Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

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.

DAS HAUS KÖLLN d’Elke Becker

The women of the famous oatmeal dynasty have been fighting for more than half a century – for their lives, and for happiness.

DAS HAUS KÖLLN
(The Family Kölln Trilogy)
by Elke Becker
Heyne, 2024

Book 1: GLÄNZENDE ZEITEN (Golden Age, January 2024)

North Germany, 1886: The life of Charlotte Kölln’s husband is tragically cut short by an accident at work. There is no time for Charlotte to grieve, though, because the gristmill has to keep grinding, otherwise her family will face ruin. As a woman, Charlotte can neither get credit nor officially run the business, but she doesn’t let that stop her. When her eldest son announces that he plans to marry one of the workers, Bertha, Charlotte isn’t pleased. She is worried about her family’s status, which she wants to preserve at all costs. The two headstrong women must find a way to get along – and in the process realise that they can do anything, so long as they stick together.

Book 2: GROSSE HOFFNUNG (A New Hope, April 2024)

The sequel to the exciting family saga about the legendary oatmeal dynasty.

Northern Germany, 1912. Bertha Kölln’s new breakfast oatmeal is a huge success, and her family is working tirelessly to increase production. But then the Great War arrives in the sleepy little town near Hamburg, and the Kölln family, too, is affected. But they refuse to be broken, either by the war or by several accidents that have occurred in the mill. When Bertha’s son Peter marries the young bohemian Else Voormann, the couple don’t have it easy: Peter doesn’t understand confident, decisive Else – and Else for her part doesn’t trust her husband, who is spending far too much time with a pretty seamstress. Once again, two very different women must decide: will they fight each other, or stick together?

Elke Becker yearned for the sea and adventure, and travelled all over the world before settling down on Mallorca in 2005. The idea to write about the real-life Kölln family came to her over breakfast one day, as she was eating a bowl of the famous Kölln oatmeal; so she set off on a research trip to northern Germany, a beautiful place which has always been dear to her heart.

PAULA ODER DIE SIEBEN FARBEN DER EINSAMKEIT de Stephan Abarbanell

Paula Ben-Gurion wanted to marry a man, but what she got was a state: a novel about an unusual and courageous woman.

PAULA ODER DIE SIEBEN FARBEN DER EINSAMKEIT
(Paula, or: The Seven Shades of Loneliness)
by Stephan Abarbanell
Blessing, March 2024

Paula grew up in Minsk, was sent to New York when she was young, dreamt of studying medicine and was a committed anarchist. But then she met her future husband, the founder of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion – and at the end of her life, she finds herself in a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. Her husband is expecting the arrival of his friend, Konrad Adenauer, who has just resigned as German Chancellor. Once again, it is down to Paula to organise the visit and arrange everything. Poverty, war, motherhood, and – again and again – loneliness: this novel is a memorial to a strong, courageous woman, who had to make many compromises in life, and became the First Lady of a country in which she did not believe. And who, even in old age, never stops doubting, searching and hoping.

Stephan Abarbanell was born in Brunswick in 1957 and grew up in Hamburg. He studied theology and general rhetoric in Hamburg, Tübingen and Berkeley. Abarbanell is now in charge of cultural affairs at rbb Broadcasting.

THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA de Juliet Grames

One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy.

THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA
by Juliet Grames
Knopf, July 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.

Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When an old woman begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.

Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.

Juliet Grames is the best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Real Simple, Parade, and The Boston Globe, and she is the recipient of an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She is editorial director at Soho Press in New York.