Showing titles in Historical

A lover from another time... When Ted Ennis steps out the doors of the Criterion Theatre for a cigarette and finds himself in Victorian London, he begins to doubt his sanity. At first he thinks it's all a film set, and is sure that the strikingly handsome young man leaning against a lamppost must be the leading man.… What starts as a sordid transaction with a beautiful rent boy quickly turns into something much deeper, drawing him back again and again as he gets to know Jem and craves meaningful encounters with him.

Philadelphia, 1837. On six occasions, twelve-year-old tomboy Rian Krieger has escorted self-emancipated fugitives to the next station on their flight from enslavement. When Rian’s father, factory owner Otto Krieger, learns that she is a conductor on the Underground Railroad, he renews his plans to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland. This is a fate Rian cannot abide, as it means she would have to wear a dress all the time.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2024 CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 2024 “Pure delight.” —Ann-Marie MacDonald...

“Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst.” —Esquire From the winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly novel that spans seven transformative decades as it plumbs the complex relationships of a remarkable...

When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's shortlist to be president. Rough and reticent, he's a country lawyer lacking money and manners, living above a dry goods shop, but with a gift for oratory. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with a tireless interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. "I can only hope," she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, "that his waters being so very still, they also run deep." 

Set in a declining textile town in North Carolina, Hide is the love story of Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, and Frank Clifton, a veteran of World War II. They meet after the war, in a time when such love holds real danger. But, severing nearly all ties with the rest of the world, they carve out a home for themselves on the outskirts of town and for decades the routine of self-reliant domesticity - Wendell's cooking, Frank's care for a yard no one sees, and the vicarious drama of courtroom TV - seems to protect them.

In 1932, New York City, top reporter Lorena "Hick" Hickok starts each day with a front page byline - and finishes it swigging bourbon and planning her next big scoop. But an assignment to cover FDR's campaign - and write a feature on his wife, Eleanor - turns Hick's hard-won independent life on its ear. Soon, her work, and the secret entanglement with the new first lady, will take her from New York and Washington to Scotts Run, West Virginia, where impoverished coal miners' families wait in fear that the New Deal's promised hope will pass them by. 

1979. President Carter was in the White House. Three Mile Island. Odd-even gas rationing. Pink Floyd released “The Wall.” The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher elected Prime Minister of the UK. The Iran Hostage Crisis. And disco…lots of disco.

Amelia Cole—Lia for short—is one of the first women studying abroad at Oxford University in the 1920s. Finally free from her overbearing Brooklyn parents, she finds a welcome sense of independence in British college life. Lia quickly falls for Scarlett Daniels, an aspiring actress and hardheaded protester. Scarlett introduces her to an exciting gender-equality movement with high stakes. But when their secret love clashes with political uprising, their relationship is one of the casualties.

He was about to be tried for treason. His gay lover had been ordered to kill him. He was trying to evade a clever inspector from the Privy Council as well as the Black Plague. And he had hired a bumbling actor named Shakespeare to front for his writings. It was obviously time for Christopher Marlowe to fake his own murder.

"En route to polite exile in the Galapagos Islands (field work, to quote the dean of my university), I have found myself marooned on a deserted tropical paradise. Deserted, that is, except for my savior, a mysterious American called Marcus. He is an inventor and the proof of his greatness is the marvelous new clockwork arm he has created to replace the unsightly one that was ruined in my shipboard mishap."

In 1465 a simple pocketful of herbs could get you burned at the stake, but Luccia Alimenti, daughter of one of the legendary women doctors called Salernistas, travels Europe secretly distributing medical texts to midwives and herbalists. Despite dodging the Inquisition and battling the Plague with her beloved Irish godmother, Luccia finds love as well as heartbreak. Pushed to the edge, however, she must use her skill as an archer to rescue women being taken to the pyre.

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?

One of the most famous partnerships in literature yields, over time, to a peculiar romantic triangle. Sherlock Holmes. Dr. John Watson. And the good doctor's second wife, whom Doyle never named. In L.A. Fields's novel, Mrs. Watson is a clever woman who realizes, through examining all the prior cases her husband shared with the world's greatest consulting detective, that the two men shared more than adventures: they were lovers, as well.

During the Civil War, two young soldiers on opposite sides find themselves drawn together. One is a war-weary scholarly Southerner who has seen too much bloodshed, especially the tortures inflicted upon the enemy by his vicious commanding officer, his uncle. The other is a Herculean Yankee captured by the rag-tag Confederate band and forced to become a martyr for all the sins of General Sheridan's fires. When these two find themselves admiring more than each other's spirit and demeanor, when passions erupt between captor and captive, will this new romance survive the arduous trek to Purgatory Mountain?

Oliver Twist meets The Crimson Petal and the White in this devilishly funny, emotionally charged tale of finding a new path in life after a great fall. William Dempsey rose from a life of thieving and prostitution to be the personal plaything of the Marquess of Argyll. Then a betrayal sees him returned to the rough streets of London without patronage, his West End apartment, or a place among the ton.

The uneventful life of a jeweler from Tel Aviv changes abruptly in 2011 after Fareed, a handsome young man from Damascus, crosses illegally into Israel and makes his way to the ancient port city of Jaffa in search of his roots. In his pocket is a piece of a famous blue diamond known as "Sabakh".  Intending to return the diamond to its rightful owner, Fareed is soon swept up in Tel Aviv's vibrant gay scene, and a turbulent protest movement. He falls in love with both an Israeli soldier and his boyfriend - the narrator of this book - and reveals the story of his family's past.

Scrooge has compelling reasons for hating Christmas, for rejecting his fiancée and his precious nephew, and for employing Tiny Tim’s father, despite his obvious incompetence. He is a doting uncle, beloved brother, successful businessman, and passionate lover, but a dark secret puts both him and his loved ones at risk. Scrooge struggles to embrace his true self and live in defiance of the Victorian era’s repressive moral standards.

Jesse McGinnis has it all - the woman she loves, two beautiful children, a successful career. But when news comes of the massacre on Mount Perish, will it lead her on a collision course with disaster? Will Jesse reach the mountain in time to save any members of the Ponak tribe? Will she come to her senses and return home, or will she walk away, protecting her children from her safely guarded secret?

From acclaimed fantasy author T. Frohock comes a dark, lyrical historical thriller, set in 1930s Spain and Germany, that brings to life the world of angels and demons from the novellas collected in Los Nefilim: Spanish Nephilim battling daimons in a supernatural war to save humankind. Born of...