" in Europe from the 15th to the 19th century.
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| In the Name of the Family: A Novel by Sarah DunantThis sequel to Blood and Beauty finds Rodrigo Borgia comfortably ensconced in the Vatican as Pope Alexander VI. His illegitimate children continue to increase their wealth and power through any means available: brilliant but volatile Cesare undertakes an ambitious military campaign, while daughter Lucrezia embarks on her third marriage to secure a political alliance with the prominent Este family. Observing (and learning from) their exploits is diplomat and spy Niccolò Machiavelli. For other fictional treatments of this infamous family, check out C.W. Gortner's The Vatican Princess or Jeanne Kalogridis' The Borgia Bride. |
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| The Confessions of Young Nero: A Novel by Margaret GeorgeLucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was born to rule. At least, that's what his mother believes, though it must be noted that Agrippina, a woman with a penchant for poisoning her husbands, may not be the most reliable judge of character. Still, Lucius -- an intelligent, sensitive boy who loves music and chariot races -- can only be an improvement over his uncle, Caligula. Lucius strives to distance himself from his relatives even as he benefits from Agrippina's scheming: by age 16, he's Emperor Nero. However, he quickly discovers that staying in power requires a certain amount of ruthlessness. This novel by the author of The Memoirs of Cleopatra is an unusual coming-of-age story that imagines the life of a notorious ruler. |
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| The Typewriter's Tale: A Novel by Michiel HeynsIn 1907, 23-year-old Frieda Wroth, a graduate of the Young Ladies' Academy of Typewriting, arrives at Lamb House in Sussex to become Henry James' typist. Not quite a servant, Wroth occupies an unusual position in the household that allows her to observe its small dramas without participating in them. That changes with the arrival of Morton Fullerton, an American foreign correspondent based in Paris, who wants Frieda to help him retrieve a packet of letters in James' possession. With her personal desires at war with her sense of loyalty, Frieda faces a dilemma worthy of one of her employer's heroines. This introspective novel may appeal to readers who enjoyed Colm Tóibín's The Master. |
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| The Horseman: A Novel by Tim PearsLeo Sercombe loves horses. The son of a tenant farmer, Leo lives on the Somerset estate of Lord Prideaux and aspires to a position in the master's stables. He also befriends headstrong Charlotte, Prideaux's daughter. However, in Edwardian England, Leo's ambition, coupled with his disregard for class boundaries, make him an outlier and a threat. Descriptive in style and episodic in structure, The Horseman begins in 1911 and continues through World War I. Downton Abbey fans should enjoy this period piece, which reveals a society that clings to tradition as it undergoes dramatic changes wrought by industrialization. |
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The great swindle
by Pierre Lemaître
The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines. When another of D'Aulnay-Pradelle's soldiers, Albert Maillard, reaches the bodies and discovers how they died, the lieutenant shoves him into a shell hole to silence him. Albert is rescued by fellow soldier, the artist Edouard Pricourt, who takes a bullet in the face. The war ends and both men recover, but Edouard is permanently disfigured, and fakes his death to prevent his family from seeing him as a cripple. In gratitude for Edouard's rescue, Albert becomes the injured man's companion and caregiver. Finding that the postwar gratitude for the soldiers' service is nothing more than lip-service to an empty idea, the two men scramble to survive, ultimately devising a scam to take money for never-to-be-built war memorials from small towns. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pradelle has married Edouard's sister Madeline and is running a scam of his own that involves the exhumation of war victims. In this sorrowful, heart-searching novel, the interwoven lives of these three men create a tapestry of the human condition as seen through the lens of war, revealing brutality and compassion, heroism and cowardice, in equal measure.
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Not all bastards are from Vienna
by Andrea Molesini
Andrea Molesini's exquisite debut novel--winner of the prestigious Campiello Prize--portrays the depths of heroism and horror within a Northern Italian village toward the end of the Great War. While a family's villa is requisitioned by enemy troops, they are forced to intimately confront war's injustice as their involvement with its sinister underpinnings grows more and more complex. In the autumn of 1917, Refrontolo--a small community north of Venice--is invaded by Austrian soldiers as the Italian army is pushed to the Piave river. The Spada family owns the largest estate in the area, where orphaned seventeen-year-old Paolo lives with his eccentric grandparents, headstrong aunt, and a loyal staff. With the battlefront nearby, the Spada home become a bastion of resistance, both clashing and cooperating with the military members imposing on their household. When Paolo is recruited to help with a covert operation, his life is put in irrevocable jeopardy. As he bears witness to violence and hostility between enemies, he grows to understand the value of courage, dignity, family bonds, and patriotism during wartime.
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The summer before the war : a novel
by Helen Simonson
The bestselling author of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand returns with a breathtaking novel of love on the eve of World War I that reaches far beyond the small English town in which it is set. In East Sussex, 1914 it is the end of England's brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha's husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won't come to anything. And Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master. When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of books, it is clear she is significantly more freethinking--and attractive--than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of her beloved father, who has left her penniless, Beatrice simply wants to be left alone to pursue her teaching and writing. But just as Beatrice comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the colorful characters who populate Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For despite Agatha's reassurances, the unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of progress, and the old ways, will be tested as this small Sussex town and its inhabitants go to war.
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The shattered tree
by Charles Todd
At an aid station in France in October 1918, Bess Crawford, a nurse, encounters an injured, unidentified French lieutenant, who yells in fluent German after being attacked by a fellow patient. Though Bess's matron suggests that the Frenchman is from German-speaking Alsace-Lorraine, Bess isn't so sure. Two weeks later, Bess is shot while in the trenches and is sent to Paris to recuperate, and finds the perfect opportunity to pursue the matter, with the help of Captain Barkley, an American who's ostensibly in the city searching for deserters.
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A Front Page Affair
by Radha Vatsal
In New York City, 1915, the Lusitania has just been sunk, and headlines about a shooting at J.P. Morgan's mansion and the Great War are splashed across the front page of every newspaper. Capability "Kitty" Weeks would love nothing more than to report on the news of the day, but she's stuck writing about fashion and society gossip over on the Ladies' Page--until a man is murdered at a high society picnic on her beat. Determined to prove her worth as a journalist, Kitty finds herself plunged into the midst of a wartime conspiracy that threatens to derail the United States' attempt to remain neutral--and to disrupt the privileged life she has always known. Radha Vatsal's A Front Page Affair is the first book in highly anticipated series featuring rising journalism star Kitty Weeks.
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