Historical Sagas

In which Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and courageous Puritan, pursues knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe -- in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.

Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.

Lubji Hoch escapes from the Nazis, moves to Berlin and changes his name to Richard Armitage. After a successful career in the British Army, he takes over a struggling newspaper and with unrivalled ruthlessness begins building his media empire. Meanwhile, Keith Townsend, the son of a millionaire and Oxford educated, returns to Australia from London to take over his father's newspaper with similar ambitions. As both men move their quest for power to the world stage, they realise they are more than a match for one another's brilliance and ambition.

Ensign Richard Sharpe, newly made an officer, wishes he had stayed a sergeant after he is put in terrible danger by Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill at the impregnable Gawilghur's ravine. To regain his confidence and his authority, Sharpe will fight as he has never fought before.

In 1918, after four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes only four times a year and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Three years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel is tending the grave of her newly lost infant when she hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up on shore carrying a dead man and a living baby.

The newly promoted Captain Richard Sharpe clashes with an incompetent colonel, leads his men in the battle of Talavera and earns himself a dangerous enemy. As Sharpe leads his men in to battle, he knows he must fight for the honour of the regiment and his future career. Soldier, hero, rogue - Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles.

Wynsdown, 1949. In the small Somerset village of Wynsdown, Charlotte Shepherd is happily married and now feels settled in her adopted home after arriving from Germany on the Kindertransport as a child during the war. Meanwhile, the squire's fighter-pilot son, Felix, has returned to the village with a fiancée in tow. Daphne is beautiful and charming...and is harboring secrets. After meeting during the war, Felix knows some of Daphne's past, but she has worked hard to conceal what could unravel her carefully built life.

But the Empire's military leaders are fiercely divided on what to do. Should they conduct aggressive offensives in hopes of a break through, or should they weather the winter and use that as a chance to reorganize, restructuring the lines of battle? In the end, they decided that while they gather supplies for a theoretical offensive, they would conduct an investigation to collect intelligence. Naturally, Tanya's Salamander Unit was the first candidate for the mission. Should they push ahead, or should they hold their ground? There's no time to hesitate.

Driven ashore on the coast of Ireland, their longships nearly wrecked by the gods who seem unwilling to let them leave, Thorgrim Night Wolf and his band of Northmen once again face a fight for their survival. Helpless without their ships, they must find some refuge in that hostile country and begin the laborious work of making the vessels seaworthy again. But for all the shipbuilding skills that Thorgrim and the others possess, there is one thing they cannot do - weave cloth to replace the sails shredded in the gale that drove them ashore.

Richard Sharpe, asked to help an old friend, meets, at last, the greatest enemy. Five years after the Battle of Waterloo, Sharpe's peaceful retirement in Normandy is shattered. An old friend, Don Blas Vivar, is missing in Chile, reported dead at rebel hands--a report his wife refuses to believe. She appeals to Sharpe to find out the truth. Sharpe, along with Patrick Harper, finds himself bound for Chile via St. Helena, where they have a fateful meeting with the fallen emperor Napoleon.

Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, 21-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, they couldn’t be more different, but both are beautiful, modern, and carefree...until the day their father tells them he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides.

Having sent his much-beloved but deceitful young wife Katheryn Howard to her beheading, King Henry fixes his lonely eyes on a more mature woman, 30-year-old, twice-widowed Katharine Parr. She, however, is in love with Sir Thomas Seymour, brother to the late Queen Jane. Aware of his rival, Henry sends him abroad, leaving Katharine no choice but to become Henry's sixth queen in 1543. The king is no longer in any condition to father a child, but Katharine is content to mother his three children, Mary, Elizabeth, and the longed-for male heir, Edward.

At Elizabeth's command, she marries the Duc de Beaumont de Jaspre, whose Mediterranean principality is vital to England. Her new world, though tortuously cruel at first, is transformed by Skye's hot-blooded desires - only to be shaken with the news that her beloved former husband may be alive in Algiers. Her daring flight into danger leads her ultimately to her heart's true destiny - as bold and sensual as Skye herself.

Oberlin, Ohio, 1868. Lisbeth Johnson was born into privilege in the antebellum South. Jordan Freedman was born a slave to Mattie, Lisbeth's beloved nurse. The women have an unlikely bond deeper than friendship. Three years after the Civil War, Lisbeth and Mattie are tending their homes and families while Jordan, an aspiring suffragette, teaches at an integrated school. When Lisbeth discovers that her father is dying, she's summoned back to the Virginia plantation where she grew up.

Julian Fellowes's Belgravia is the story of a secret. A secret that unravels behind the porticoed doors of London's grandest postcode. Set in the 1840s, when the upper echelons of society began to rub shoulders with the emerging industrial nouveau riche, Belgravia is peopled by a rich cast of characters. But the story begins on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. At the Duchess of Richmond's new legendary ball, one family's life will change forever.

In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, recently widowed, is shunned by his fellow Quakers when he marries his young servant girl to help with his five small children. He moves his shaken family down the Wilderness Road to the Virginia/Kentucky border. Although determined to hold on to his Quaker ways, and despite his most dearly held belief that slavery is a sin, Daniel becomes the owner of a young boy named Onesimus, setting in motion a twisted chain of events that forever change his children’s lives.

As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia, their headstrong eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride.

In this spectacular saga as radiant, thrilling, and beguiling as Hollywood itself, Adriana Trigiani takes us back to Tinsel Town's golden age - an era as brutal as it was resplendent - and into the complex and glamorous world of a young actress hungry for fame and success. With meticulous, beautiful detail, Trigiani paints a rich, historical landscape of 1930s Los Angeles, where European and American artisans flocked to pursue the ultimate dream: to tell stories on the silver screen.

Harry Clifton’s story began in 1920, as a dock worker in England, and now he is set to write his magnum opus. As he reflects on his days, the lives of his family continue to unfold, unravel, and intertwine in ways no one could have imagined . . . Harry’s wife Emma, who just completed her time at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, receives a surprise call from Margaret Thatcher. Meanwhile, Giles Barrington discovers a shocking truth about his wife, Karin. Sebastian Clifton becomes chairman of Farthings Kaufman bank, but only after Hakim Bishara’s abrupt resignation.

When Ross Buchanan is forced to resign as chairman of the Barrington Shipping Company, Emma Clifton wants to replace him. But Don Pedro Martinez intends to install his puppet, the egregious Major Alex Fisher, in order to destroy the Barrington family firm just as the company plans to build its new luxury liner, the MV Buckingham. Back in London, Harry and Emma's adopted daughter wins a scholarship to the Slade Academy of Art where she falls in love with a fellow student, Clive Bingham, who asks her to marry him.