Top 30 New Historical Fiction Books 2026 You Absolutely Must Read
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
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Hello fellow book lovers! Welcome to Cozy Book Cafe. Thank you for visiting our website. Here you will discover the most anticipated new historical fiction books 2026. Dive into captivating new stories, discover new authors, and let your imagination soar.
​Enjoy the best new historical fiction books 2026 that blends imagination with authentic details from the past. You get richly drawn characters, vivid settings, and a sense of stepping back in time without leaving your chair.​
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Explore Our New Historical Fiction Books 2026
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.
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Abandoned by her mother one Christmas Eve, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable "big girls" at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed.
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Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies.
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Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates—and Meg’s—converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan for them to take control of their lives. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife and women’s freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.
Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson
Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American Officer, is living in Occupied Germany in the 1950s. After discovering a local orphanage filled with the abandoned mixed-race children of German women and Black American GI’s, Ethel feels compelled to help find these children homes.
Philadelphia born Ozzie Phillips volunteers for the recently desegregated army in 1948, eager to make his mark in the world. While serving in Manheim, Germany, he meets a local woman, Jelka, and the two embark on a relationship that will impact their lives forever.
In 1965 Maryland, Sophia Clark is given an opportunity to attend a prestigious all white boarding school and escape her heartless parents. While at the school, she discovers a secret that upends her world and sends her on a quest to unravel her own identity.
Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives, and demonstrates that love in its myriad of forms—familial, parental, and forbidden, even love of self—can be transcendent.
Burn Down Master's House by Clay Cane
As turmoil simmers within a divided nation, smoke from another blaze begins to rise. Sparked by individual acts of resistance among those enslaved across the American South, their seemingly disparate rebellions fuel a singular inferno of justice, connecting them in ways quiet at times, explosive at others. As these flames rise, so will they.
Luke, quick-witted and literate, and Henri, a man with a strong and defiant spirit, forge an unbreakable bond at a Virginia plantation called Magnolia Row. Both seek escape from unimaginable cruelty. And sure as the fires of hell, Luke and Henri will leave their mark, sparking resistance among the lives they touch…
One is Josephine, a young, sharp, and observant girl who wields silence as her greatest weapon. A witness to Luke and Henri’s resilience, she listens, watches, waits for the moment to make her move.
Then there is Charity Butler, her husband a formerly enslaved man who proved his ferocity as a young boy standing alongside Josephine. At his encouragement, Charity fights for her freedom in court and wins – only to battle a deeply unjust system designed to destroy the life they’ve built.
And finally, there is Nathaniel, who ruthlessly exploits other Black people and mirrors the cruelty of the white men who, like him, are enslavers. A perversion of the system of slavery, his fragile and contradictory rule will become a catalyst of its own.
The Forgotten Midwife by Laura Anthony
New Jersey, 2023. Riley Carmichael is getting married and finally joining a huge, loving family, but she can’t help but feel the emptiness of her own side of the church. For most of Riley’s life, it’s been just her and her grandmother, Betty, but as late-stage dementia overtakes her grandmother’s mind, Riley knows she’s losing her, too. On one of Riley’s visits to Betty’s nursing home, she encounters her grandmother in one of her increasingly rare moments of lucidity, and Betty desperately shares with Riley a tatty birth certificate for an unknown baby born in Ireland in the 1950s. Full of questions about her heritage, Riley embarks on a trip to Ireland to find that elusive sense of home, identity, and belonging.
Tipperary, Ireland, 1954. Margaret Lannigan’s life is made up of weekly dances and time spent with the love of her life, Joseph. But when Margaret’s older sister dies suddenly, it falls to Margaret to fulfill the family’s commitment to the Catholic Church: the eldest daughter of the Lannigan family has joined a local convent for generations. Forced to part with Joseph and take the veil, Margaret is sent to Ballyvale Home for Fallen Girls to care for expectant mothers who fell pregnant outside of marriage. With no training or midwifery skills, she must fight to provide the compassionate care she feels these women deserve amid the cruelty they face.
When Margaret meets a young and terrified Delia O’Rourke, the sister of her childhood best friend, she must find the strength she needs to protect this young woman and her baby in the face of a system built to ensure they disappear.
A Founding Mother by Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie
In the heart of revolutionary Boston, Abigail Adams raises her children amid riots, blockades, and the outbreak of war. While her husband, John Adams, rises from country lawyer to nation-builder, often away for years at a time, Abigail builds her own independence—managing their farm, making lucrative investments, amassing savings, battling plague and loss, and defending their home.
Unafraid to speak her mind, she famously offers fearless political counsel, urging John to “remember the ladies” in the new government. Through it all, she becomes his most trusted confidante and indispensable ally.
