Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

LAST NIGHT AT THE TELEGRAPH CLUB de Malinda Lo

Acclaimed author of Ash Malinda Lo returns with her most personal and ambitious novel yet, a gripping story of love and duty set in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1950s.

LAST NIGHT AT THE TELEGRAPH CLUB
by Malinda Lo
Dutton, January 2021
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

« That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other. » And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: « Have you ever heard of such a thing? »
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

“Restrained yet luscious.” —Sarah Waters, bestselling author of Tipping the Velvet
“Finally, the intersectional, lesbian, historical teen novel so many readers have been waiting for.” —Kirkus, starred review
“A must-read love story…alternately heart-wrenching and satisfying.” —Booklist, starred review
“This standout work of historical fiction combines meticulous research with tender romance to create a riveting bildungsroman.” —Horn Book, starred review
“Proof of Malinda Lo’s skill at creating darkly romantic tales of love in the face of danger. » —O: The Oprah Magazine

• Winner of the National Book Award for Young Adult literature
• A New York Times and Indie Bestseller
• 2022 Michael L. Printz Honor
• 2022 Stonewall Award
• 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award
• 2022 We Need Diverse Books Walter Dean Myers Award Honor
• Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Young Adult Literature Category
• Barnes & Noble January 2022 YA Pick of the Month
• Finalist for the NEIBA Book Award
• 2021 Medal Winner of the Alice B Awards
• ALA 2022 Rainbow List
• Best Books of 2021: NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, School Library Journal, Chicago Public Library, New York Public Library, Goodreads, Horn Book, Book Riot, Brightly, YALSA, Kirkus, Booklist, CCBC, San Francisco Chronicle, BCCB, Shondaland, Cosmopolitan

Malinda Lo is the critically acclaimed and bestselling author. Her debut novel Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Science Fiction and Fantasy, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and was a Kirkus Best Book for Children and Teens. She has been a three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

THE HIDDEN HEART de Theresa Howes

A sweeping love story set in occupied France in 1944 where an art-forger is blackmailed by the British government into looking into the loyalties of a French priest, rumoured to be a collaborator. For fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Kate Morton and Letters to the Lost.

THE HIDDEN HEART
by Theresa Howes
on submission
(via Mushens Entertainment)

1944. Marguerite Segal, an artist living under a false identity on the Cote d’Azur to escape her criminal past, is blackmailed by British Intelligence into befriending Father Etienne Valade, a local priest suspected of being an Nazi collaborator. Her mission is to persuade him to pass on information from the high ranking German officers who attend his church. Connected by a passion for art, they soon fall in love. As she tries to convince him to pass on information learned in the confessional box, her association with him increasingly puts her in danger of violent reprisals from the local people. At the same time, her covert work, creating false identity cards to camouflage those hiding from the Third Reich, brings her under the scrutiny of the occupying enemy.
As the Allied invasion draws closer, Marguerite has to work out who she can trust in a world where everything is at stake. Should she put her faith in the man she loves, without knowing the motivation behind his actions? Or by trusting a man so full of contradictions, will she be aligning her fate with that of a man whose heart she cannot know?

Theresa Howes lives in London, and has a background as an actor. Her work has been long-listed for the Mslexia Novel Award, the Bath Novel Award, The Caledonia Novel Award, The Lucy Cavendish College Prize, and the BBC National Short Story Award. Theresa is already working on her second novel: at the end of WWII, a female war reporter who was used as a honey trap by British Intelligence during the war is trying to rebuild her marriage until the high ranking British officer she exposed as traitor reappears in her life, determined to get his revenge.

DIE BEAUTIFUL de Buzzy Jackson

A debut novel based on the real and unforgettable life of Hannie Schaft, a young woman living in Nazi-occupied Holland who joined the Resistance, learned to shoot, and executed her Nazi targets with such precision that Hitler nicknamed her « the Girl with Red Hair ».

