Historical House Fiction

Two possible futures loom before Miss Anne Davenport. The first option: sharing an unhappy home with her father and soon-to-be stepmother. The second: a life of independence at the Spinster House, if only her friend, Cat, would vacate the premises and marry the Duke of Hart. A well-placed whisper about the pair's secret tryst might speed the course of true love.

It is 1934. Returning to the West Country after their latest adventure in London, lady's maid Verity Hunter and cook Joan Hart are ready to embrace a quieter life. Their mistress, the glamorous young heiress Dorothy Drew, is attempting to rein in her enthusiasm for too many cocktails and takes up the offer of a place to rest and recuperate from an old family friend, Mrs Ashford. All seems well, until the day after they arrive, when everyone in the house is struck down by what appears to be mushroom poisoning. The deadly dish proves fatal for one unlucky soul.

Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a 13-year-old houseboy working for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who's abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene.

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North.

January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb.... As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends - and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is.

Oceans and circumstances have forced families apart. For the banished French Acadians drifting in exile, the shore means safety - though it is a safety at a terrible price. For the lonely British nobleman, the shore holds a single chance to secure his legacy. For Andrew and Catherine Harrow, the shore marks a tragic separation. An extraordinary set of journeys awaits them all, each as intricate and perilous as the coastline itself.

The New York Times best-selling author of Whiter Than Snow, Sandra Dallas delivers a novel about the secrets and passions of three generations of women who live in a Victorian Colorado house. While the house is under construction in 1880, a 17-year-old servant imagines living in the “Bride’s House” with one of her several suitors. Decades later, the legacy and secrets of earlier Bride’s House women cause the current occupant to question what she really wants and who she truly loves.

Christine and her older brother, Henry, grew up in the Delaney family as loved and nurtured as if they had been born to Elizabeth and Wynn. Now adults, they are ready to make new lives for themselves. Henry has found love and is planning a wedding. Christine is delighted for her brother, but she is still carrying scars from a broken relationship. And the war in Europe causes uncertainties at every turn, while the Northland still calls to her heart.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Sam and Sadie—two college friends, often in love, but never lovers—become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have heard before.

Internationally best-selling author Edward Rutherfurd has enchanted millions of readers with his sweeping, multigenerational dramas that illuminate the great achievements and travails throughout history. In this breathtaking saga of love, war, art, and intrigue, Rutherfurd has set his sights on the most magnificent city in the world: Paris. Moving back and forth in time across centuries, the story unfolds through intimate and vivid tales of self-discovery, divided loyalties, passion, and long-kept secrets of characters both fictional and real, all set against the backdrop of the glorious city.

The bittersweet reunion of the Robichaud family and the Harrows in the land of the Acadians has brought two mothers and two daughters full circle. They rekindle those early bonds and experience restoration of those lost years, but time and tragedy have left their indelible imprints on all who have endured the decades of separation and uncertainty. Moving forward with their lives now means further farewells - not as devastating as the one long ago but no less heart-wrenching.

For years, Lady Bancroft’s Valentine’s Ball at Bancroft Hall had been a glittering gathering of high society’s most eligible men and women. Countless happy couples owe their love stories to her matchmaking, their gratitude keeping Lady Bancroft in the genteel comfort of her grand Cotswolds estate. But this year tragedy strikes. A murder threatens to ruin everything. Desperate, Lady Bancroft turns to her neighbour, the dashing Major Heathcliff Lennox. A decorated war hero and now a consultant to Scotland Yard, Lennox would much rather be fishing.

San Francisco, 1866: una monja irlandesa, embarazada y abandonada por un aristócrata chileno tras una apasionada relación, da a luz a una niña a la que llama Emilia del Valle. Criada por su cariñoso padrastro, Emilia se convertirá en una joven brillante de gran personalidad, autónoma e independiente, que desafiará las normas sociales de su tiempo para profesar su verdadera pasión y vocación: la escritura.

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

Every fortune-hunting female in London is after the newly titled Earl of Drake, but he's intent on finding a wife whose heart is true. So, while drunkenly jesting with his friends in a pub one night, he has an idea - what if the ladies of the ton didn't know he was a wealthy earl? All he has to do is pose as a servant at his friend's summer country house party and make sure the guest list is full of beautiful, eligible debutantes. What could possibly go wrong?

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

The saga of a land from the time when the volcanic islands rose out of the sea to the decade in which they become the 50th state. Michener uses individuals' experiences to symbolize the struggle of the various races to establish themselves in the islands.

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings—and the freedom to travel with Gerald.

Welcome to the bizarre court of Henry VIII, where even a princess fears losing her head like her mother. Elizabeth hides her tenacious personality from everyone, especially her father. Your 21st-century kid will enjoy Elizabeth's "treasonous thoughts" and glimpse the daily life of a young woman who ascended the throne at 25 and went on to rule her country for 45 years.