Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

THE ROYAL STATION MASTER’S DAUGHTERS d’Ellee Seymour

A heartwarming and dramatic World War I saga of secrets, love and the British royal family for readers of Daisy Styles and Maisie Thomas. Based on the Saward family, who ran the train station at Wolferton, the local stop for the Royal Sandringham Estate.

THE ROYAL STATION MASTER’S DAUGHTERS (Book 1)
by Ellee Seymour
Zaffre, April 2022
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Roll out the red carpet. The royal train is due in half an hour and there’s not a minute to be wasted.
It’s 1915 and the country is at war. In the small Norfolk village of Wolferton, uncertainty plagues the daily lives of sisters Ada, Jessie and Beatrice Saward, as their men are dispatched to the frontlines of Gallipoli.
Harry, their father, is the station master at the local stop for the royal Sandringham Estate. With members of the royal family and their aristocratic guests passing through the station on their way to the palace, the Sawards’ unique position gives them unrivalled access to the monarchy.
But when the Sawards’ estranged and impoverished cousin Maria shows up out of the blue, everything the sisters thought they knew about their family is thrown into doubt.
THE ROYAL STATION MASTER’S DAUGHTERS is the first book in a brand-new World War I saga series, inspired by the Saward family, who ran the station at Wolferton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through this history-making family we get a glimpse into all walks of life – from glittering royalty to the humblest of servants.

Don’t miss the second book in the series, The Royal Station Master’s Daughters at War, published in March 2023.

Ellee Seymour is an author, ghost writer and PR consultant. The Shop Girls is her first book as an author. It was a joy for her to research and write this heart-warming true story about a glamorous bygone era, based on an elegant ladies’ department store in Cambridge with its very own Mr Selfridge-styled character as the boss who the shop girls either loved or loathed. Heyworth’s closed 49 years ago and had all but faded from living memory when Ellee began researching the book. Ellee lives near Cambridge.

THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES de Janet Skeslien Charles

From the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Paris Library comes THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES, a powerful historical novel that charts the lives of two NYPL librarians across the barrier of decades.

THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES
by Janet Skeslien Charles
Atria Books, April 2024
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

1918. World War I. Northern France is a battlefield. The American Committee for Devastated France establish their headquarters just miles from the front. This group of international women help French families who’ve lost everything – homes, livelihoods, and limbs. They save children, restore bombed villages, and evacuate civilians.
Jessie « Kit » Carson takes a leave of absence from the NYPL in order to establish something that the French have never seen – children’s libraries – as well as to escape her boss. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles, creates libraries, and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears.
1987. Wendy Peterson stumbles across a mention of Jessie Carson in the NYPL archives and becomes consumed with learning her fate. Fixation is nothing new to Wendy. She’s obsessed with Roberto, her handsome coworker. She worries about her best friend, Leigh, who grows more and more distant. Wendy soon learns that she and Jessie Carson have more in common than their work at the New York Public Library.
With a dazzling cast of real-life characters, THE LIBRARIAN OF LOST STORIES highlights themes of resilience, friendship, and community. Once again, Janet Skeslien Charles brings history alive with this meticulously researched, little-known story of incredible women who face the danger of war to share their love of literature and their belief in books as bridges.

Janet Skeslien Charles’s work has been translated into 35 languages. Her novel about real-life librarians during World War II, The Paris Library, was a New York Times bestseller, #1 Indie Next Pick, and book club favorite. Janet has spoken at over 200 literary events and has been a keynote speaker for venues such as the Association of American Women in Europe commemoration and the Salem Literary Festival. Her debut novel Moonlight in Odessa was translated into 12 languages. She spends her free time at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris.

RED SMOKING MIRROR de Nick Hunt

A bravura re-imagining of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, from a prize-winning writer.

RED SMOKING MIRROR
by Nick Hunt
Swift Press, July 2023
(via Randle Editorial and Literary)

The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.
For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma’s breathtaking capital, assisted by his Nahua wife Malinala. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea…
A bravura reimagining of an alternate history, RED SMOKING MIRROR is a richly written novel of love and fate, of how cultures co-operate and clash, and of how individuals can shape and are shaped by the times they live through.