DIE BEAUTIFUL
by Buzzy Jackson
‎ Dutton, Winter 2023
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Hannie didn’t train to be a soldier — her youthful dream was to finish law school in Amsterdam and join the League of Nations. But Hannie’s volunteer work with the Red Cross puts her on the radar of key resistance recruiters, who spot her fearlessness and outrage, recognizing her for the heroine she’ll someday become. As the simmering menace of Nazi-occupied Holland reaches a boiling point, Hannie becomes ever more daring, assassinating powerful Nazis point blank, blowing up munitions factories, constantly improvising with last-minute Resistance orders. She also falls deeply in love at a tremendous cost. But throughout it all, Hannie’s greatest weapon is her determination not to become a monster herself: blijf altijd menselijk. Stay human.

Buzzy Jackson is the award-winning author of three books of nonfiction and has a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley. A recent fellow at the Edith Wharton Writing Residency, she is also a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle and writes for the Boston Globe and BookForum. Buzzy grew up in the mountains of California and Montana and now lives in Boulder, Colorado.

RIVER SPIRIT de Leila Aboulela

A masterful, adventurous new novel set in nineteenth-century Sudan from Caine Prizewinning, New York Times Notable author Leila Aboulela.

RIVER SPIRIT
by Leila Aboulela
Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2023

Hailed as “a versatile prose stylist” (New York Times) whose work “shows the rich possibilities of living in the West with different, non-Western, ways of knowing and thinking” (Sunday Herald), Leila Aboulela has been longlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) multiple times and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. She has been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, Aminatta Forna, and Anthony Marra, among others, for her rich and nuanced novels depicting Islamic spiritual and political life.
Her new novel, RIVER SPIRIT, is a compulsive and searching look at the complex relationship between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. A spellbinding and addictive narrative of the years leading up to the brutal British conquest of Sudan in 1898, it colorfully narrates a story of the individuals who fought for and against Gordon of Khartoum—the British general who defended the city against the Sudanese during the 1884 siege of Khartoum—and the self-anointed Mahdi, Sufi religious leader of Sudan. Told mesmerizingly in a chorus of the vivid women and men who fought for and against these two leaders—including an orphaned young enslaved woman, her unlikely suitor and guardian, a military rebel, and two ferocious mothers—this page-turning novel delivers up a complex portrait of the “tragic Victorian hero” who ultimately proved a disappointment to the Sudanese who trusted him, and an obstacle to the thousands of men and women who—against the odds and for a brief time—gained independence from all foreign rule through their will-power, subterfuge, and sacrifice.
A fascinating immersion into Sudanese history written by one of its own, Aboulela’s latest novel examines the trials of war and the dynamism of human courage through the voices of society’s most unexpected heroes.

Leila Aboulela is the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her novels include The Kindness of Enemies, The Translator (longlisted for the Orange Prize), Minaret, and Lyrics Alley, which was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland.

THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR de Nina de Gramont

A beguiling novel of star-crossed lovers, heartbreak, revenge, and murder—and a brilliant re-imagination of one of the most talked-about unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.

THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR
by Nina de Gramont
St. Martin’s Press, February 2022

Every story has its secrets.
Every mystery has its motives.
“A long time ago, in another country, I nearly killed a woman. It’s a particular feeling, the urge to murder. It takes over your body so completely, it’s like a divine force, grabbing hold of your will, your limbs, your psyche. There’s a joy to it. In retrospect, it’s frightening, but I daresay in the moment it feels sweet. The way justice feels sweet.”

The greatest mystery wasn’t Agatha Christie’s disappearance in those eleven infamous days, it’s what she discovered.
London, 1925: In a world of townhomes and tennis matches, socialites and shooting parties, Miss Nan O’Dea became Archie Christie’s mistress, luring him away from his devoted and well-known wife, Agatha Christie. The question is, why? Why destroy another woman’s marriage, why hatch a plot years in the making, and why murder? How was Nan O’Dea so intricately tied to those eleven mysterious days that Agatha Christie went missing?

Nina de Gramont is a professor of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She is the author of The Last September (Algonquin, 2015) as well as several Young Adult novels.