Colonial Fiction

Abigale Martin needs a miracle. After a crushing family secret stole her job, her apartment, and her future, she escapes her ruined life and risks a return to her hometown. Hints from a trusted friend that a mysterious bed and breakfast could grant her deepest desires lead her to rent a room. But when her former crush - a man she’s spent months avoiding - won’t leave her side, they both end up facing more than just the past she tried to escape.

Captain Amara Corrin, hero of the late Solar Wars, commands the first colonial fleet. Full of hopeful dreamers looking for a new home, world-weary ex-soldiers, and those just seeking escape, five ships set out from Earth with the hopes of humanity behind them. But Amara soon finds herself with more trouble than she can handle. The Council, Earth’s new governing body, has saddled her with their political rivals, exiling them to a place where they could do them no harm.

The Colonial Scouts are an elite group of explorers who seek out habitable planets for the Colonial Expansion Board. They travel through space via programmable wormholes. Impani, a brilliant girl with a dark past, dreams of escaping the streets by becoming a Scout. Because she is homeless, she feels she must study twice as hard to get into the program. The day before her final exam, however, a transporter malfunction sends her jumping uncontrollably from planet to planet.

Seeking a new life, the Oberstrasse family lands on the wild Maine coast in 1753. They find that the American frontier teems with conniving swindlers, hostile French and Indians, killing diseases, and then a powerful movement for independence from Britain. They have come because Christianne has decided that their infant sons will never soldier for the Landgraf of Hesse like their father, hired out to serve King George of England. Expecting to till the soil, Johann finds that opportunity on the rocky coast comes from the forest, not land, so he learns carpentry and trapping.

From the author of The Widow’s War and Bound comes a compelling new novel about a young woman’s struggle to decide where her loyalties lie - with family or with forbidden love; with royalist tradition or upstart independence - on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

The Colonial Scouts are an elite group of explorers who seek out habitable planets for the Colonial Expansion Board. They travel through space via programmable wormholes. Natica is drowning in siblings. She hopes that if she becomes a Scout, she will rise above her brothers and sisters and shine. But when a man dies because of her mistake, she leaves the program and returns home a failure.

The Colonial Scouts are an elite group of explorers who seek out habitable planets for the Colonial Expansion Board. They travel through space via programmable wormholes. Trace, a new Scout, wants desperately to prove himself to both the Board and to his girlfriend. But when he leads a rescue party to a failing colony, everything goes against him.

Stifled by English society, Molly Bentley has always yearned for adventure. When her father offers to send her to the bustling port town of Albany in Western Australia, Molly readily agrees, even if it means assuming a secret identity. With only her chaperone Mrs Caldicott to answer to, her life of freedom can finally begin. Until Molly is knocked down in the streets, nearly trampled, and a threatening letter is slipped into her hands.

When their home in Cape Verde is attacked and burned by Sir Francis Drake in the 16th century, Tontorix and Diaecus decide to travel on a galleon to explore the New World. Upon arriving in colonial Brazil, the two ancient Celts build a new home for themselves, but are forced to flee when the Dutch arrive to attack and occupy Portuguese settlements. They escape into the wilderness and take up residence in Palmares, a community of runaway slaves who are continuously hunted by the Europeans looking to re-enslave them.

Postcolonial Love Poem, the brilliant second collection from Natalie Diaz, holds in its pages the urgent appeal for all bodies―bodies of lovers, family, enemies, as well as of language and rivers and land―to be held dearly. In her lyrical landscape, Diaz tenderly prods the wounds inflicted by America onto its Indigenous peoples.

“It’s a stunner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) From award-winning South African author Nadia Davids comes a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s, where a young maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner. I...

On Christmas Eve, a traveler finds himself waiting out a snowstorm at the Holly Tree Inn. While passing the hours waiting for the weather to pass so his coach can continue its journey, the warm hearth of the inn brings his mind to roam to pass recollections, both happy and grave. He also ponders the true meaning of his current journey and reason for his melancholy: the woman he planned on marrying is, instead, going to marry his best friend. However, the delay at the inn is about to bring him a miraculous discovery.

Sarah Calhoun is the 15-year-old daughter of the Elector Andrew Calhoun, one of Appalachee's military heroes and one of the electors who gets to decide who will next ascend as the Emperor of the New World. None of that matters to Sarah. She has a natural talent for hexing and one bad eye, and all she wants is to be left alone - especially by outsiders.

CHRONOS historians Madi, Tyson, and Katherine and their cohorts are on the enemy’s trail, fixing the mess that sociopath Saul Rand has made of history - and of the Temporal Dilemma rules. Another time shift is on the horizon, and this time, it’s one that reflects Saul’s twisted vision. When the shift hits, it plunges the United States into a modern dark age where superstition trumps science and 17th-century witch hunts are no longer a thing of the past. But Saul has added a new hurdle to this insane reality: he’s hunting the Sisters of Prudence.

Elizabeth Macquarie, widow of the disgraced former Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, is in mourning—not only for her husband, but the loss of their shared dream to transform the penal colony into a bright new world. Over the course of one long sleepless night on the windswept isle of Mull, she remembers her life in that wild and strange country; a revolution of ideas as dramatic as any in history; and her dangerous alliance with the brilliant, mercurial Francis Greenway, the colony's maverick architect.

1898, Geelong, Victoria. Stella Truehart is all alone in the world. Her good-for-nothing husband has died violently at the hands of an unknown assailant. Her mother is dead, her father deserted them before she was born, and now her kindly Truehart grandparents are also in their graves.

Filled with dreams of a better life, 17-year-old Genevieve Elliot makes the perilous journey from England to colonial Virginia, where she and handsome frontiersman Roarke Adair tame the savage wilderness and survive the sorrows of war to make a home.

Arthur Leary thought that his part in the Revolution ended when his generals surrendered their army to the Americans after the Battle of Saratoga. Little did he know that political maneuvering at the highest levels of British and American government would leave him and his fellow soldiers marching across the landscape for years to come...unless he could find a way out. The rocky soil of a New England farm owned by fierce patriots to the American cause offered him hard labor and harder choices - choices that would shape his future and that of his country.

Cameroon, 1929. As colonial powers fight for influence in Africa, French military surgeon Eugène Jamot is dispatched to Cameroon to lead the fight against sleeping sickness there. But despite his humanitarian intentions, the worst comes to pass: seven hundred local villagers are left blind as a result of medical malpractice by a doctor under Jamot’s watch.

Hamburg 1888: After thirty prosperous years, coffee importer Peter Hansen & Sons faces hard times - and certain bankruptcy - unless three brothers can make savvy moves to save the faltering business after their father’s untimely death. For Robert Hansen, that means meeting changing demands by following the future from Vienna to Africa. He relocates his family to the German colony of Cameroon and takes ownership of a cocoa plantation. With a spirit as adventurous as her father’s, Robert’s fifteen-year-old daughter Luise discovers an exciting new world.