Showing titles in Historical

In 17th century Paris, everyone has something to hide. The noblemen and women and writers consort with fortune tellers in the confines of their homes, servants practice witchcraft and black magic, and the titled poison family members to obtain inheritance.

September 1919: 21-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian’s brother Will during the Great War, but in 1917 Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought shame and dishonour on the Bancroft family. But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan’s visit. He holds a secret deep in his soul. One that he is desperate to unburden himself of to Marian, if he can only find the courage.

Fin Tighe is clinging to respectability by his nail-bitten fingers. He may be the illegitimate son of an English earl, but he hasn’t spoken to his father in a decade, and his engineer’s salary is barely enough to support him and his cousin Aurelie. And Fin’s evenings spent in the clandestine gay community may be legal through a loophole in the Napoleonic Code, but they leave him vulnerable. So, when Fin’s employer, Gustave Eiffel, announces that he needs additional investors to pay for his pet project, a 300-meter tower that will dominate the city’s skyline, Fin jumps at the chance.

Erin Wade's historical lesbian novel is set in West Texas where cattle and oil were king and men were masters of their fate. A woman didn't have a chance of making it in the straight-shooting, fast-riding, hard-drinking world of the Texas cowboy...or did she? A novel about a love so forbidden, it wasn't even whispered. A heroine so unlikely, she wasn't believed.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother.

The year is 1980, and Mount St. Helens hasn't erupted in over one hundred years. Surely, it won't happen now? Volcanologist Nova "Cano" Kane is the first to volunteer when the rumblings start, even if it means she'll have to face her biggest regret. When Cano fled Seattle four years ago, she left behind the woman she's never been able to forget. Geology professor Dr. Allison Albright has spent four years learning to live with Multiple Sclerosis and without Nova. Now her ex has waltzed back into Allison's university and the tension between them is building like that inside the mountain.

England 1881. Being gay is both a sin and a crime. Parents disowning their children is considered honourable. Consensual sex risks life in prison. Sodomy scandals ruin careers and reputations. Homosexuals have to choose between safety and happiness. After an unspeakable incident gets him exiled from his idyllic Irish hometown, twenty-four-year-old Jack Branson rebuilds his life in fog-and-mould London as a house call prostitute for closeted members of the British aristocracy.

It’s 1972, and eighteen-year-old tomboy Maeve O’Connor must win a photography contest to escape her suffocating, conservative family and attend her dream school in Manhattan. But where will she find arresting subjects? Why, a washed up old seaside resort called Asbury Park, New Jersey—a place where sideshow entertainers, strippers, carnies, artists, and alternative lifestyles coexist on the boardwalk in plain sight.

Set in and around the women's prison at Milbank in the 1870's, Affinity is an eerie and utterly compelling ghost story, a complex and intriguing literary mystery, and a poignant love story with an unexpected twist in the tale. Following the death of her father, Margaret Prior has decided to pursue some 'good work' with the lady criminals of one of London's most notorious gaols. Surrounded by prisoners, murderers, and common thieves, Margaret feels herself drawn to one of the prison's more unlikely inmates.

Once upon a time, there was a winter that wouldn't end. And all that stands between the people of White Meadows and starvation is a young man called Lance. Lance is 16 years old, and for all his courage and hunting skills, he's running out of fight. His family has been wiped out in a border raid, and he's drowning in loneliness. When strangers arrive at White Meadows, all Lance can think of is using his last strength to drive them away. But these men have come in peace, not to burn and destroy. Among them is a hot-headed, utterly charming prince-in-training named Arthur.

Wyoming Territory, 1870. Elijah Carter is afflicted. Most of the townsfolk of South Pass City treat him as a simpleton because he’s deaf, but that’s not his only problem. Something in Elijah runs contrary to nature and to God. Something that Elijah desperately tries to keep hidden. Harlan Crane, owner of the Empire saloon, knows Elijah for what he is—and for all the ungodly things he wants. But Crane isn’t the only one. Grady Mullins desires Elijah too, but unlike Crane, he refuses to push the kid.

Laurence Fitzroy is trapped in a golden cage. The only son of a wealthy London baronet, he's struggling to escape his father's suffocating world. But Laurie is losing his fight. At 19 years of age, bright and imaginative, he's no match for the brutal Sir William. Laurie wants to be an actor - bad enough as far as Sir William is concerned, but, worse than that, he's gay.

It’s the summer of ’96 and best friends (and secret girlfriends) Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, free from the harsh gazes of their neighbors and the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they will finally be together as a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people . . . even if the move means leaving behind Hannah’s beloved Bubbe.

Mani Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland's shores. And if the flu doesn't do it, there's always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema!

Intelligent but isolated recent physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. Her childhood memories dimmed by loss, she has left behind her home, her family, and her first love in pursuit of intellectual fulfillment. When she finally lands a job as a NASA secretary during the Apollo 11 mission, the work is everything she dreamed, and while she feels a budding attraction to one of the engineers, she can’t get distracted. Not now.

1657. Marie, a gifted healer of the Deer Clan, does not want to marry the green-eyed soldier from France who has asked for her hand. But her people are threatened by disease and starvation and need help against the Iroquois and their English allies if they are to survive. When her chief begs her to accept the white man’s proposal, she cannot refuse him, and sheds her deerskin tunic for a borrowed blue wedding dress to become Pierre’s bride.

The Baroness, an infamous exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer—deeply closeted and pathologically repressed—begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her. As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real, and is happening to her—and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control.

The American Civil War creates enemies of lifelong friends and allies of strangers, but no relationship is more unlikely than that of a passionate Northern Unionist and a loyal Virginia sympathizer. Actress and Northerner Jordan Colfax is hired to spy on behalf of the Union. When she meets Confederate sympathizer Laura St. Clair, whose father is military aide to Jefferson Davis, the perfect opportunity presents itself. But when the truth about Jordan's real intentions is discovered, their love is put to the ultimate test.

Love at first seduction in Georgian England. Lord Blair yearns for a second chance at love with his long-lost lieutenant. But there’s a hitch in his well-laid plans: he’s about to wed. In the style of Regency England, His Midshipman is a stand-alone M/M novella. Reid and David’s story continues in His Second Chance, the Regency Lords series, a queer romance by award-winning author Stephanie Lake. Start the series today to heat up your evening.

Everyone has a secret.... Only some lead to murder. Introducing Leo Stanhope: a Victorian transgender coroner's assistant who must uncover a killer without risking his own future. When the body of a young woman is wheeled into the hospital where Leo Stanhope works, his life is thrown into chaos. Maria, the woman he loves, has been murdered, and it is not long before the finger of suspicion is turned on him, threatening to expose his lifelong secret.