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History class making you think the past is dusty and dull? Make history come alive with a little help from the historical fiction reading lists!

In Historical Fiction: 20th Century and Onward, explore the Turn of the Century, the Great Depression, WWII, the Civil Rights Movement, plus much more!

Chasing Charity: Texas Fortunes Trilogy, Book 2 by Marcia Gruver

In this second book of the Texas Fortunes series, Charity Bloom is left stranded at the altar after her best friend takes off with her fiance. How will she ever show her face in town again? After Buddy Pierce discovers oil on the Bloom property, he realizes the real treasure may be above ground-in the form of Charity Bloom. Can he strike it rich in Charity? When her ex-fiance decides he wants her back, whom will Charity choose--the handsome roughneck or the deceitful rogue?

Courting Trouble by Deeanne Gist

It's 1894, the year of Essie's thirtieth birthday, and she decides the Lord has more important things to do than provide her a husband. If she wants one, she needs to catch him herself. So, she writes down the names of all the eligible bachelors in her small Texas town, makes a list of their attributes and drawbacks, closes her eyes, twirls her finger, and...picks one.

Kaspar the Titanic Cat written by Michael Morpurgo, illustrated by Michael Foreman

When Kaspar the cat first arrived at London’s Savoy Hotel, it was Johnny Trott who carried him in. But when tragedy befalls the Countess during her stay, Kaspar becomes more than Johnny’s responsibility: Kaspar is Johnny’s new cat, and his new best friend.

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

In 1914, Joey, a beautiful bay-red foal with a distinctive cross on his nose, is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. With his officer, he charges toward the enemy, witnessing the horror of the battles in France.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Living in Germany during World War II, young Liesel Meminger scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can't resist --- books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids.

Countdown by Deborah Wiles

It's 1962, and it seems everyone is living in fear. Twelve-year-old Franny Chapman lives with her family in Washington, DC, during the days surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis. Amidst the pervasive threat of nuclear war, Franny must face the tension between herself and her younger brother, figure out where she fits in with her family, and look beyond outward appearances.

Glory Be by Augusta Scattergood

As much as Glory wants to turn 12, sometimes she wishes she could turn back the clock a year. Her sister Jesslyn no longer has the time of day for her now that she’s entering high school. Things have always been so easy with her best friend Frankie, but now suddenly they aren’t. And then there’s the debate about whether or not the town should keep the segregated public pool open.

More books like the ones on this list »

History class making you think the past is dusty and dull? Make history come alive with a little help from the historical fiction reading lists!

In Historical Fiction: Before the 20th Century, explore the Medieval age, Salem Witch Trials, moving to the Western Frontier and the Civil War, plus much more!

To see historical fiction books from the 20th century and onward, click here.

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

As the Revolutionary War begins, 13-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom.

More books like the ones on this list »

Joyce Maynard, author of In Wonderland

Frances believes she has found a ticket to paradise when a wealthy couple hires her for the summer as their mother’s helper at their lakefront summer home in Maine. Best of all, she gets to spend the summer with Forrest Emerson, her father's charismatic childhood friend who escaped their neighborhood when he married into money. But below the glittering surface of Lake Catherine, nothing is what it seems. When Forrest’s wife, Regina, pulls Frances into her private obsession, the girl finds herself witness to the intimate secrets of adult lives. As the summer heat builds, so do the tensions within Wonderland’s walls. By Labor Day, a death will shatter the seemingly perfect family, leaving Frances to question everything she thought she knew about privilege, power and the price of belonging.

Matthew Quick, author of Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir

Matthew Quick traveled all over the world advocating for mental health awareness, standing before crowds as a success story. But secretly, he was depressed. And some days, he didn’t want to live. Years earlier, when he first told his father that he wanted to be a novelist, the response was immediate and brutal: “Idiot!” Quick channeled his pain into his debut novel, THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, which became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Still, the approval he longed for never came. His father remained cold and withholding. The deeper the rift between them grew, the deeper he sank into anxiety and addiction. In this book, Quick takes readers deep into his psyche, as he wrestles with both his own mental health and his father’s cognitive decline.

Nadia Hashimi, author of City of Widows

In February 2020, the US began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of occupation. A whole generation of Afghan women had been born during that time --- women who had grown up in relative peace, gone to school, entered the professions, even served in the army and Parliament. The women of Afghanistan watched as the Taliban filled the streets again. In the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Kabul, women are TV newscasters, shop owners, doctors, teachers, lawyers, even soldiers. They include Marjan, who fought with the Afghan army and will risk everything to keep her daughter safe. Soraya led the army’s all-female combat force over the objections of her upper-class family. She is now a wanted woman whose brother may choose not to shelter her from the Taliban.

