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Historical Fiction April 2024
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| Neferura by Malayna EvansPrincess Neferura, daughter of the formidable female pharaoh Hatshepsut, lives a life of prescribed duty, from her role as the high priestess of Amun to an unwanted marriage to Thutmose, a claimant to the throne. Caught between her mother and her husband, Neferura will have to do her own scheming in order to survive the intrigues of them both. |
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| The Painter's Daughters by Emily HowesMolly and Peggy, the titular daughters of 18th century English painter Thomas Gainsborough, are regular subjects in their father's work. As the girls grow older, it becomes apparent that Molly has developed a mental illness of some kind, something which Peggy realizes must be hidden at all costs from their social-climbing mother and emotionally absent father, or Molly might be sent to the notorious Bedlam asylum. |
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| A Sign of Her Own by Sarah MarshThis is the reflective and richly detailed story of Ellen Lark, a deaf woman who just wants to express herself on her own terms. While studying with Alexander Graham Bell to learn his Visual Speech technique, Ellen begins to question society's shunning of sign language and the pressure deaf people faced to assimilate. |
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| Mrs. Gulliver by Valerie MartinOn the fictional Caribbean island of Verona where prostitution is legal, the titular Lila Gulliver runs a high-end brothel. In 1954 she takes in Carità Bercy, a charming young blind woman who begins an (actual) love affair with a well-connected client that will have dramatic and unexpected fallout for the entire community. |
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| The Lost Dresses of Italy by M.A. McLaughlinThree beautifully preserved Victorian dresses unite two women living nearly a century apart in this compelling and richly detailed story of loss and recovery. In 1947, textile historian Marianne Baxter travels to a still-rebuilding postwar Italy to oversee an exhibit of the dresses, which once belonged to celebrated poet Christina Rossetti (who hid them away in 1865 for mysterious reasons). |
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| All Our Yesterdays by Joel H. MorrisThis incisive and character-driven prequel is set a decade before the events of Shakespeare's "Scottish Play" and is narrated by the unnamed young woman who would eventually be known as Lady Macbeth. Author Joel H. Morris paints a sympathetic portrait of this infamous figure and the ups and (many) downs of her early life. |
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| Finding Margaret Fuller by Allison PatakiThe life and adventures of trailblazing writer and activist Margaret Fuller fill this lush and richly detailed novel by The Accidental Empress author Allison Pataki. Fuller's circle of famous friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who may have based elements of Hester Prynne on her. |
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Before All the World
by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
What it's about: Leyb Mireles and Gitti Khayeles haven't seen each other since narrowly escaping the pogrom that destroyed their village, but fate is about to pull them back together in Depression-era Philadelphia through the combined forces of an underground gay bar, a Yiddish manuscript, and the work of it unlikely translator.
Read it for: the charming but not-quite-masterful translation of sections of Gitti's memoirs, written by Leyb's American friend Charles Patterson. In addition to exploring how Charles, a Black man, became fluent in Yiddish, the text is full of thought-provoking notes that explore Charles as a character in his own right.
Is it for you? Author Moriel Rothman-Zecher takes great care with prose but Before All the World is a stylistically complex work most likely to appeal to fans of high-concept novels like Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated or Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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