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LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE SILENCED
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"some secrets are meant to stay secret forever" -- Liane Moriarity
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by Melanie BenjaminIn March 1940, the Nazis sweep Paris and immediately take up residence in one of the city's most iconic sites -- The Hotel Ritz. But two residents of the Ritz refuse to be defeated -- its director, Claude Auzello, and his beautiful American actress wife, Blanche. They not only oversee the smooth workings of the hotel, but both Blanche and Claude throw themselves fearlessly into the dangerous and clandestine workings of the French Resistance.
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by Marie Benedict
The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian-who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true.
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by Natasha Boyd
The story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who ran her father's plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina in the 1700s and struck a bargain with the plantation's slaves -- teach her how to make indigo and she would teach them to read.
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by Genevieve Cogman
It is 1793 and the French Revolution is in full swing. Vampires--usually rich and aristocratic--have slaked the guillotine's thirst in large numbers. The mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, a disguised British noble, and his League are heroically rescuing dozens of aristocrats from execution, both human and vampire. And soon they will have an ace up their sleeve: Eleanor Dalton.
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by Michelle Gable
In 1950, a young, beautiful Polish refugee arrives in Hyannisport, Massachusetts to work as a maid for one of the wealthiest families in America. Alicia is at once dazzled by the large and charismatic family, in particular the oldest son, a rising politician named Jack. Alicia and Jack are soon engaged, but his domineering father forbids the marriage.
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by Hazel Gaynor
When two young cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright from Cottingley, England, claim to have photographed fairies at the bottom of the garden, their parents are astonished. But when one of the great novelists of the time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, becomes convinced of the photographs' authenticity, the girls become a national sensation, their discovery offering hope to those longing for something to believe in amid a world ravaged by war.
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by Hannah Kent
Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated Icelandic farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard ...
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by Ariel Lawhon
As rumors begin to circulate through European society that the youngest Romanov daughter has survived the massacre at Ekaterinburg, old enemies and new threats are awakened. The question of who Anna Anderson is and what actually happened to Anastasia Romanov spans fifty years and touches three continents. This thrilling saga is every bit as moving and momentous as it is harrowing and twisted.
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by Greer Macallister
When Charlotte Smith's wealthy parents commit her beloved sister Phoebe to the infamous Goldengrove Asylum, Charlotte knows there's more to the story than madness. She risks everything and follows her sister inside, surrendering her real identity as a privileged young lady of San Francisco society to become a nameless inmate, Woman 99. The longer she stays, the more she realizes that many of the women of Goldengrove aren't insane, merely inconvenient ...
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by Sharyn McCrumb
Despite her mother's misgivings, Zona Heaster marries Erasmus Trout Shue. After weeks of silence from the newlyweds, riders come to the Heasters' place to tell them that Zona has died from a fall, attributed to a recent illness. Mary Jane is determined to get justice for her daughter. A month after the funeral, she informs the county prosecutor that Zona's ghost appeared to her, saying that she had been murdered. An autopsy, ordered by the reluctant prosecutor, confirms her claim.
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by Varley O'Connor
The "fasting girl" was one of the more horrifying phenomena of the Victorian era in the United Kingdom and the United States. These were little girls and young women who supposedly went for long periods of time without food or drink. Sarah Jacob, a girl living in rural Wales, stopped eating when she was 10 years old. Her home became a pilgrimage site. More than a hundred weeks into her supposed fast, she died, and her parents were convicted of manslaughter.
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by Dexter Clarence Palmer
In 1726 in the small town of Godalming, England, a young woman confounds the medical community by giving birth to dead rabbits. Surgeon John Howard is a rational man. His apprentice Zachary knows John is reluctant to believe anything that purports to exist outside the realm of logic. But even John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local farmer, manages to give birth to a dead rabbit.
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by Jayne Anne Phillips
In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn't spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital's entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world.
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by Lara Prescott
At the height of the Cold War, two secretaries are pulled out of the typing pool at the CIA and given the assignment of a lifetime. Their mission: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR, where no one dare publish it, and help Pasternak's magnum opus make its way into print around the world.
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by Kate Quinn
In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kiev (now known as Kyiv), wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son--but Hitler's invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper--a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death.
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by Erika Robuck
Nineteen-year-old Violette Szabo has seen the Nazis' evil up close and is desperate to fight them. But when she meets the man who'll change her life only for tragedy to strike, Violette's adrift. Until she enters the radar of Britain's secret war organization-the Special Operations Executive-and a new fire is lit in her as she decides just how much she's willing to risk to enlist.
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by Sarah Schmidt
When her father and stepmother are found brutally murdered on a summer morning in 1892, Lizzie Borden - thirty-two years old and still living at home - immediately becomes a suspect. But after a notorious trial, she is found innocent, and no one is ever convicted of the crime.
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by Mary Sharratt
Disguising herself as a man to escape her loveless marriage and enjoy the exclusive freedoms of men, aspiring writer Aemilia Lanier falls in love and runs away with ragged poet William Shakespeare, with whom she secretly writes plays that bring him fame years later.
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by Rupert Thomson
In the years preceding World War I, two young women meet and embark on a clandestine love affair, terrified they will be discovered, but then, in an astonishing twist of fate, the mother of one marries the father of the other. As "sisters" they are finally free of suspicion ...
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by Jeanette Winterson
Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own ...
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