Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

CARTIER de Sophie Villard

Love, intrigue and the most desirable jewellery in the world – the first instalment in a two-book series about the Cartier family’s glamorous life.

CARTIER: Der Traum von Diamanten
(Diamond Dreams)
The Cartier Saga, Book 1
by Sophie Villard
Penguin Germany, November 2024

Paris, 1910. Now that her engagement to an aristocrat has been called off, Jeanne Toussaint tries to make ends meet as a seamstress in unsavoury Montmartre. One night, she meets jeweller Louis Cartier in a nightclub. He and his brothers have shops in Paris, London and New York where anyone who’s anyone buys their jewellery. Louis immediately recognises that Jeanne has a sure sense of style and is immensely talented. But it’s more than that: he can’t deny his attraction to this charming, vivacious young woman. But storm clouds are gathering on Europe’s horizon, and the Cartier family are in danger of losing everything.

Sophie Villard is the pen name of a successful German author. She studied journalism and political science, and lives near Dresden with her family. Her novel about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim was a Spiegel bestseller. After Madame Exupéry und die Sterne des Himmels (‘Madame Exupéry and the Starry Skies’) and Mademoiselle Eiffel und der Turm der Liebe (‘Mademoiselle Eiffel and the Tower of Love’), she has now turned to writing an exciting saga about the Cartiers.

MY NAME IS EMILIA DEL VALLE d’Isabel Allende

In this spellbinding novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and The Wind Knows My Name, a young journalist comes of age in the late 1800’s and attempts to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.

MY NAME IS EMILIA DEL VALLE
by Isabel Allende
Ballantine, May 2025
(via Writers House)

In San Francisco 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.

To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of sixteen, she begins to publish pulp fiction under a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can’t contain her sense of adventure any longer, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at The Daily Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.

As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, along with Eric, and while there, she meets her estranged father and delves into the violent confrontation in the country where her roots lie. As she and Eric discover love, the war escalates and Emilia finds herself in extreme danger, fearing for her life and questioning her identity and her destiny.

A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, MY NAME IS EMILIA DEL VALLE introduces a character you will never forget.

Isabel Allende, born in Peru and raised in Chile, is a novelist, feminist, and philanthropist. She is one of the most widely read authors in the world, having sold more than eighty million copies of her twenty-eight books across forty-two languages. She is the author of several bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The Wind Knows My Name, Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and Paula. In addition to her work as a writer, Isabel devotes much of her time to human rights causes. She has received fifteen honorary doctorates, been inducted into the California Hall of Fame, and received the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded her 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.

SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME de Bora Lee Reed

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko meets Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing in this powerful story of family separation and reunion, as well as love and war from a Reese’s Bookclub LitUp Fellow.

SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME
by Bora Lee Reed
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster, July 2026
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

North Korea, 1950: Oksoon believes that the war is finally over in Pyeongyang. The Americans are here to stay, she’s told, but her father and eldest brother have gone south and she anxiously waits for their return. When the Chinese army unexpectedly attacks, Oksoon must flee with her mother and second brother in search of safety and to reunite their family. Journeying from freezing winter in the rural north to the seedy back alleys of Seoul during the summer, Oksoon and her family fall in with an unlikely group of miscreants – a prostitute, a baduk gambler, an opportunistic ferryman – and question how far they’ll go, and what moral boundaries they’ll cross, to find their missing relatives.

Meanwhile, far to the south near Jinju, Oksoon’s close cousin Junho flees the war to find refuge at the Lord’s Beloved Home for Children. As the orphanage struggles to keep its doors open, Junho is put in charge of drafting letters to rich American benefactors, convincing them to send money to Korea. But when the enigmatic orphanage director brings her aristocratic niece to stay at the Home – a beautiful young woman harboring a secret – Junho finds himself caught between his impulse for survival and his growing affections, which put him at risk of being expelled from the only safe place he knows.

As Oksoon and Junho make their way towards each other and eventually unite, they fight to save themselves and hold their family together, even as the war threatens to tear everything apart. Told in alternating points of view, SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME highlights the tension between personal dreams and duty to family, the power of resilience, and how choices made in a brief moment have consequences that reverberate for lifetimes. Combining the intergenerational scope of Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s The Mountains Sing with the coming-of-age focus found in Asha Lemmie’s Fifty Words for Rain, SONG FOR ANOTHER HOME tells a powerful story about what it means to build a life for yourself and your family against all odds.