Nick Hunt has walked and written across much of Europe. He has written a loose trilogy of books about walking in Europe, the first two of which were shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. His articles have appeared in The Economist, the Guardian and elsewhere, and he works as an editor for the Dark Mountain Project. RED SMOKING MIRROR is his first novel.

LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES d’Andrew Krivak

A novel of one family, a century of war, and the promise of homecoming from Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak.

LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES
by Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Press, May 2023
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Rooted in the small, mountain town of Dardan, Pennsylvania, where patriarch Jozef Vinich settled after surviving World War I, LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES immerses us in the intimate lives of a family whose fierce bonds have been shaped by the great conflicts of the past century.
After Bexhet Konar escapes fascist Hungary and crosses the ocean to find Jozef, the man who saved his life in 1919, he falls in love with Jozef’s daughter, Hannah, enlists in World War II, and is drawn into a personal war of revenge. Many years later, their youngest son, Samuel, is taken prisoner in Vietnam and returns home with a heroin addiction and deep physical and psychological wounds. As Samuel travels his own path toward healing, his son will graduate from Annapolis as a Marine on his way to Iraq.
In spare, breathtaking prose, LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES  is the freestanding, culminating novel in Andrew Krivak’s award-winning Dardan Trilogy, which began with The Sojourn and The Signal Flame. It is a story about borders drawn within families as well as around nations, and redrawn by ethnicity, prejudice, and war. It is also a tender story of love and how it is tested by duty, loyalty, and honor.

“Subtle and nuanced.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Krivak’s resplendent multigenerational family saga expertly braids the horrors of war with the struggles of those waiting for loved ones to return home.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Krivak impresses with this layered story of deferred homecomings and the elusive nature of peace.” —Publishers Weekly

Andrew Krivak is the author of The Bear, a Mountain Book Competition winner and NEA Big Read selection, and the novels of the Dardan Trilogy: The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and The Signal Flame, a Chautauqua Prize finalist. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

THE NATURALIST OF AMSTERDAM de Melissa Ashley

Set in 1700s Amsterdam, this historical novel explores the life of entomologist and artist Maria Sibylla Merian’s daughter Dorothea Graff.

THE NATURALIST OF AMSTERDAM
by Melissa Ashley
Affirm Press (Australia), September 2023
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Credit: David Merrylees

Set in 1700s Amsterdam, The Naturalist of Amsterdam follows the life of Dorothea Graff, daughter of the famed artist and naturalist, Maria Sybilla Merian. From her early years within the confines of the Labadist community of Walter Schloss to her mother’s artist studio in Amsterdam and the wilds of South America, Dorothea’s story charts an amazingly rich and colourful period of discovery and explores the challenge of being the offspring of one of the most famous female artists in history. For as long as she can remember, Dorothea Graff has served her scientist-artist mother, Maria Sibylla Merian, in the family atelier with her older sister Hanna.
At just twenty years old, Dorothea decides to join her mother on a once in a lifetime expedition to the Dutch Colony of Suriname to observe and paint its insect and plant life. A commercial artist, businesswoman and printmaker, Maria has previously published illustrated volumes of her studies of European butterflies and plants, but entranced by displays of Suriname insects in the collections of Amsterdam’s rich burgher merchant-traders, Maria decides to travel to their source, where she will conduct studies in their habitat to feature them in a magnificent, hand-coloured publication.
All Maria and Dorothea’s savings have been ploughed into the expedition, which is fraught with danger and peril, but fame and greatness are never achieved without enormous sacrifice and suffering – The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname will one day make Maria world-famous.
THE NATURALIST OF AMSTERDAM asks the question: who are we really outside of our work, and given another chance at happiness, should we take it?

Melissa Ashley is a writer, poet, birder and academic who tutors in poetry and creative writing at the University of Queensland in Australia. Her first novel, The Birdman’s Wife, has been printed in three formats and sold more than 35,000 copies in Australia, and her follow-up novel The Bee and the Orange Tree was also a bestseller. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.