Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

THE COMPANY DAUGHTERS de Samantha Rajaram

Jana Beil, a servant in 17th-century Amsterdam, alongside her companion Sontja, signs up to be a ‘company daughter’ — a mail-order bride to settlers in the far Dutch colonial East Indies. Based on true history, these two women undertake a dangerous and deadly sea journey to the colony of Batavia — present-day Indonesia — to start a new life there as wives to the men they know nothing about.

THE COMPANY DAUGHTERS
by Samantha Rajaram
Bookouture , Fall 2020

Jana Beil has learned that life rarely provides moments of joy. Indeed, all of Amsterdam in 1616 is less concerned with happiness than with maintaining appearances. But when she begins working as a servant for the wealthy and kind Reynst family, she finds some peace and begins to secretly fall in love with Sontja, the beautiful daughter of the house. However, when Master Reynst loses his fortune through a bad investment with the VOC (the Dutch version of the East India Company), everything changes. Unable to afford her wage, the Reynsts’ let Jana go and she is back on the street again, desperately searching for work. Sontja, too, looks for ways to make enough money to get by, but when her father drinks himself to death, their house is sold to debtors, leaving both girls without a future. With no other choice, Sontja becomes a Company Daughter and sails to the colonial outpost of Batavia to marry a Dutch settler. Unable to envision a life without her, Jana also signs up for the voyage. The two embark on a lengthy, dangerous journey to Batavia, which will end with weddings to miserable old men — not the young, strapping soldiers they were promised. Despite all the hardships, Jana’s life slowly fills with wonder, beauty, and love as she sheds the resignation of her old life to finally reach out for what she truly wants.

Samantha Rajaram is a former attorney and current professor of English in the California Bay Area. She is also a Katha award-winning short story writer, having been published in national magazines such as India Currents and the U.S. Lighthouse Society Journal. This is her debut novel.

DAS GRAND HOTEL de Caren Benedikt

A glamorous sea-side hotel, an influential family, and a well-kept secret … The first volume of an opulent Family Saga.

DAS GRAND HOTEL #1 – DIE NACH DEN STERNEN GREIFEN
[The Grand Hotel – Reaching for the Stars]
by Caren Benedikt
Blanvalet, February 2020

Rügen 1924. There it is on the promenade of Binz, white and magnificent – the impressive Grand Hotel belonging to the von Plesow family. A lot has happened here, and things have not always been easy, but Bernadette is proud of her hotel, the best in town. It was here that she brought up her children: the quiet Alexander, who one day will inherit the Grand Hotel; Josephine, the rebellious artist who is still trying to find her place in life; Constantin, always on the go, who already has his own hotel in Berlin, the Astor. Things could hardly be better. Of course, there is the odd quarrel with her daughter, and something seems to be not quite right with the otherwise cheerful maid Marie – but all this is nothing compared to what the unannounced visit of a man could lead to who threatens Bernadette he will disclose her darkest secret …

Caren Benedikt is the pseudonym of author Petra Mattfeldt. After legal training she freelanced as a journalist and now mainly works as a novelist.

EMIL AND KARL de Yankev Glatshteyn

A unique work that was one of the first books for young readers describing the early days of what came to be known as the Holocaust.

EMIL AND KARL
by Yankev Glatshteyn
Square Fish/Macmillan, March 2008

Originally published before the war in 1938 and the full revelations of the Third Reich’s persecution of Jews and other civilians, the book offers a fascinating look at life during this period and the moral challenges people faced under Nazism. It is also a taut, gripping, page-turner of the first order. Written in the form of a suspense novel, Emil and Karl draws readers into the dilemma faced by two young boys in Vienna—one Jewish, the other not—when they suddenly find themselves without homes or families on the eve of World War II.

Originally written in Yiddish, Emil and Karl is one of the most accomplished works of children’s literature in this language, and the only book for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn, a major American Yiddish poet, novelist, and essayist.

“It’s a clear, powerful novel that will bring today’s readers very close to what it was like to be a child under Nazi occupation. . . The fast-moving prose is stark and immediate. . . The translation, sixty-five years after the novel’s original publication, is nothing short of haunting.” ―Booklist, Starred Review

Born in Lublin, Poland, Yankev Glatshteyn (1896-1971) was one of the major figures in the burgeoning Yiddish literary scene in New York City during the first half of the last century.
Jeffrey Shandler (translator) is an associate professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust and editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, among other books. He lives in New York City.

THE USEFUL IDIOT de John Sweeney

Based on the terrifying and tragic true story of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who first told the world about the famine in the Soviet Union in 1933

THE USEFUL IDIOT
by John Sweeney
Silvertail Books, January 2020

Moscow, 1932. Gareth Jones, a young Welsh reporter, arrives in the Soviet Union excited to see for himself how Josef Stalin is forging a new civilisation. He meets American and British journalists who acclaim Stalin’s great experiment—but when Jones witnesses people starving to death in Ukraine, his belief in the Soviet revolution is shattered. He must decide whether to report the truth or become just another useful idiot, saying only what the Communist secret police allow and smothering the evidence of his own eyes. In this special kind of hell, anyone could be an informer, and Jones knows his life will be at risk if he is even thought to be defying Stalin. And when the woman he loves falls under the suspicion of the secret police, everything Jones values is in danger. Can he reveal the terrible truth about the Ukrainian famine to the world, or will he be silenced forever?

THE USEFUL IDIOT is the secret history of the first great Soviet lie—wrapped up in an electrifying novel perfect for readers of Robert Harris, Ken Follett and Kate Atkinson. As Vladimir Putin rewrites the Nazi-Soviet pact and with the horrors of Chernobyl and the Cold War so recent, this thriller of fake news in 1932 is real storytelling of enormous significance.

John Sweeney is an award-winning journalist and a former long-serving BBC reporter. He is the author of ten books, including three novels: the 200,000-copy bestseller ELEPHANT MOON (Silvertail Books), another historical thriller based on true events, and two modern-day political thrillers, COLD and ROAD (Amazon Publishing). He also wrote an investigation into the Church of Scientology, THE CHURCH OF FEAR (Silvertail Books), and an account of his time spent undercover in North Korea, NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER (Transworld).

Publication will coincide with the release on 14th February of Mr. Jones, a film telling the story of Gareth Jones by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, starring James Norton and Vanessa Kirby. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. You can watch the trailer at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Rz0ye5c-4

CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX de Jordy Rosenberg

A love story set in the eighteenth-century London of notorious thieves and queer subcultures, this genre-bending debut tells a profound story of gender, desire, and liberation

CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX
by Jordy Rosenberg
One World, June 2018

Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found. Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess’s adventures. Dated 1724, the book depicts an London underworld where scamps and rogues clash with London’s newly established police force, queer subcultures thrive, and ominous threats of the Plague abound. Jack—a transgender carpenter’s apprentice—has fled his master’s house to become a legendary prison-break artist, and Bess has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind. CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX is, at once, a work of speculative historical fiction, a soaring love story, a puzzling mystery, an electrifying tale of adventure and suspense, and an unabashed celebration of sex and sexuality. Writing with the narrative mastery of Sarah Waters and the playful imagination of Nabokov, Jordy Rosenberg is an audacious storyteller of extraordinary talent.

Jordy Rosenberg is a transgender writer, scholar, and activist. He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches eighteenth-century literature and queer/trans theory. He has received fellowships and awards from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation/J. Paul Getty Trust, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and the Clarion Foundation’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. CONFESSIONS OF THE FOX is his first novel.