Bora Lee Reed was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the U.S. as a young child. She grew up in Southern California, among a vibrant Korean immigrant community. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has been awarded residences from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, and UCross. Bora, a Reese’s Book Club LitUp Fellow, now lives in Berkeley, CA, where she works as the director of communications for UC Berkeley’s public policy school.

ANIMA RISING de Christopher Moore

From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore comes a deranged tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter, two psychiatrists and an undead woman’s empowering journey of self-discovery.

ANIMA RISING
by Christopher Moore
William Morrow, May 2025
(via DeFiore and Company)

1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in Vienna, finds a young woman floating in the Danube canal, who has no idea of who she is or where she came from. He names her Judith, after the Hebrew heroine who beheaded an Assyrian general and thus saved her people. Back at his studio, Klimt and his model-turned-muse, Wally, tend to the girl, but she is almost feral, blurts out nonsense in a variety of languages, and generally scandalizes Viennese café society.

With help from famous psychiatrists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Judith recalls being stranded in the arctic one hundred years ago, locked in a crate by a man named Victor Frankenstein, being kidnapped by an enormous patchwork monster, before he murders her for trying to escape him and then finds herself with the gods of the Inuit Underworld. She is of course, the bride of Frankenstein.

But how did she turn up in Vienna more than a century later? And why are so many people keen to find her, including Geoff, the giant croissant-eating dog who also shares her superhuman strength, endurance and immortality?

Welcome to Anima Rising, Christopher Moore’s most ingenious and most hilarious novel yet.

With a body of work that boasts some of the most outlandish plots and outrageous characters ever to make it onto the printed page, Christopher Moore has made a name for himself as the clown prince of contemporary fiction. He is the author of The Serpent of Venice, Second Hand Souls, and other novels. He lives in San Francisco.

THE WHARTON PLOT de Mariah Fredericks

Mariah Fredericks’ mesmerizing novel follows renowned novelist Edith Wharton in the twilight years of the Gilded Age in New York as she tracks a killer.

THE WHARTON PLOT
by Mariah Fredericks
Minotaur Books, January 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

New York City, 1911. Edith Wharton, almost equally famed for her novels and her sharp tongue, is bone-tired of Manhattan. Finding herself at a crossroads with both her marriage and her writing, she makes the decision to leave America, her publisher, and her loveless marriage.

And then, dashing novelist David Graham Phillips―a writer with often notorious ideas about society and women’s place in it―is shot to death outside the Princeton Club. Edith herself met the man only once, when the two formed a mutual distaste over tea in the Palm Court of the Belmont hotel. When Phillips is killed, Edith’s life takes another turn. His sister is convinced Graham was killed by someone determined to stop the publication of his next book, which promised to uncover secrets that powerful people would rather stayed hidden. Though unconvinced, Edith is curious. What kind of book could push someone to kill?

Inspired by a true story, THE WHARTON PLOT follows Edith Wharton through the fading years of the Gilded Age in a city she once loved so well, telling a taut tale of fame, love, and murder, as she becomes obsessed with solving a crime.

“Superb . . . Thanks to a literary plot laced with arch wit and precise put-downs, appearances by Wharton’s famous friends (including Henry James and the Vanderbilts), and an eclectic assortment of the upper crust in the waning days of a varnished era, Fredericks hits this one out of the park.”―Library Journal (Starred Review)

“THE WHARTON PLOT a vivid, fascinating, entertaining mystery. Readers looking for a bit of history with their suspense will be gripped.”―Publishers Weekly

« Fredericks’ elegantly written narrative gives a lively look at an author way ahead of her time. »―Kirkus Reviews

« Written with grace and wit, THE WHARTON PLOT is a pleasure to read. »―Wall Street Journal

« Based on the real murder of Phillips, Fredericks’ latest will especially appeal to bibliophiles, who will enjoy reading tidbits about the real-life authors who appear. »―Booklist

Mariah Fredericks was born, raised, and still lives in New York City. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in history. She is the author of the Jane Prescott mystery series, which has twice been nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, as well as several YA novels.