Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

HER HIDDEN GENIUS de Marie Benedict

Discover the story of a woman who fought through a male-dominated field to unlock the secrets of DNA. The next big book by the New York Times bestselling author of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie and The Only Woman in the Room.

HER HIDDEN GENIUS
by Marie Benedict
Sourcebooks, January 2022

Rosalind Franklin knows if she just takes one more x-ray picture—one more after thousands—she can unlock the building blocks of life. Never again will she have to listen to her male colleagues complain about her, especially Maurice Wilkins who’d rather conspire about genetics with James Watson and Francis Crick than work alongside her. Then it finally happens—the double helix structure of DNA reveals itself to her with perfect clarity. Photograph 51. But Rosalind never could have predicted how far her colleagues would go to erase her names from the history books. Marie Benedict’s next powerful novel shines a light on a woman who died to discover our very DNA, a woman whose contributions to science were suppressed by the men around her but whose relentless drive advanced our understanding of humankind.

Marie Benedict is a lawyer with more than ten years’ experience as a litigator at two of the country’s premier law firms and for Fortune 500 companies. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Boston College with a focus in history and art history and a cum laude graduate of the Boston University School of Law. Marie, the author of The Other Einstein, Carnegie’s Maid, The Only Woman in the Room, and Lady Clementine, views herself as an archaeologist of sorts, telling the untold stories of women. She lives in Pittsburgh with her family.

HOUSE OF TWELVE FINGERS de Lauren Francis-Sharma

From the acclaimed author of Book of the Little Axe, HOUSE OF TWELVE FINGERS is the harrowing story of a young Black girl’s genius and resilience in the face of a world that would render her invisible.

HOUSE OF TWELVE FINGERS
by Lauren Francis-Sharma
Atlantic Monthly Press, May 2023

Lauren Francis-Sharma’s debut novel ‘Til the Well Runs Dry was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and her second novel, Book of the Little Axe was praised as a “masterly epic” (Publishers Weekly) that spanned generations and continents. Now, she returns with HOUSE OF TWELVE FINGERS, a moving, richly imagined story of one family’s Great Migration and the foundations of Black Baltimore.
In 1904, the day the Great Baltimore Fire decimated the burgeoning city, William and Phyllis Battle welcome the arrival of their first child outside a whites-only hospital. The couple are recent arrivals in Baltimore, struggling to build for themselves the life they dreamed about down South. Phyllis, born with six fingers on each hand, has always been regarded with some suspicion by her community, but whether this suspicion is warranted or she’s simply misunderstood remains to be seen. Meanwhile, her daughter Margaret is coming of age, and demonstrates a keen intellect and photographic memory from a young age, but has never spoken a word. After William is injured in an industrial accident, Phyllis makes ends meet by teaching Margaret to use her extraordinary memory to count cards. However, the girl catches the eye of some unscrupulous characters who populate the gaming halls and dark alleyways of the city. And one day Margaret does not come home.
Set in the spring and Red Summer of 1919, a year whose racial terror incidents are now infamous, HOUSE OF TWELVE FINGERS is an evocative, suspenseful, and tenderly wrought story of an unforgettable family’s bitter fight to carve out a life on their own terms.

Lauren Francis-Sharma is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel ‘Til The Well Runs Dry, which was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. She resides near Washington, DC with her husband and two children. She is the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

DIE INSEL DER WÜNSCHE: STÜRME DES LEBENS de Anna Jessen

This island is her destiny. A moving tale of a woman’s fate in a picturesque setting.

DIE INSEL DER WÜNSCHE: STÜRME DES LEBENS
(The Island of Dreams: The Storms of Life)
by Anna Jessen
Goldmann/PRH Germany, March 2021

Hamburg, 1887. The young flower girl Tine Tiedkens is destitute. To escape her misery, she decides to try her luck on the island of Heligoland. But the crossing to the fashionable island turns into a nightmare, and when she arrives everything seems set against her. But then she unexpectedly runs into the young hotelier Henry Heesters, who once bought flowers from her in Hamburg, and lands a position in his elegant hotel. With diligence and enthusiasm, Tine works her way up from waitress to housekeeper – and falls in love with Henry. He, too, loves her – but just as happiness seems to be within reach, fate intervenes once again…

Anna Jessen has loved the North Sea since she was a child. To her, rocky Heligoland is the ‘Island of Dreams’, fascinating for its unique nature, loveable people and not least its unique history. Aside from travelling, Anna Jessen’s great passions are writing, music and working in the book trade.

