Showing titles in Historical

Three lives. One man. Christopher Marlowe was the first rock star poet, a spy, an atheist, a gay rebel whose controversial plays thrilled audiences and challenged the government. Christopher Wild is Kathe Koja’s new novel, a daring remix of eras - the glitter and threat of Elizabethan England, a grimy mid-20th century, and a dark near-future of constant surveillance - as Marlowe loves and fights and writes his way through every dangerous age.

It is 1914 and The Great War is underway. When the call to arms comes, Nicholas Southwell won't be found hanging back. It's a pity he can't be so decisive when it comes to letting his estate manager Paul Haskell know what he feels before he has to leave for the front line. In the trenches Nicholas meets a fellow officer, Phillip Taylor, who takes him into the unclaimed territory of physical love. Which one will he choose, if he's allowed the choice?

A poignant, highly original novel about an author whose relationship with his very famous book editor will change him forever.... After years of struggling as a writer in 1990s New York City, James Smale finally gets his big break when his novel sells to an editor at a major publishing house: none other than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie, or Mrs. Onassis as she's known in the office, loves James' candidly autobiographical novel about his own dysfunctional family.

At the beginning of Virginia Woolf's fantastical and satirical 1928 novel, Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan, England. At the age of 30, Orlando awakens to have found he's now a woman. Moving through the following centuries, the novel stretches over 300 years, during which time Orlando meets several key figures of English literary history.

Against a backdrop of unrest and unforeseen political change, a trio of bygone friends converge in San Francisco. Jonathan is haunted by his past and can’t move forward. Kit, his former student, is disillusioned and in a slump. Milo inhabits the center—the axis of the triangle. Beneath his clownlike behavior and dazzling grin, Milo’s tender heart and wisdom transforms those he loves.

Joseph Asten, a handsome, 23-year-old farmer living in the Allegheny River Valley shortly after the Civil War, secretly longed for intimacy and love with other men. He devised a misguided plan to marry a woman who knew of his "dual nature," then his life took some unexpected, fateful turns.

In 1938, while tensions in Europe are reaching a boiling point, four young women with big ambitions enter secretarial school in San Francisco. Motivated to attain the financial stability that eluded their parents, they go to battle for their futures. Moira, of Scottish descent, dreams of being an actress. Ann yearns for the education her Jewish immigrant parents provided for her brother, but not for her. Japanese American Wanda experiences firsthand the racial injustices running rampant in the United States.

The Spectacular has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the publisher.

After a ferocious early-springtime storm, young Norwegian sailor Hans Lyngstrand is shipwrecked in the English Channel near the coastal Kent town of Dengate - he is one of few survivors. Soon after, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges takes a job as a reporter at the local newspaper. A loner by nature, he’s a curiosity to the nosy townspeople, the gregarious editor of the paper, and his melodramatic landlady, whose own private life is fraught by the unexplained absence of her son and suspicious disappearance of her husband.

Polly Manaia is living in Sydney's notorious Kings Cross, working as an exotic dancer. She's desperate to bring her young daughter to live with her, but beneath her brash confidence lie dark secrets which threaten to drag her under. Gina is excited to live with her mum again. She's mature for an eleven-year-old, but can this young girl cope with Polly's demons? Rhoda and Star, transgender performers and Polly's flatmates, bring stability to Polly and Gina's lives. Yet this unlikely little family will find themselves threatened in more ways than one.

Told from three different perspectives, this sweeping saga begins in 1935 Portugal, in the grip of Salazar’s authoritarian regime, where upper-class Jenny enters into an uncommon marriage with the beguiling António. Keeping up appearances, they host salons for the political and cultural elite. In private, Jenny, António, and his lover, Pedro, share a guarded triangle, build a profound relationship, and together raise a daughter born under the auspices of rebellion.

Olivia Hampton's lifelong love of dark literature led her to accept a job as a cataloger for Julian Dunraven's extensive but extremely disorderly library. The only problem is that the position requires her to work at Dunraven Castle, the remote and mysterious home of the Dunraven family. In Victorian America, a young lady had to either earn her keep or be married off to the best man for her hand. Olivia accepted the position at Dunraven Castle.

Clubbed Two is historical fiction, set in Philadelphia from 1982 to 1992. Club Sanctuary can be seen as a metaphor for the greater LGBTQ community, but it is written as a real place, with characters who are fabulous, funny, and flawed. The author combines historical characters and events with fictional ones, creating a story that's entertaining, informative, and emotional. The love story between the two main characters, Joey and Henry, serves as a vehicle for connecting the stories of diverse Queer characters.

Soho 1925. Two young men meet - for one of them this is love at first sight, for the other only lust and guilt.... Paul Harris returns to England from self-imposed exile in Tangiers for an exhibition of his paintings. He leaves behind Patrick, the man he has loved since they met in the trenches in 1918, needing to discover if he has the strength to live without him and wanting to explore the kind of life he might have lived had it not been for the war. In Bohemian Soho, Paul meets Edmund....

From the moment she stepped foot in the ominous and towering Gerard House, Constance Beechum sensed an evil chill that was far more deadly than the frigid blasts which had buffeted her on the way to Castine, Maine. She couldn't turn back. She had left nothing behind, not even a life-line. Her uncle had found her a job caring for the old and dying Lady Elizabeth Gerard. Although she hadn't an ounce of experience in nursing or caring for the ill, Constance had no choice but to accept the offer. She was penniless.

It is 1597 and Kit Skevy and Mariner Elgin have just robbed the wrong grave. They are young criminals in the pocket of a gang Lord named Will Twentyman, the Grave Eorl of Southwark. Mariner is the best cutpurse around, a strange Calvinist girl who dresses like a boy and is partner in crime to Kit Skevy, Southwark's best brawler who carries a secret: he cannot feel pain. When caught out in their unfortunate larceny, Kit is kidnapped by the menacing alchemist Lord Isherwood.

Set during one of America’s most tumultuous periods, A Summer of Fever and Freedom is a historical fiction novel about coming out, coming of age, and coming together, and an ode to the revolutions we all experience. At eighteen years old, Jane is teetering on the cusp of womanhood, a rite of passage complicated and painful for even the most stable of hearts. For Jane, who is anxiously awaiting her brother’s return from the war in Vietnam, the heavy journey is cracking her already fragile foundation. When she attends a party in Greenwich Village and meets twenty-three-year-old gay ...

The shocking murder of King Zachary Chamberlain sends his entire family and kingdom into turmoil as the hunt for his killer begins. As Zachary’s eldest son Prince Tobias prepares to be crowned as the new king, suspicions arise between him and his three younger brothers. In the meantime, the once-ruling Henderson family seizes on the chaos in the kingdom in an effort to overthrow the Chamberlains and retake control.

It's been a long time since Jane Havens, Mistress of Havenswood, felt the joy and promise of by-gone days when her family home, Havenswood, was a thriving and powerful farming estate. Together with her elder brother Cole, who drowns his sorrow in alcohol, Jane does what she can to lead the fading estate through the hard times that fell upon the family after their father, a Union Army Colonel, died shortly after the Civil War. Jane and Cole try to raise their little brother, Henry, a wild young boy with no direction, no manners and no one to marshal his considerable natural abilities into a productive, young gentleman.

Morehead is an explicitly adult novel about Dave Morehead, a young man living in San Francisco during the height of the sexual revolution, in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. It was a time of sexual, evolutionary, and political change, with both glorious and nearly catastrophic consequences. San Francisco was teeming with diversity, and an evolving political base that forever changed the landscape of what had always been a progressive city. Morehead tells the tale of a straight young man living in a gay old city.