Shari Lapena, author of Getting Away with Murder

Jill and Ted adore their New York brownstone the way others adore their children. It reflects who they are, their status and tastes. With the grand mahogany staircase and state-of-the-art kitchen, it is the stuff of glossy magazines and real-estate dreams. It is their sanctuary. So when Ted’s inheritance runs out and he makes a bad investment, they panic. How can they protect their beloved home and enviable lifestyle? The answer is obvious. The death of one wealthy family member --- from whom they stand to inherit millions --- could solve all their problems. Together, they will get away with murder. As long as they trust each other. As long as neither makes a mistake. As long as there are no surprises.

Editorial Content for Beginning Middle End

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Norah Piehl

“I had been looking for something like a beginning,” writes Valeria Luiselli's first-person narrator on the opening page of BEGINNING MIDDLE END. “All I had to do, or so I thought, was to answer a simple question: How do I reinvent it, the story, our lives?”  Read More

Teaser

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong? While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo, her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins.

Promo

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong? While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo, her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins.

About the Book

From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE and TELL ME HOW IT ENDS comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo --- cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up --- her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.

BEGINNING MIDDLE END evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made, and what happens when they disappear?

Warm, funny and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.

Audiobook available, read by Maia Enrigue Luiselli and Marta López Astrain

Editorial Content for Sea of Charms

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Pamela Kramer

SEA OF CHARMS is the third installment in Sarah Beth Durst’s Spellshop series, romances that are set in a fantasy realm. This latest entry focuses on a character we met in THE ENCHANTED GREENHOUSE, Marin, a woman with a magic sailboat who delivers supplies to the various islands that make up the Crescent Island Empire. Read More

Teaser

Betrayed by love, Marin lives and works as a supply runner, sailing from island to island, delivering an array of goods with Perri the sea serpent and Ree the sailor shrub as her crew. On one of her routine trips to the capital, Alyssium, Marin finds a revolution underway --- and her friend, Dax, in the line of fire. What starts as a rescue evolves into a deal: Marin will keep Dax on as a member of her crew if he pretends to be her boyfriend at the End-of-Harvest Festival back home. But against her better judgment, Marin finds herself intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, his charming smile --- and realizes that perhaps she isn’t saving him. Maybe it’s the other way around.

Promo

Betrayed by love, Marin lives and works as a supply runner, sailing from island to island, delivering an array of goods with Perri the sea serpent and Ree the sailor shrub as her crew. On one of her routine trips to the capital, Alyssium, Marin finds a revolution underway --- and her friend, Dax, in the line of fire. What starts as a rescue evolves into a deal: Marin will keep Dax on as a member of her crew if he pretends to be her boyfriend at the End-of-Harvest Festival back home. But against her better judgment, Marin finds herself intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, his charming smile --- and realizes that perhaps she isn’t saving him. Maybe it’s the other way around.

About the Book

#1 New York Times bestselling author Sarah Beth Durst brings cozy fantasy romance to the high seas in SEA OF CHARMS, the third magical adventure in the Spellshop series.

Marin had always belonged on the great blue sea. When the man she thought was the love of her life schemed to ruin her parents’ business, she did what her heart knew best: she fled to the sea.

Now working as a supply runner on her own boat, Marin sails from island to island, delivering a varied array of goods: letters, flour, stories and even the occasional enchanted statue. It’s a lonely life, but it’s hers. Besides, she’s got the company of Perri the sea serpent and Ree the sailor shrub. They’re the best crew she could ask for.

On one of her routine trips to the capital of the Crescent Islands Empire, Alyssium, Marin finds the city on fire and a revolution underway --- so she offers transportation to Dax, a composer friend who refuses to leave behind his instruments. What starts as a rescue evolves into a deal: Marin will keep Dax on as a (temporary) member of her crew if he becomes her pretend boyfriend at the End-of-Harvest Festival back home.

Against her better judgment, Marin finds herself intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories,  his charming smile --- and realizes that perhaps she isn’t saving him. Maybe it’s the other way around.

SEA OF CHARMS is a cozy fantasy romance about finding your crew, your family, and moreover, finding yourself.

Audiobook available, read by Caitlin Davies 

Editorial Content for The Good Parts

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Rebecca Munro

Debut novelist Evann Normandin chronicles the birth and death of the love of a lifetime in THE GOOD PARTS, which is full of poignant takeaways on love, identity and memory. Read More

Teaser

When Landon receives a letter from Rose --- the woman he once planned forever with --- he learns that their love story is over. She has undergone a radical memory-erasing treatment, leaving behind her grief, her past...and him. But Landon can't bear to lose the love of his life. Now living in Edinburgh, Rose's world is a blank canvas, and she's dating someone new. When Landon reenters her life as a stranger, they become fast friends. But what Rose doesn’t know is that this new friend carries the weight of everything they once shared. And when she starts exhibiting strange symptoms, it becomes clear their history isn’t gone --- it’s just buried. And remembering could come at a devastating cost.

