Historical Fiction
A mix of eras, stories, settings and characters in these historical novels chosen by our librarians. (Updated January 2024)
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A Grandmother Begins the Story
The story of the unrivaled desire for healing and the power of familial bonds across five generations of Métis women and the land and bison that surround them.
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Availability: Available
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A Council of Dolls
Details the story of three women from different generations, told through the stories of the dolls they carried in 1888, 1925 and 1961 bringing to light the damage done to indigenous people through history.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The American Daughters
When Ady, who is enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, is separated from her mother, she meets Lenore, a free Black woman who invites her to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters, setting her on a journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Lady Tan's Circle of Women
Sent into an arranged marriage, Tan Yunxian, forbidden to continue her work as a midwife-in-training as well as see her forever friend Meiling, is ordered to act like proper wife and seeks a way to continue treating women and girls from every level of society in 15th-century China.
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River Sing Me Home
A redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery.
Format: Book
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The Fraud
A kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.
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The House of Doors
Broke, floundering creatively, and miserable in a marriage of convenience meant to hide his homosexuality, Somerset Maugham traveled to Malaya after World War I, where he met Lesley Hamlyn and her lawyer husband, Robert. Tan takes this real-life event and stitches together a narrative featuring Maugham's bonding with Lesley and a secret she shares about events during the Chinese Revolution.
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In the Upper Country
The fates of two unforgettable women--one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life's last vital act--intertwine at the terminus of the Underground Railroad.
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The Refugee Ocean
Two refugees find that their lives are inextricably linked—over time and distance—by the perils of history and a single haunting piece of music.
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Above the Salt
A sweeping love story follows two Portuguese refugees who flee religious violence and reignite their budding romance in Civil-War America.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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