Historical Fiction
A mix of eras, stories, settings and characters in these historical novels chosen by our librarians. (Updated January 2024)
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Afterlives
A young man returns home years after being kidnapped to find his parents gone and his sister basically a slave in a multi-generational saga set during the colonization of east Africa that won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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This Other Eden
In 1792, formerly enslaved Black man Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered Malaga Island off the coast of Maine and created a racially integrated community that endured for a century. Then white folks arrived with the goal of "cleansing" the island, threatening to send off residents in boats (but for one light-skinned boy) unless they submitted to white domination. (Library Journal)
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The Great Divide
A sweeping saga of the building of the Panama Canal, told through the stories of the diverse laborers involved in its construction in 1907.
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A True Account
In Boston, Hannah Masury - bound out to service at a waterfront inn since childhood - is ready to take her life into her own hands. When a man is hanged for piracy in the town square and whispers of a treasure in the Caribbean spread, Hannah is forced to flee for her life, disguising herself as a cabin boy. To earn the freedom to choose a path for herself, Hannah must hunt down the treasure and change the tides.
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Loot
Set in 18th-century India, England and France, this sweeping novel follows gifted woodcarver Abbas who embarks on a perilous journey to retrieve the giant wooden tiger he created for Tipu Sultan from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.
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North Woods
Exploring the many ways we're connected to our environment and to one another across time, language and space, this sweeping collection of stories about a single house in the woods of New England is told through the lives of an extraordinary succession of inhabitants.
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
When a skeleton is unearthed in the small, close-knit community of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1972, an unforgettable cast of characters, living on the margins of white, Christian America closely guard a secret, especially when the truth is revealed about what happened and the part the town's white establishment played in it.
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Wandering Stars
Traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather's shooting in There There.
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The Beasts of Paris
Enter the world of Haussmann's newly built City of Light: a dazzling, panoramic novel of love and survival set during the Siege of Paris in 1870.
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The Seamstress of Sardinia
In 1900 Sardinia, an intelligent and ambitious young woman with an impossible dream, becoming the seamstress for a wealthy family, is drawn into a world far different than her own where she observes the town’s residents who are not quite what they pretend to be.
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Availability: Available
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