Showing titles in Historical

It’s 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia’s childhood friend Mac McFadden, whose verve and energy buoy the recently divorced Virginia to embrace this new chapter. Memory (“Mem”) is unlike other girls: she is attuned to the voices of plants and animals and is missing two fingers on her twisted left hand. The three of them knit their lives together and become a close, though unconventional, family.

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.

Japan, 1825: Low-ranking samurai Uchida Tomonosuke is a devotee of the way of manly love, but he has never pledged himself to another man. Until one day he accidentally crosses paths with Ichi, a beautiful blind masseur who challenges everything he thought he knew about love between men. Ichi is independent and confident, but his blindness means he is considered a non-person in the rigid social hierarchy.

Full-cast dramatisations of three insightful novels by Christopher Isherwood, plus a bonus interview Novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood is best known for The Berlin Stories of pre-Hitler Germany, which inspired the musical Cabaret. Many of his works have been adapted for stage and...

Maud Heaston has been in love with Beatrice Williams since they first met in 1939. They’ve been through hell and back; family, careers, and secrets have threatened to tear them apart, but their love has endured it all. Until now. Old age and illness have forced them into separate nursing homes and the family Maud trusted to take care of them are only out for themselves.

“I adored this novel. It’s a story about being an awkward, misfit girl with big dreams in a man’s world. It made me laugh out loud, and it made me really, really want a tattoo.” —Clare Pooley, New York Times bestselling author of The Authenticity Project An uplifting, feminist...

Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.

In 1883, Thaniel Steepleton returns to his tiny flat to find a gold pocket watch on his pillow. When the watch saves Thaniel’s life in a blast that destroys Scotland Yard, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori—a kind, lonely Japanese immigrant. Meanwhile, Grace Carrow is sneaking into an Oxford library, desperate to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether before her mother can force her to marry. As the lives of these three characters become entwined, events spiral out of control until Thaniel is torn between loyalties, futures and opposing geniuses.

Three women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they live. In 1931 Katherine Henderson leaves behind her small town in Kansas and the marriage proposal of a local boy to live on her own and work at the Sears & Roebuck glove counter in Chicago. There she meets Annie - a bold, outspoken feminist who challenges Katherine's idea of who she thinks she is and what she thinks she wants in life.

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.

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!

It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life.

From the author of the #1 best seller The Girl in the Spider’s Web—an electrifying thriller that begins with Alan Turing’s suicide and plunges into a post-war Britain of immeasurable repression, conformity and fear June 8, 1954. Several English nationals have defected to the USSR, while a...

They once faced each other on a battlefield. Now soldier-turned-spy Jonathan Reese must keep watch over the man he's never forgotten. A close encounter reveals Karl von Binder, the count's son, also recalls the day he spared Jonathan's life. Sparks fly between the former enemies and Jonathan begins to lose perspective on his mission. He knows he must maintain distance because the heat he encounters in Karl's touch stirs him far too deeply for his own good.

'A dirty little jewel of a novel' Julia Armfield 'Malory Towers meets The Conjuring' Alice Slater 'Gory, tender, sexy' Krystelle Bamford 'Compulsively readable' Guardian In 1928, Emily Locke's final year at the isolated Briarley School for Girls is derailed when Violet, the school's brightest...

Meet Orlando: a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, poet, lover, adventurer—and, after a transformational sleep, a woman. Spanning over 300 years of British history, Orlando bends the rules of time, gender, and narrative as its protagonist navigates shifting societies, identities, and expectations, all while seeking something elusive: the truth of the self. Playful, profound, and radically ahead of its time, Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking novel is part love letter, part satire, and part meditation on the fluid nature of existence.

Goldengrove’s towers and twisted chimneys rose at the very edge of the peaceful Weald, a stone’s throw from the poisonous marshes and merciless waters of Rye Bay. Young Tabby Palethorp had been running wild there, ever since her mother grew too ill to leave her room. I was the perfect choice to give Tabby a good English education: thoroughly respectable and far too plain to tempt her lonely father, Sir Kit, to indiscretion. I knew better than to trust my new employer with the truth about my past. But knowing better couldn’t stop me from yearning for impossible things.

On a mission deep in the jungle, Oxford anthropologist James Litchfield comes face-to-face with a local legend: a wild man who wanders with mountain gorillas and lives as one of their own. The chance encounter with the savage, whom James calls Michael, leads to a game of observation and exploration. Their mutual curiosity turns to an attraction, one that Michael has never experienced and James is desperate to deny.

ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2024 "An evocative, touching, and--in multiple senses--moving portrait of Zambian life and politics at a moment of great transformation. And in the tradition of Zambian storytelling, it shows us, it teaches us, how ordinary people like Grace, in extraordinary...

This is a novel that portrays a love affair between two men in the late 1950s. In turn, they each tell their story in their own voices. The men are British. One of them is a young wardrobe assistant. The other is a stuntman who had served in action during World War Two. The pair meet on the set of a film being shot on location in Italy.