Gothic Historical Fiction

At their newly founded school, Samuel Hood and his daughter, Caroline, promise a groundbreaking education for young women. But Caroline has grave misgivings. After all, her own unconventional education has left her unmarriageable and isolated, unsuited to the narrow roles afforded women in 19th-century New England. When a mysterious flock of red birds descends on the town, Caroline alone seems to find them unsettling. But it's not long before the assembled students begin to manifest bizarre symptoms: Rashes, seizures, headaches, verbal tics, night wanderings. One by one, they sicken.

When Cooper McQueen wakes up from a night with a beautiful stranger, it's to discover he's been robbed. The only item stolen: a million-dollar bottle of bourbon. The thief, a mysterious woman named Paris, claims the bottle is rightfully hers. After all, the label itself says it's property of the Maddox family, who owned and operated Red Thread Bourbon distillery since the last days of the Civil War, until the company went out of business for reasons no one knows...no one except Paris.

In 1886, a respectable young woman must acquire a husband. But Violet Pring does not want to marry. She longs to be a professional artist and live on her own terms. When her scheming mother secures a desirable marriage proposal from an eligible Brighton gentleman for her, Violet protests. Her family believes she is deranged and deluded, so she is locked away in Hillwood Grange Lunatic Asylum against her will. In her new cage, Violet faces an even greater challenge: she must escape the clutches of a sinister and formidable doctor and set herself free.

England, 1925. Louisa Drew lost her husband in the First World War and her six-year-old twin sons in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Newly remarried to a war-traumatised husband and seven months pregnant, Louisa is asked by her employer to travel to Clewer Hall in Sussex where she is to photograph the contents of the house for auction. She learns Clewer Hall was host to an infamous séance in 1896, and that the lady of the house has asked those who gathered back then to come together once more to re-create the evening.

Rosemary Chivers is haunted by the choices she made as a teenager—and by those made for her by a controlling mother. Now, in the Cold War era of conformity and suspicion, Rosemary is a modern new teacher at a school for troubled girls, where she challenges the narrow curriculum meant to tame restless young minds. She also keeps a devastating secret. She knows one of the students is the child she gave up. But which one?

Legendary thriller writer David Morrell transports listeners to the fogbound streets of London, where a killer plots to assassinate Queen Victoria. The year is 1855. The Crimean War is raging. The incompetence of British commanders causes the fall of the English government. The empire teeters. Amid this crisis comes opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, one of the most notorious and brilliant personalities of Victorian England. Along with his irrepressible daughter, Emily, and their Scotland Yard companions, finds himself confronted by an adversary who threatens the heart of the nation.

Wieland (1798) is an early American novel set in 1760s Pennsylvania. Based on a real case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the story is imbued with suspense and intrigue, adopting Gothic devices such as ventriloquism and spontaneous combustion. The satanic interloper Carwin exercises his power over the narrator, Clara Wieland, wreaking havoc over the Wieland family with disastrous consequences. A central theme in the novel is the issue of the values that formed the basis of a new democratic and republican America.

The Interpretation of Murder opens on a hot summer night in 1909 as Sigmund Freud arrives in New York. Among those waiting to greet him is Dr. Stratham Younger, a gifted physician who is one of Freud's most ardent American supporters. And so begins the visit that will be the great genius' first and only journey to America.

I still dream, every night, of Polneath on fire. Smoke unravelling from an upper window, and the terrace bathed in a hectic orange light.... Now I see that the decision I made at Polneath was the only decision of my life. Everything marred in that one dark minute.

Bertha Mellish, “the most peculiar, quiet, reserved girl” at Mount Holyoke College, is missing. One cold November morning the junior is spotted walking through the Massachusetts woods; then, she vanishes. As a search team dredges the pond where she might have drowned, Bertha’s panicked father and sister arrive at the campus desperate to find some clue as to her fate or state of mind. Bertha’s best friend, Agnes, a scholarly loner studying medicine, might know the truth, but she is being unhelpfully tightlipped.

