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Historical Fiction October 2020
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| The Two Mrs. Carlyles by Suzanne RindellStarring: Violet, a resourceful young woman who grew up in a San Francisco orphanage and has recently married a wealthy man; Violet's new husband Harry Carlyle, who says first wife Madeleine died in the massive earthquake that recently hit the city (in 1906).
For fans of: Daphne DuMaurier's classic novel Rebecca, which inspired this novel's gothic tone and Violet's suspicious curiosity about her husband's first wife. |
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| Jack by Marilynne RobinsonSeries alert: Jack is the 4th novel starring the characters from the Gilead series, which began as a letter from dying Presbyterian minister John Ames Broughton to his son and spans events from the Civil War to the 1950s.
This time with more...moving, star-crossed romance (it's 1957 and the titular Jack's love interest is Della, a Black woman he met in St. Louis); well-crafted dialogue (much of the story unfolds in conversations between Jack and Della); and reflections on faith (in the divine and in each other). |
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| The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. SchwabWhat it's about: Village girl Addie is chafing at the restrictions of life as a woman in early 17th-century France, so she makes a deal with the devil for "a chance to live and be free."
The problem: The devil grants her wish...literally. So now Addie is immortal, and for 300 years everyone she meets forgets her. Everyone but the man who just caught her returning some books she previously "borrowed" from a New York bookshop.
For fans of: other time-focused tales of loss, love, and loneliness such as Kate Atkinson's Life After Life or Laura Barnett's The Versions of Us. |
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| Here We Are by Graham SwiftWhat it is: an engaging, character-driven story set in postwar Brighton, where a dying artform has one last great summer thanks to an equally doomed variety act.
The players: show emcee Jack Robinson, the "Compere Comedian"; Jack's army buddy Ronnie Deane, who performs sleight-of-hand as "The Great Pablo"; Evie White, newly hired as the proverbial magician's "lovely assistant" until she becomes much more than that to both men she shares the stage with. |
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| The City of Brass by S.A. ChakrabortyThe setting: Eighteenth-century Cairo, where a young woman who survives as a con artist accidentally summons a djinn, who takes her back to the parallel world of the djinn to face her destiny.
Reviewers say: "This lyrical historical fantasy debut brings to vivid life the ancient mythological traditions of an Islamic world unfamiliar to most American readers" (Library Journal). |
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| The Underground Railroad by Colson WhiteheadThe setting: an antebellum South that looks quite like the one in our reality, only the Underground Railroad literally has train tracks, inspiring the slavecatchers to create increasingly bizarre, elaborate, and disturbing obstacles between escapees and their freedom.
Reviewers say: "Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft's rococo fantasies" (Kirkus Reviews). |
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An Easy Death
by Charlaine Harris
Guiding two wizards through the magic-wary country of Texoma, a gunslinger navigating the Great Depression in the wake of FDR's assassination searches for a low-level magician who may be able to save the tsar.
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Cries From the Lost Island
by Kathleen O'Neal Gear
Sixteen-year-old Hal Stevens is joined by a famous archaeologist on a journey to Egypt to fulfill the last wish of a murdered woman claiming to be the reincarnation of Queen Cleopatra.
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The Angel of the Crows
by Katherine Addison
In an alternate-world 1880s London populated by supernatural and human beings, an angel triggers chaos by falling in his resolve to end the murder spree of Jack the Ripper.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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