Historical Sagas

The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter, Blanca, embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban.

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge - until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents - but they quickly realize the dark truth.

Spring has come to Ireland, where Thorgrim Night Wolf, new-made Lord of Vík-ló, and the 300 Viking warriors under his command have suffered through a brutal winter. Despite having accomplished much during the months of cold and rain, the patience of the men has worn thin, and anger and frustration threaten to tear the ships' crews apart. But just as the men are turning on one another, a local Irish lord arrives with a proposal, a plan for Irish and Norse to join together in a raid.

Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s dark, insightful, and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James.

Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is conflicted when an injury results in her reassignment to the relative comfort of the English countryside. Love has never been part of her plan, but despite herself, she falls for an officer with three bullet wounds, startling blue eyes and a wicked sense of humor.

In a land of mountains and mist, tradition and superstition, Languoreth and her brother Lailoken are raised in the Old Way of their ancestors. But in Scotland, a new religion is rising, one that brings disruption, bloodshed, and riot. And even as her family faces the burgeoning forces of Christianity, the Anglo-Saxons, bent on colonization, are encroaching from the east. When conflict brings the hero Emrys Pendragon to her father’s door, Languoreth finds love with one of his warriors. Her deep connection to Maelgwn is forged by enchantment, but she is promised in marriage to Rhydderch, son of a Christian king.

Les Rockefeller… rarement une dynastie a marqué à ce point l’histoire des États-Unis et, plus largement, celle du XXe siècle. Pour le plus grand nombre, ils symbolisent l’argent, la puissance et la philanthropie. Au départ, John D.Rockefeller senior, le " roi du pétrole ". Dans les années 1870, ce visionnaire austère se lance dans le raffinage de l’or noir et bâtit un empire. À la fin de sa vie, il est l’homme le plus riche du monde. Son fils, Junior, préfère s’éloigner de l’univers impitoyable des affaires pour celui de la philanthropie.

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.

Set in the 1920s and 1930s, Honolulu explores the stark contrast between the image of the glamorous Hawaiian paradise portrayed to the mainland and the harsh reality of life on the island. With characters as vivid and richly descriptive as the history of Hawaii itself, this novel is sure to enthrall listeners.

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty.

Here is Edward Rutherfurd's classic novel of London, a glorious pageant spanning 2,000 years. He brings this vibrant city's long and noble history alive through the ever-shifting fortunes, fates, and intrigues of half-a-dozen families, from the age of Julius Caesar to the 20th century. Generation after generation, these families embody the passion, struggle, wealth, and verve of the greatest city in the world.

Set against the backdrop of an elegant Cornwall mansion before World War II and a vast continent-spanning canvas during the turbulent war years, this captivating story tells of an extraordinary young woman's coming of age, coming to grips with love and sadness, and in every sense of the term, coming home.... In 1935, Judith Dunbar is left behind at a British boarding school when her mother and baby sister go off to join her father in Singapore.

Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavinia arrives on the steps of the kitchen house and is placed, as an indentured servant, under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate slave daughter. Lavinia learns to cook, clean, and serve food while guided by the quiet strength and love of her new family. In time Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, caring for the master's opium-addicted wife and befriending his dangerous yet protective son. She attempts to straddle the worlds of the kitchen and big house, but her skin color will forever set her apart.

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches - a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women. Moving in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale.

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart, that's exactly what they get.

A fateful shipwreck leaves the young and wealthy Lord Brandon presumed dead, and his estate in England lies abandoned and ripe for the picking. Years later, his step-cousin Justine finds him alive and drug-addicted, and against his family's wishes, boldly brings him home to reclaim his inheritance. Dark surprises disturb Brandon at every turn - a ruined property, a traitorous, bitter family, his fiancee married to his rival. And Justine, the shy, quiet girl he grew up with is no longer a little girl, but an alluring and determined young woman.

Alijah's reign sweeps from Erador to Ayda. Those who would stand against the king are few, their numbers cast across too many battlefields. Does hope lie in the east? Can the elves turn the tide and keep The Rebellion alive? The weight of Dhenaheim now rests on Doran's shoulders. Chained and imprisoned, the clans are shattered and spread across the realm. On the island of Qamnaran, they build to the heavens. In the Moonlit Plains, they dig down into the dark. Only the Heavybellys have the mettle to do what must be done.

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams.

In 1558 the ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral look down on a city torn apart by religious conflict. As power in England shifts precariously between Catholics and Protestants, high principles clash bloodily with friendship, loyalty, and love. Ned Willard wants nothing more than to marry Margery Fitzgerald. But when the lovers find themselves on opposing sides of the religious divide sweeping across the country, Ned goes to work for Princess Elizabeth. When she becomes queen, all Europe turns against England.

1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast—as the snow falls.