LITTLE SOULS de Sandra Dallas

World War I is raging overseas while the home front battles the Spanish Flu. Schools are converted into hospitals, churches and funeral homes are closed, and the dead are left on the streets to be picked up nightly by horse drawn wagons collecting corpses. But are they all truly victims of the flu?

LITTLE SOULS
by Sandra Dallas
St. Martin’s Press, Winter 2022

Sisters Helen and Lutie moved to Denver from Iowa after their parents died. Helen, the oldest and a nurse, and Lutie, a carefree advertising designer, share a small, neat house and make a modest income from a rental apartment in the basement. But when their tenant dies from the flu, Helen and Lutie are thrust into much more than a sad family drama. There is no safe place for a wayward child in the midst of the epidemic, so the sisters are forced to take in the woman’s small daughter. Dorothy is a shy girl who tries to hide the bruises on her body and who shuts down at any mention of her absent father. They shower her with kindness and love and the three soon feel like a new family, albeit a temporary one. But then everything shatters. Lutie comes home from work and discovers a dead man on their kitchen floor and Helen standing above the body with an icepick in hand. Lutie has no doubt Helen killed the man—Dorothy’s father—defending herself or the little girl, but she knows that will be hard to prove. So when Helen’s doctor boyfriend arrives, a pact is made to protect the nurse at all costs. And this will not be the only secret they have to keep as the war and the flu knock relentlessly on their door.
Set against the backdrop of an epidemic that feels so familiar now, LITTLE SOULS is a powerful tale of sisterhood and of the sacrifices people make to protect those they love most.

Sandra Dallas is New York Times best-selling author of sixteen adult novels, four children’s novels, and two non-fiction books. Sandra’s novels with their themes of loyalty, friendship, and human dignity have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and have been optioned for films.

THE TORQUED MAN de Peter Mann

Set in Nazi Berlin, THE TORQUED MAN focuses on a German spy handler tortured by pangs of conscience and by his own sexuality, and on the charismatic IRA fighter he springs from prison in Franco’s Spain to enlist as an anti-British saboteur.

THE TORQUED MAN
by Peter Mann
HarperCollins, Winter 2022
(chez Writers House – voir catalogue)

Berlin—September, 1945. Two manuscripts are found in the rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war in this slow-burn historical thriller with a dark comic edge with echoes of Thomas Mann and Flann O’Brien. One manuscript is the journal of German spy handler Adrian de Groot, written from a cellar during the Berlin air raids of 1943, following the death of his agent, friend, and former lover Frank Pike. In de Groot’s narrative, Pike is a charismatic Irish socialist and IRA fighter recruited by German intelligence to assist with the planned Irish-German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil and spends his final years languishing in Berlin. While the journal chronicles de Groot’s complicated relationship with Pike and his attempts to keep him in his thrall, it also reveals de Groot’s own psychological struggle—as a bookish homosexual, erstwhile literary translator, and anti-Nazi conservative— to accommodate himself to the murderous regime he works for.
Meanwhile, the other MS—Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia: Concerning his Murderous Exploits in Berlin—gives a very different account of the Irishman’s doings in the Reich. Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool, Pike appears here as a double agent gone rogue. His mission: an assassination campaign of highranking Nazi doctors, culminating in the killing of Dr. Theodor Morell, the personal physician of Adolf Hitler. The two manuscripts spiral around each other, leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and de Groot’s relationship, their ultimate loyalties, and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are caught.
THE TORQUED MAN is inspired by the historical figure Frank Ryan, a left-wing Irish Republican who was recruited in 1940 by German foreign intelligence, sprung from prison in Spain, and who spent the remainder of the war stewing in Berlin until his death in 1944. The book draws on British intelligence files from the UK’s National Archives, based on the interrogation of Frank Ryan’s German handler, as well as biographies of Ryan published in Ireland. It also pulls from World War II-era diaries, Celtic myth and epic, recent scholarship on Nazi doctors, drugs, espionage, anti-Nazi resistance, everyday life in the Third Reich, the T4 Euthanasia program, Francoist Spain, and the wartime politics of Ireland in order to give readers a unique window onto the Second World War— all in a story that reads like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus swallowed Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and George McDonald Fraser’s The Flashman series and washed it down with a spy novel.

Peter Mann has a PhD in Modern European history and is a past recipient of the Whiting Fellowship. He teaches history and literature at Stanford and the University of San Francisco. He is also a graphic artist and since 2014 has published a weekly online syndicated comic strip with Andrews McMeel Universal called The Quixote Syndrome.