Historical Fiction American Literature

The Trees is the story of an American family in the wilderness - a family that "followed the woods as some families follow the sea." The time is the end of the 18th century, the wilderness is the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River. But principally, The Trees is the story of a girl named Sayward, eldest daughter of Worth and Jary Luckett, raised in the forest far from the rest of humankind, yet growing to realize that the way of the hunter must cede to the way of the tiller of soil.

1549. Convinced he’s destined to fulfill a whispered prophecy, Friar Diego de Landa labors to convert the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula. Discovering a brutal Spanish landowner persecuting the native population, Friar Diego determines to protect them and punish the cruel man. 2010. Cortez Vuscar is convinced his father will return if he can grow their church’s congregation. Certain he’s found his true love, Cortez sets out to win her from her wealthy, unfaithful boyfriend. But his fascination with the literature she’s reading infects his mind with a deadly descent into madness.

Just as Mr. Darcy finally decides to propose to the enticing Miss Elizabeth Bennet, she is summoned to Falmouth, to meet a relation she never knew she had. Thus, the ill-starred Hunsford proposal is avoided - but before he could even begin to understand his luck, adverse circumstances hasten to conspire against him, and Fitzwilliam Darcy is compelled to follow the woman he loves to the far reaches of Cornwall, into a world of deceit and peril, where few - if any - are what they seem to be...

Jobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she's evaded since college. But when her brother disappears, he leaves behind an object from their mother's Vietnam past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that might be an heirloom belonging to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

In New York City, Joanna Marshall is an aspiring singer obsessed with success, determined to overcome the racism and sexism that stand in her way. Her childhood friends Maggie Ellersley and Peter Bye confront similar barriers but with different goals in mind: Maggie is focused on finding love; Peter, on becoming a surgeon. But as their interests overlap and their ambitions collide, the course of Joanna and Maggie’s lives seems destined to change forever. Written in response to the dominant stereotypes of the time, There Is Confusion paints a revelatory portrait....

In Cahokia, the corn crop is failing again and a warchief - and the warrior woman he may never possess - are disgusted by their Chief's lust for tribute. Now even the gods have turned their faces, closing the underworld to the seers. If the gods have abandoned the people, there is no hope - unless it comes in the form of a young girl who is learning to Dream of Power.

ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024 "An evocative, touching, and--in multiple senses--moving portrait of Zambian life and politics at a moment of great transformation. And in the tradition of Zambian storytelling, it shows us, it teaches us, how ordinary people like Grace, in extraordinary...

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann—here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustave von Aschenbach, a...

Rain on a Mountain Fork Lawman, manhunter, peacemaker–it takes a hard breed of man to survive as a Texas Ranger, but Chick Bowdrie stands head and shoulders above the rest. The rough trails are his home. He's dried by the desert sun and wind, scarred and toughened by uncounted gun battles, and...

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books The best-known book by Cuba’s most important...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls returns with his first stand-alone novel since Chances Are . . . —a spellbinding page-turner about a crime in a small town that exposes long-held secrets and betrayals among a group of lifelong friends. When Tyler Sinclair left Stone Mountain...

#1 SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE “A picaresque, swashbuckling adventure.”—The Washington Post Book World They’re an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of...

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the 18th century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires.

A gun moll with a knack for disappearing flees from Prohibition-era Harlem to Portland's Paragon Hotel. The year is 1921, and "Nobody" Alice James has just arrived in Oregon with a bullet wound, a lifetime's experience battling the New York Mafia, and fifty thousand dollars in illicit cash. She...

A parallel story to the life of Paul Gauguin leaving everything for Tahiti and his separation from the rest of the world, with remarkable portraits of those along the way, narrated in an American voice.

Two brothers are exposed to the brutal realities of life and the seductive cruelty of power in this riveting debut novel—a story of savagery and race, injustice and honor, set in the untamed frontier of 1880s Australia—reminiscent of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and the novels of Cormac...

A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2019 FROM: Buzzfeed * The Rumpus * Entertainment Weekly The first thing I remember being said of me with any consistency was that I was intelligent—and I recognized even then that it was a comment leveled at me with as much disapproval as admiration. Still, I never tried...

On a dark evening, Mr. Harley Quin appears at the door of Royston Hall under the premise that his car has broken down. Once inside, he embarks upon the tragic tale of Royston Hall's former occupants, leading to a dramatic change in the perceptions of the current inhabitants – but has Mr...

“Oates is just a fearless writer…with her brave heart and her impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers.” —Los Angeles Times “[An] extraordinarily intense, racking, and resonant novel.” —Booklist (starred review) One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the...

Mr. Midshipman Easy is the 1836 novel by Frederick Marryat, a retired Captain in the 19th century Royal Navy. The novel is set during the Napoleonic Wars, in which Marryat himself served with distinction. It was adapted twice into films in 1916 and in 1935 as Midshipman Easy. Captain Frederick Marryat (July 10, 1792 - August 9, 1848) was an English Royal Navy officer, novelist, and a contemporary and acquaintance of Charles Dickens, noted today as an early pioneer of the sea story.