Depression Historical Fiction

Pearl Spence has been through more in her young life than most folks could handle. But through it all, her family has been by her side. They may not be perfect, but they love her, and they all love each other, come what may. That's one thing Pearl no longer questions.

A coming-of-age middle grade novel about three best friends born in the wake of Hurricane Katrina who must confront storms of their own 12 years later, from a National Book Award winning author. Born in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Greer, Joya Mia, and Kiki are seventh graders and the best of...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Women, a historical novel about three women’s lives on a California island On a tiny, desolate, windswept island off the coast of Southern California, two families, one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s, come to start new lives and pursue...

Jo has a gift. She is a mathematical prodigy—a woman who sees and thinks in numbers. She secures a job as a teller at Central Bank & Trust, where she recreates herself as a modern woman and rises through the professional ranks. While working at the bank, Jo becomes fascinated by Levi Arrowood, the dark and mysterious manager of the Sky Club, an infamous speakeasy and jazz club on the mountainside above town.

After twenty years in a loveless marriage, Evelyn Henderson will do anything to escape her stifling suburban life. She boards a train for Reno, Nevada, a former frontier town that’s booming thanks to “six-weekers”: women from all walks of life who take up residence there just long enough to secure an uncontested divorce—a right they don’t yet have in their home states.

Ramadan, 2017. Yusuf wakes up in the middle of the night to pray. His routine is always the same, but something tells him that tonight is different. Yellow flames blur Yusuf’s vision, and the laughter of a small child echoes in his ears. But this time, the red, smoke-filled skies aren’t just in his memory. Miles away, Rubi is also awake. On the television, she watches reports of a devastating fire in London. She is already anxious when her parents send her to stay with her Grandpa Yusuf, whose conservative house rules are almost as unbearable as the loneliness she feels at home.

Newly orphaned Magnolia Parker must protect her sick little brothers, but when the authorities send the boys to an unknown orphan asylum, Magnolia calls on her unwavering grit to bring them home. She's lost everything but still has a secret weapon—a promise from Eleanor Roosevelt, the most famous woman in America. Setting out on a cross country quest, she befriends two unlikely travelers: Hop, a migrant worker with a big heart, and Red, a young girl traumatized into silence.

One whirlwind week of love, blackmail, and betrayal follows three brothers through teeming prewar New York in this "entertaining . . . outsized . . . big, expressive debut" (Wall Street Journal). June 1939. Francis Dempsey and his shell-shocked brother, Michael, are on an ocean liner from...

"[A] glorious, glittery saga of friendship and loss... I read The Air You Breathe in two nights. (One might say I inhaled it.)." --NPR "Echoes of Elena Ferrante resound in this sumptuous saga."--O, The Oprah Magazine "Enveloping...Peebles understands the shifting currents of female friendship...

When Travis returns home from Afghanistan, his parents are splitting up, his brother's stolen his girlfriend and car, and the nightmares of his best friend getting killed keep him completely spooked. But when he runs into Harper, a girl who despises him for rumors Travis started back in middle school, life actually starts looking up. And as he and Harper see more of each other, he falls deeper in love with her and begins to find his way through the family meltdown and the post-traumatic stress.

Two Shakespearean actors in an unconventional marriage get caught up in a renowned director’s scheme that will bring them closer than ever or rip them apart for good. Up-and-coming stage actress Margaret Shoard has just taken a bow as Lady Macbeth, the role she has always believed was destined...

This is the first installment of the action and adventure-packed historical fiction book series, The Boloney Trail Trilogy. The novel tells the remarkable true events of the Hornbeck family, who struggle to survive The Great Depression, only then to become key players in the birth of the feared Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.

Wingwalkers is one-part epic adventure, one-part love story, and, as is the signature for critically acclaimed author Taylor Brown, one large part American history. The novel braids the adventures of Della and Zeno Marigold, a vagabond couple that funds their journey to the West Coast in the middle of the Great Depression by performing death-defying aerial stunts from town to town, together with the life of the author (and thwarted fighter pilot) William Faulkner, whom the couple ultimately inspires during a dramatic air show—with unexpected consequences for all.

The place: rural Vermont. The time: the Great Depression. Henry Talcott's beautiful wife, Irene, has recently left him. He and their two young children, Thomas and Margaret, are spending the summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. It's a bittersweet idyll.

Set in the mid-1930s, Filthy Sugar tells the story of Wanda Whittle, a 19-year-old dreamer who models fur coats in an uptown department store, but who lives in a crowded rooming house with her hard-working widowed mother and shrewd older sister, Evelyn, in the “slums” behind the city’s marketplace; a world where “death is always close but life is stubborn”. Bored with the daily grind and still in shock from the sudden death of her father, Wanda finds both escapism and inspiration in celluloid fantasies....

It’s 1933, and though the country is stuck in the Great Depression, movies are the ultimate escape. But Hollywood is skilled at selling lies, and nothing is as it seems. Frankie Donnelly is scrappy, smart, and ambitious. Her knack for spinning any story into stellar publicity has made her an invaluable “fixer” at RCO Studios, where she works under the tutelage of powerful Nico Marconi. Frankie’s latest fix is the upcoming marriage of Hollywood royals Jack Sawyer and June Finney, and millions of fans can’t wait to see their favorite silver-screen lovers tie the knot.

Eighteen-year-old Constance is not interested in marriage or in being a “young lady”. But for a young woman coming of age in the early 1800s, that’s just about all that’s available to her. When her parents arrange her a marriage with a man more than twice her age, she’s powerless to resist. Stance couldn’t possibly find her newfound husband less appealing, but what can she do? Here’s what: Four months into the marriage, she can slip out of their bed in the middle of the night, and she can put on his clothes.

Through the long years of the Great Depression, Harper Flute watches with a child's clear eyes her family's struggle to survive in a hot and impoverished landscape. As life on the surface grows harsher, her brother Tin escapes ever deeper into a subterranean world of darkness and troubling secrets, until his memory becomes a myth barely whispered around the countryside.

Elana K. Arnold, author of the Printz Honor book Damsel, returns with a dark, engrossing, blood-drenched tale of the familiar threats to female power—and one girl’s journey to regain it. You are alone in the woods, seen only by the unblinking yellow moon. Your hands are empty. You are nearly...

“Elegant and engrossing….Henderson is a talent to watch.” —Danielle Trussoni, author of Angelology “This is not a book you’ll soon forget.” —Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants The gripping debut novel from Litpark.com founder and Pushcart Prize-nominee Susan Henderson...