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When peace is secured, Abigail steps onto the world stage—exchanging ideas with Thomas Jefferson in the French countryside, navigating court life as the wife of the Minister to Great Britain, and presiding over the parlor politics of the early American republic in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
Even after her husband’s presidential administration, she continues battling political foes and working behind the scenes to advance her family, secure independence for the women in her life, and ensure a better life for the next generation of Americans.
Kin by Tayari Jones
​Vernice and Annie are 'cradle friends', born days apart in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, both destined never to know their mothers.
The girls are inseparable, bound by a friendship far deeper than sisterhood.
But this is the American south in the 1950s. Black girls like Vernice and Annie have to fight for every opportunity they can, and neither one can build the future they hope for in Honeysuckle.
Gradually, inevitably, the girls drift apart.
Vernice pursues her education; Annie is lured by the promise of a heady first love affair and a growing obsession with finding her mother.
But her search pulls her even further into a world of danger that soon leaves her oldest friend battling to save her.
The Shock of the Light by Lori Inglis Hall
Twins Tessa and Theo are roots of the same tree, in tune with one another’s every thought and desire. As World War II takes hold across Europe, both are eager to do their part. Theo is recruited by the RAF and disappears into the skies, while Tessa jumps at the chance to join the Special Operations Executive, devoted to spying and sabotage behind enemy lines. It will be dangerous, highly classified work, but Tessa, despite all she shares with Theo, is no stranger to secret-keeping.
Two years later, Theo comes home. Tessa does not.
Theo, wounded, broken by the loss of his fellows and disappearance of his sister, is indefatigable, angry, and driven. He has secrets of his own that could jeopardize his future, and—he will pay a price for pursuing answers about Tessa’s fate.
Decades later, PhD candidate Edie is deep into her research on the Special Operations Executive during the war. When she finds Theo in London, they form an unlikely partnership, and together they will try to uncover the truth about Theo’s beloved sister—and the one secret she never told him…
Where the Sea Lavender Grows by Kitty Johnson
Elise, an artist grieving the loss of her son and a fracturing marriage, is in North Norfolk to restore Marsh House to its former glory, its walls adorned with the fading murals and paintings of its long-ago owner, Lilias Carter-Brown.
Elise makes an immediate connection to the house, to Sam—a carpenter and a comfort—and to history itself when an old photograph draws Elise into Lilias’s heartbreaking past.
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In 1939, with war threatening, Lilias and her sister turn Marsh House into a sanctuary for London evacuees—a young boy and his mother. But it’s the boy’s father, Harry, an enlistee soon to report for duty, with whom Lilias forms an unexpected and intimate bond.
When Harry suddenly vanishes without a trace, it changes the course of Lilias’s life forever.
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Now, as Elise and Sam work to solve the mystery of the disappearance, the restoration of Marsh House is bringing Elise back to life as well—to love again, to put her and Lilias’s pasts to rest, and to finally move on.
The Water Women by Bonnie Blaylock
In 1930s Sardinia, Allegra and her daughters maintain the tradition of the water women.
As it was for the generations of Jewish mothers and daughters before her, weaving the fine threads of mollusks into golden cloth and tapestry is an honor, a duty, and a precious gift to an outside world that seems bent on turmoil.
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By 1942, a threat comes to their sleepy fishing village. Germany has pressed its boot on Italy. Allegra’s daughter Zaneta notices boats she’s never seen before anchored off the shore.
As her family withdraws from the once-unified community, their island home sinks into a fog of fear and suspicion. Then Zaneta meets a German deserter. With the encounter comes a secret that will haunt Zaneta forever, and in the years to come, her own daughter, Mira, as well.
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For three women, the threads of the byssus weave a story of love, war, loss, and hope that will challenge them and bind them through the most trying times of their lives.
Where the Wildflowers Grow by Terah Shelton Harris
Leigh is the last of the Wildes. She knows this because she watched them all die.
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Grief never truly fades and even as the tragedy haunts her, Leigh carries on, because survival is in her blood. So, when the transport bus taking her to prison careens off the road, killing everyone onboard except her, she does what's in her nature. She survives.
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While searching for a place to hide, Leigh stumbles upon an unexpected sanctuary: a flower farm in rural Alabama tucked away from the world. What Leigh doesn't expect is the found family there who have built something from the wreckage of their own lives. Especially Jackson, the farm's owner, who sees through Leigh's defenses, offers her small moments of tenderness, encourages her to face her own tragedies. Slowly, Leigh finds peace with the hard pace and soft nature of the farm, taking comfort in the life blooming around her. Maybe she's not beyond redemption, not too broken for something good. And maybe, just maybe, Leigh starts to heal.