Promo

When Landon receives a letter from Rose --- the woman he once planned forever with --- he learns that their love story is over. She has undergone a radical memory-erasing treatment, leaving behind her grief, her past...and him. But Landon can't bear to lose the love of his life. Now living in Edinburgh, Rose's world is a blank canvas, and she's dating someone new. When Landon reenters her life as a stranger, they become fast friends. But what Rose doesn’t know is that this new friend carries the weight of everything they once shared. And when she starts exhibiting strange symptoms, it becomes clear their history isn’t gone --- it’s just buried. And remembering could come at a devastating cost.

About the Book

An epic, unforgettable love story about a woman who takes a memory-erasing pill and the man she once loved who returns as a stranger, hoping to make her fall for him all over again --- for fans of ONE DAY and IN FIVE YEARS.

She erased their past. He’s betting on their future.

When Landon receives a letter from Rose --- the woman he once planned forever with --- he learns their love story is over. She’s undergone a radical memory-erasing treatment, leaving behind her grief, her past...and him. But Landon can't bear to lose the love of his life. If she fell for him once, couldn’t she fall for him again?

Now living in Edinburgh, Rose's world is a blank canvas, and she's dating someone new. When Landon reenters her life as a stranger, they become fast friends, their lives entwining once more. But what Rose doesn’t know is that this new friend carries the weight of everything they once shared: their firsts, their marriage, and the heartbreak they barely survived. And when she starts exhibiting strange symptoms, it becomes clear their history isn’t gone --- it’s just buried. And remembering could come at a devastating cost.

Told in alternating timelines --- his from the present, hers from the past --- THE GOOD PARTS is an achingly poignant story about the people we become across a lifetime and the beauty of finding our way with what remains. 

Audiobook available, read by Mhairi Morrison 

Editorial Content for Scavenging Beauty: A Memoir in Walks

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Pauline Finch

Just over a dozen years ago, Californian social worker Angelica Glass casually remarked to her wife that she was planning to walk every street in their home county of Santa Cruz --- urban, rural, desert, forest, wasteland, beachfront, all of it. The journey began in 2013, lasted seven years and 15 pairs of shoes, and eventually gave birth to her compelling memoir, SCAVENGING BEAUTY. Read More

Teaser

Angelica Glass spent decades as a social worker helping families struggling with poverty, addiction, abuse and neglect. Needing relief from work-related stress, she turned to walking as an outlet. What began as a way to incorporate more exercise into her busy life transformed into something extraordinary: a years-long odyssey in which Glass drew upon physical exercise, a close observation of the natural world, and long periods of introspection to reconcile with her own past. Between moments of awe as she explored her community and documented what she saw with her camera, she grappled with the turmoil of her early years in a complicated, challenging family, the aging process, long-held insecurities and grief.

Promo

Angelica Glass spent decades as a social worker helping families struggling with poverty, addiction, abuse and neglect. Needing relief from work-related stress, she turned to walking as an outlet. What began as a way to incorporate more exercise into her busy life transformed into something extraordinary: a years-long odyssey in which Glass drew upon physical exercise, a close observation of the natural world, and long periods of introspection to reconcile with her own past. Between moments of awe as she explored her community and documented what she saw with her camera, she grappled with the turmoil of her early years in a complicated, challenging family, the aging process, long-held insecurities and grief.

About the Book

In this beguiling memoir of discovery and transformation, a woman walks every street in Santa Cruz County, California, and finds unexpected healing.

Angelica Glass spent decades as a social worker helping families struggling with poverty, addiction, abuse and neglect. Needing relief from work-related stress, she turned to walking as an outlet. What began as a way to incorporate more exercise into her busy life transformed into something extraordinary: a years-long odyssey in which Glass drew upon physical exercise, a close observation of the natural world, and long periods of introspection to reconcile with her own past.

Between moments of awe as she explored her community and documented what she saw with her camera, she grappled with the turmoil of her early years in a complicated, challenging family, the aging process, long-held insecurities and grief.

Whether wandering through residential neighborhoods, over redwood-strewn mountain passes, or along the seashore, Glass found solace and developed a growing sense of peace. By looking to the natural world to suture old wounds --- by scavenging beauty on her terms --- she came to understand what it means to feel whole.

Audiobook available, read by Angelica Glass