Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

GIRL ON WARD A de Christie Newport

Gripping historical thriller – perfect for all fans of Kate Morton and Hannah Kent.

GIRL ON WARD A
by Christie Newport
Storm Publishing, June 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

In 1995, journalist Olive Brown receives a threatening letter hinting at her connection to a dark past in an asylum in 1952. With a controlling and abusive husband and two young daughters to protect, Olive decides to investigate the matter herself to avoid jeopardizing her career.

Meanwhile, in 1952, Martha Littler is a pregnant teenager hiding her condition from her abusive parents. After giving birth, Martha’s baby is taken away by her parents, and she is admitted to Wynwarden Asylum, where she befriends fellow patient Lizzie. They discover the horrifying truth about the abusive treatments and atrocities happening within the asylum. As bodies begin to appear, Martha tries to seek the truth – whilst being torn between saving her sister and finding her baby.

The lives of Olive and Martha are linked in ways they could never imagine. As they begin to uncover the hidden pasts of those closest to them, there are deadly consequences.

Christie Newport is a mixed-heritage writer living in Northumberland. Since developing a rare illness as a child, Christie found reading and creating stories to be an escape. In recent years Christie has taken her writing seriously, honing her skills through courses and various brilliant opportunities. Writing crime and psychological thrillers set in her home city is her passion.

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE d’Isabel Allende

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE is a classic tale of love and war, of discovery and redemption, told by a valiant young woman who confronts monumental challenges, survives and reinvents herself.

I AM EMILIA DEL VALLE
by Isabel Allende
TBD
(via Writers House)

San Francisco, 1866. Emilia del Valle Walsh is born. Her mother, Molly Walsh, is an Irish nun who was seduced by a Chilean aristocrat. Pregnant and abandoned, Molly marries her friend, teacher Francisco Claro. Emilia grows up in the heart of a humble Mexican neighborhood, guided by the support of her stepfather, becoming a bright and independent young woman who challenges social norms to pursue her passion for writing.

At just sixteen, Emilia begins her career writing adventure novels under the pseudonym Brandon J. Price. After a few years, she secures a position as a columnist at the San Francisco Examiner, where she meets Eric Whelan, a respected journalist who becomes her mentor, despite competing for news coverage. Soon to expand her career, Emilia travels from California to New York City. There she meets Owen, Eric’s brother, who becomes her first lover. Summoned back to San Francisco and heartbroken, Emilia convinces her editor to send her to Chile to cover a civil war in which the United States has economic and political interests. Eric Whelan joins her in Chile as a correspondent.

Santiago, 1891. Emilia finds herself in a nation on the brink of an abyss. While covering the battle between President Balmaceda and the oppositional congress, she seizes the opportunity to explore her relationship with the del Valle family and meet her father, who is ruined and very ill.

Emilia’s reporting places her at the heart of the war, enduring situations of terrible violence on the battlefield, in the

hospital, and in prison, where she is on the verge of death. When she reunites with Eric, love blossoms between them. Meanwhile, her father passes away, leaving her an inheritance of land in the deep south of Chile, surrounded by forests, lakes, and volcanoes. The horrors of war do not reach her there, and soon she discovers that she belongs in that country, in that landscape.

Isabel Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has authored a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books including Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, Eva Luna and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than fifty-two languages and have sold more than seventy-seven million copies worldwide. In addition to her work as a writer, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes. In 1996, following the death of her daughter Paula Frias, she established a charitable foundation in her honor, which has awarded grants to more than one hundred nonprofits worldwide on behalf of women and girls. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018 she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She has also received PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

END OF AUGUST de Paige Dinneny

Aurora Taylor has never had so much to lose.

END OF AUGUST
by Paige Dinneny
Alcove Press, February 2025

It’s almost summer in 1979, and 15-year-old Aurora Taylor is a week shy of finishing her first full year at the same school. She’s desperate to see it through, because every end to her single mother’s chaotic romantic relationships results in a disruptive and sudden move. So many moves that Aurora needs more than two hands to count all the towns she’s lived in and the friendships she never got a chance to make.

So when her mother Laine shows up at school with the car loaded, Aurora thinks her latest fling finally put a nail in this town’s coffin. Instead, it’s her grandpa Jay’s death calling them back to the town Laine’s been running from since Aurora’s conception, when Laine was just fifteen and Aurora’s Gran was the town drunk.

Between her mother and Gran’s explosive relationship, and the whiskey Gran’s returned to to drown her sorrows, Aurora gives their visit to the little blue house in Monroe, Illinois a week, tops. But when Laine begins an intense affair with the married mailman, everything changes. For the first time in her 15 years, Aurora has time to fall in love too—but this time with the town. It’s not unlike most of the small towns in Indiana Aurora has lived in, suffocating summer heat included, but this one has streets and people and places she is given a chance to know and love. It has a girl Aurora can call her best friend. A Gran who loves Aurora even as she fights for control over her own worst nature for the third time in her life. And a picture-perfect pastor’s son who sees Aurora as more than “Laine’s daughter.” It’s everything Aurora never thought she would have to lose. It’s everything she would never let herself dream about.

But each time the illicit lovebirds slip into the back bedroom, Aurora sees her chances at happiness slipping away. Laine won’t just burn a bridge this time, she’ll light the town on fire, burning Gran’s hope, Aurora’s future, and her own chance at redemption to the ground with it.

Paige Dinneny earned her MFA from Cal State Long Beach and writes primarily about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She was born and raised in Southern California, but now resides in Franklin, Tennessee with her sister and two cats. She briefly taught academically, but much prefers interacting with people as a retail store manager.

REMEMBER, REMEMBER d’Elle Machray

Gunpowder, treason and a plot to destroy the British Empire…

REMEMBER, REMEMBER
by Elle Machray
HarperNorth, February 2024
(via Mushens Entertainment)

1770. Delphine lives in the shadows of London: a secret, vibrant world of smugglers, courtesans and small rebellions. Four years ago, she escaped enslavement at great personal cost. Now, she must help her brother Vincent do the same.

While Britain’s highest court fails to administer justice for Vincent, little rebellions are no longer enough. What’s needed is a big, explosive plot – one that will strike at the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. But can one Black woman, one fuse and one match bring down an Empire?

An incendiary alternative history, REMEMBER, REMEMBER is a gripping story of conscience, conspiracy, queer identity and courage in the face of injustice.

Elle Machray (she/they) lives in Edinburgh and studied Politics at the University of Leeds. Elle started writing in lockdown and was selected to join the inaugural cohort of the HarperCollins Author Academy in 2021. In the moments between working and writing, Elle practices karate and explores the beauty of Scotland with their dog, Bruce.

THE MOST de Jessica Anthony

A tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.

THE MOST
by Jessica Anthony
Little, Brown & Co, July 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.

A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, and a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as Bridge Guard, guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.