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But the past isn't so easily buried.
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No matter how far she runs, the truth of who she is and the ghosts of the Wildes follow. And when those secrets catch up to her, threatening everything she's come to love, Leigh will have to truly face what she can survive.
Land by Maggie O'Farrell
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home?
Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.
Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See
In 1870, three Chinese women arrive in the small, dusty, and violent pueblo of Los Angeles. Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar, is entrancing and innocent. These characteristics should bring her great rewards, beginning with her arranged marriage to a much older merchant. Petal, the big-footed daughter of peasants, has grown up hungry and with dirt between her toes. In a moment of desperation, Petal’s father sells her to buy money for rice seed, and she is loaded onto a ship to the Gold Mountain—America—where she is once again sold. Moon is married to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. She is educated, speaks fluent English, and has been endowed with a face of great beauty, yet her failed footbinding as a child has left her with a limp that lessens her value in the eyes of many.
Each woman has her own desires. Dove wants to love and be loved, Petal desires freedom, and Moon seeks justice. Together they face a larger society that wishes them not one ounce of good will. Anti-Chinese sentiment is strong in Los Angeles, and this eventually leads to the Night of Horrors during which all three women are challenged in ways they could not have imagined. Brought together by hardship and heartbreak, they must use their bravery, endurance, and ability to “eat bitterness” to discover their voices, find freedom, and connect through solace and friendship. Together they are daughters of the sun and moon.
The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams
Fourteen-year-old Tati is determined to uncover the identity of her father.
But her mother, Nadia, keeps her secrets close, while her grandmother, Gladys, remains silent about the family’s past.
As Tati digs deeper, she uncovers the truth of her lineage, still whispered at kitchen tables and murmured in basements, where the ritual of braiding or pressing hair takes place every Saturday night.
From Jubi in 1917, whose attempt to pass for white ends when she gives birth to Ruby; to Ruby’s fiery lust for Sampson in 1934 that leads to a baby of her own; to the night in 1980 that changed Nadia’s future for ever.
The Dupree women confront a legacy of pain, resilience and survival that began with an enslaved ancestor who risked everything for freedom.
When We Were Brilliant by Lynn Cullen
In 1952, Norma Jeane Baker follows documentary photographer Eve Arnold into a powder room on the night they first meet. She has a proposition for her. Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe to be photographed, and she wants Eve to do it.
Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at revealing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, she says, they can make something brilliant.
Skeptical of this cipher of a young woman, Eve demurs. She’s looking for more serious subjects than this ambitious starlet.
But she keeps getting drawn back into Marilyn’s orbit, and the women come to recognize something in each other—something fundamental.
Nothing will get in the way of what they want, and when Marilyn’s star takes off to teetering heights, neither will ever be the same.
Women of a Promiscuous Nature by Donna Everhart
On a brisk February morning while walking to the diner where she works, 24 year-old Ruth Foster is stopped by the local sheriff. He insists she accompany him to a health clinic, threatening to arrest her if she doesn’t undergo testing in order to preserve decency and prevent the spread of sexual disease.
Though Ruth has never shared more than a chaste kiss with a man, by day’s end she is one of dozens of women held at the State Industrial Farm Colony for Women. Some are there because they were reported for promiscuity by neighbors, husbands, strangers. Some were accused of prostitution. Others were just pretty and unmarried. Or poor and “suspicious.” One was eating dinner alone in a restaurant. Another spoke to a soldier.
Josephine’s sin was running a business as a single woman. Maude’s was trying to drown her sorrows. Frances had lost her mind. Opal married a man with a mean streak. Some, like 15-year-old Stella, are brought in because they’re victims of assault. She’s too naive and broken to understand how unjust this imprisonment is.
Superintendent Dorothy Baker, convinced that she’s transforming degenerate souls into upstanding members of society, oversees the women’s medical treatment and “training” until they’re deemed ready for parole. Sooner or later, everyone at the Colony learns to abide by Mrs. Baker’s rule book or face the consequences—solitary confinement, grueling work assignments, and worse.
But some refuse to be cowed. Some find ways to fight back – at any cost…
The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline
When Eng and Chang Bunker arrive in Wilkes County in 1839, they’re not just a curiosity—they’re a sensation. Everyone is eager to learn whether the salacious rumors about them are true.
Within months, the twins have opened a general store, bought land, and begun building a plantation. Now, word has it, they’re looking for wives—and in a place that thrives on gossip and legacy, their ambitions set the community on edge.
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Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, are drawn into their orbit. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sarah, quiet and observant, isn’t so sure.
When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing, and identity in a world where everything—including race, class, and gender—is rigidly defined.
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Spanning five decades and unfolding against the backdrop of a fractured nation hurtling toward war, The Foursome is both intimate and epic: a story of love and constraint, identity and reinvention.
