July 2020 list by Katherine N.
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Across the Way
by Mary Monroe
In Depression-era Alabama, Odell and Joyce Watson live a quiet, respectable life until they become friends with neighbors Milton and Yvonne Hamilton. The Hamilton's are bootleggers, and their unlawful business threatens to shatter their peaceful neighborhood. Pushed to the breaking point, Odell is sure he's got a foolproof plan to end the scheming once and for all. But it soon spirals into lies, shattering violence, and permanent damage that will roil their tranquil community, and alter his and Joyce's world forever.
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Beheld
by TaraShea Nesbit
Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. Eventually, the Anglican outsiders have had enough. Suspenseful and beautifully wrought, Beheld is about a murder and a trial, and the motivations that cause people to act in unsavory ways. It is also an intimate portrait of love, motherhood, and friendship that asks: Whose stories get told over time, who gets believed-and subsequently, who gets punished?
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The Book of Longings
by Sue Monk Kidd
Ana, raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything. Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history.
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The Book of Lost Friends
by Lisa Wingate
In 1875 America, during the tumultuous era of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Hannie, a freed slave; Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now destitute plantation; and Juneau Jane, Lavinia’s Creole half-sister. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following roads rife with vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before. For Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of stolen inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and siblings before slavery’s end, the pilgrimage west reignites an agonizing question: Could her long-lost family still be out there?
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Caging Skies
by Christine Leunens
An avid member of the Hitler Youth in 1940s Vienna, Johannes Betzler discovers his parents are hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa behind a false wall in their home. His initial horror turns to interest—then love and obsession. After his parents disappear, Johannes is the only one aware of Elsa’s existence in the house and he alone is responsible for her fate. Drawing strength from his daydreams about Hitler, Johannes plans for the end of the war and what it might mean for him and Elsa.
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The Companion
by Kim Taylor Blakemore
1855, New Hampshire. Lucy Blunt is set to hang for a double murder. Murderess or victim? Only Lucy knows the truth. Awaiting her fate, Lucy reflects on the events that led to her downfall—from the moment she arrived at the mysterious Burton mansion to the grisly murders themselves. In this odd household, Lucy slips comfortably into the shadows. But when Lucy’s rising status becomes a threat to the mistress’s current companion, the balance of power begins to shift, setting into motion a storm of betrayal, suspicion, and rage. Now Lucy’s allies fight to have her sentence overturned. But how much of her story can we trust? After all, Lucy’s been known to bend the truth.
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The Hungry Blade
by Lawrence Dudley
Forty modern masterpieces are found concealed on a neutral ship in international waters sixteen months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Their provenance is sketchy and their final destination unknown. The Royal Navy suspects the works are “degenerate art” seized by the Nazis and shipped across the Atlantic to create cash for their covert operations. But how to prove it? There’s only one man for the job—Roy Hawkins of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Can Hawkins untangle the false leads and double crosses before the Nazis realize their sinister plan?
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The Lost Diary of M
by Paul Wolfe
A novel that cannily reimagines the extraordinary life and mysterious death of bohemian Georgetown socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer— secret lover of JFK, ex-wife of a CIA chief, sexual adventurer, LSD explorer and early feminist living by her own rules. She ended up dead in an unsolved murder a year after JFK’s assassination. The diary she kept was never found. Until now. . .
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The Other Bennet Sister
by Janice Hadlow
What if Mary Bennet’s life took a different path from that laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice? What if the frustrated intellectual of the Bennet family, the marginalized middle daughter, the plain girl who takes refuge in her books, eventually found the fulfillment enjoyed by her prettier, more confident sisters? This is the plot of Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister, a debut novel with exactly the affection and authority to satisfy Jane Austen fans.
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Simon the Fiddler
by Paulette Jiles
Conscripted into the Confederate Army after nearly escaping the American Civil War, an itinerant fiddle player joins a ragtag regimental band playing for both sides of the conflict before falling in love with an indentured Irish governess.
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These Ghosts Are Family
by Maisy Card
Stanford Solomon has a shocking, thirty-year-old secret. And it’s about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley, a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead. The novel revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present day Harlem. Each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma.
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Toward the Midnight Sun
by Eoin Dempsey
In 1897, Anna Denton is traveling to the wilds of Yukon, Alaska, to follow through with an arranged marriage to wealthy Henry Bradwell, when her chaperones run a foul of local criminals. Childhood friends, Will and Silas, traveling to the Yukon as well, agree to escort Anna to Dawson City. Bradwell warmly welcomes them all, but when the brutal winter sets in, relations sour, and Anna is caught between the promise her family made to the power-hungry Bradwell and her feelings for Will. Anna and her companions soon find themselves in a deadly game where few can be trusted and where the greatest danger in the frozen wilderness of the Klondike is man himself.
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Valentine
by Elizabeth Wetmore
It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field—an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown.
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The Woman of a Thousand Names
by Alexandra Lapierre
Based on the true story of Mata Hari, the novels follows Moura, who was born into Russian aristocracy and never had any reason to worry until the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution, when her entire world crumbles. As her family and friends are persecuted, she falls into a passionate affair with British secret agent Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. But when he’s abruptly and mysteriously deported from Russia, Moura is left alone and vulnerable. Now, she must find new paths for her survival, even if it means shedding her past and taking on a new identity.
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