For several years, time and circumstance have managed to separate Hallie Knight and her old friend Susan Trench. But when Susan disappears from her grandfather's seaside home on historic Topsail Island, it is Hallie whom Nicholas Trench calls for help. Wealthy, ill, and irascible, he refuses to believe that his beloved granddaughter and the heir to his fortune has been lost to him.

With a modest inheritance and the three gowns that comprise her entire wardrobe, Theodora leaves Edinburgh—and a disappointed suitor—far behind. She is bound for Romania, where tales of vampires are still whispered, to visit an old friend and write the book that will bring her true independence. She arrives at a magnificent, decaying castle in the Carpathians, replete with eccentric inhabitants, including the castle’s master, Count Andrei Dragulescu.

Emma Parrish accepts a position no one else dares, as governess to the son of Lord Anthony Craven, the castle’s dark master. The mystery of Anthony Craven’s shadowy past lurk behind the locked doors of the estate’s forbidden Round Tower. Mysterious lights flash there in the night. The servants whisper warnings of death. Anthony himself warns Emma there is only danger to be found in his sensual embrace. Powerfully drawn to the dangerously alluring Anthony, Emma finds herself unable to deny her deepest yearnings.

For more than two centuries, Winterbourne Hall has stood atop a bluff overseeing the English countryside of Cornwall and the sea beyond. In 1947, Londoner Alice Miller accepts a post as governess at Winterbourne, looking after Captain Jonathan de Grey’s twin children. Falling under the de Greys’ spell, Alice believes the family will heal her own past sorrows. But then, the twins’ adoration becomes deceitful and taunting. Their father, ever distant, turns spiteful and cruel. The manor itself seems to lash out. Alice finds her surroundings subtly altered, her air slightly chilled.

1887, the Cornwall coast. For years, rumors have flown through the village of Suttonsbury about Ashthorne Hall—that its occupants hoard pirate treasure, that a ghost walks its halls—but botanist Hyacinth Bell only cares about the estate’s extensive one-of-a-kind orchid collection. As an independent woman, she is eager to focus on her career, even if it means waiting to pursue a romantic relationship. After all, love—like an orchid—must be nurtured and tended before it can bloom. What she doesn’t expect is to be swept away by Lucas Harding, the manor’s caretaker, upon their first meeting.

In the spring of 1912, American writer Arthur Pearce is reeling from the wounds inflicted by a disastrous marriage. But his plans to travel abroad, write a new novel, and forget about his ex-wife are interrupted by a young woman he encounters on a London-bound train. Her name is Sarah Coyle, and the tale she tells him chills his blood. Sarah’s younger sister has been entranced by Count Richard Dunning, who is rumored to dabble in bizarre religious rites and experimental medicine. Arthur agrees to help, but he has no idea of what awaits him at Altarbook, Sarah’s ancestral mansion

This annotated edition of the classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly includes an historical introduction, an overview, study of the themes present in the book, and a list of famous quotes.

Twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are identical in every way, except that Tilly hasn't grown a single inch since she was five. Then at the age of 15 the girls are sold to a mysterious Italian known as 'Captain'. Theo is an orphan, raised by his grandfather. Resenting his grandson for his mother's death in childbirth, Theo is forced to leave home without a penny to his name when he remarries, and a new heir is produced. Unable to train to be a doctor as he'd hoped, Theo finds employment in Dr Summerwell's Museum of Anatomy in London, and here he meets Captain and his theatrical 'family'.

As World War I rages across Europe, a military officer is brutally murdered in a remote English country house. Lord Strangford is the only suspect. To clear his name, Lily must unravel the bizarre secrets that surround the corpse. It's a quest that takes her from the besieged Yorkshire coast to the heart of the empire as a brilliant and relentless police inspector haunts her every move.

October 1840. A young woman staggers alone through a forest in the English countryside as a huge pair of impossible wings rip themselves from her shoulders. In London, rumors of a fallen angel cause a frenzy across the city, and a surgeon desperate for fame and fortune finds himself in the grips of a dangerous obsession, one that will place the women he seeks in the most terrible danger.