Where the Girls Were by Kate Schatz
It’s 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth “Baker” Phillips: She’s the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist.
But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible.
But then, everything changes.
Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash—in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family’s shining star to their embarrassing secret.
Without any other options, Baker is sent to a home for unwed mothers, and finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with pregnant girls who share her shame and fear.
As she grapples with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the “girls who went away.”
The Windsor Affair by Melanie Benjamin
Feuding Windsor brothers and their wives—some things, it seems, never change. The Windsor Affair recreates the cataclysmic events that nearly toppled the monarchy and incited the power struggle between Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and Wallis Simpson.
Told from the perspective of both women, the novel propels readers into the fabulous world of the debonair Prince of Wales, café society of the 1930s, and the glittering private lives of the Windsors. The first novel to be dedicated to this infamous rivalry, The Windsor Affair brings us all the gossip and intrigue between the two very different—yet perhaps more similar than they would admit—wives of royals.
As Queen, Elizabeth would become the symbol of British pluck and courage during World War II and remain a British institution the rest of her long life. Wallis would be forever forced to enact the World’s Greatest Love Story even after it sours, as she goes from being admired to vilified and, ultimately, pitied.
Against the backdrop of the Abdication Crisis, World War II, coronations, funerals, births, and deaths, these two women maintain a biting, sharp-tongued feud—until age and the long arm of history bring about a kind of understanding. For the last communication between these bitter rivals was a simple, surprising message: “In friendship, Elizabeth.”
It Girl by Allison Pataki
At the dawn of the twentieth century, New York’s streets teem with change: electricity, automobiles, the brash young President Teddy Roosevelt—and the It Girls. As artists’ muses and working models, these independent young women soar to stardom not because of their pedigrees or inherited wealth, but because of their talent, charisma, and irresistible beauty. Pop culture is born, and in a world alight with Mr. Edison’s new bulbs, no one shines brighter than America’s sweetheart, Evelyn Talbot.
But the journey to stardom is not simple or straight. While working as a shopgirl, the young Evelyn is recruited as a studio model and soon catches the eye of the preeminent artists of the age. When Broadway comes calling, Evelyn solidifies her status as the first self-made American female celebrity: the iconic Gibson Girl, the most sought-after figure and face of her time. Enter a parade of powerful and power-hungry men, from world-famous architect Stanley Pierce, the visionary behind Manhattan’s mansions and iconic landmarks, to Hal Thorne, the shockingly wealthy railroad heir and premier “playboy” of high society. Each man promises comfort, glamour, security—even love. But fame and fortune are cruel teachers, and Evelyn learns that the only person she can rely on is herself.
When Evelyn finds herself at the center of a murder of passion declared “the Crime of the Century,” she is blamed for the acts of the men in her life. In the media frenzy that spirals around her, Evelyn realizes that to survive, she will have to write her own ending. But can this artists’ muse turned showgirl pull off the greatest act of her life?
The Moonshine Women by Michelle Collins Anderson
Every batch of Strong moonshine has its own special flavor, thanks to the secret ingredients that matriarch Lidy Strong adds to the barrels of fermenting corn mash. Whether a bucketful of golden peaches, a ripe melon or juicy, jewel-toned berries, that extra “something something” is what makes the Strong “shine” so prized—and allows the family to survive after crop prices plummeted in the wake of the Great War.
Each of the Strong sisters, too, is distinct. The stoic and steadfast eldest, Rebecca, finds more comfort in nature than with people…until she finds a new home in the love she discovers for the woman who restores her health after a near-devastating accident. Middle sister Elsie is kind, beautiful—and itching for a life more thrilling than the farm can offer. And Jace, the bold and wild-hearted youngest, is known far and wide as “Shine,” a name that suits her fiery personality and flaming red hair as much as her innate skill with a still.
Their father, Hiram, has been drowning himself in grief and liquor ever since his wife died. But the moonshine business is unforgiving, especially with Prohibition agents turning up in every creek and holler. When tragedy strikes, it falls to the Strong women to keep the still running, the family together, and hope burning on the horizon.
From the Ozark mountains edged in oak and pine, to the outlaw paradise of Hot Springs, Arkansas—where gangsters like Al Capone line the bar at the Southern Club—the sisters’ quests for vengeance, healing, and love will drive them forward, in search of a future as transformative and powerful as the purest Strong moonshine.
The Bookbinder's Secret by A.D. Bell
Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, chafes at the confines of her life. She is trapped between the oppressiveness of her father’s failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man’s profession.
But when she’s given a burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds, hidden beneath the binding, a fifty-year-old letter speaking of love, fortune, and murder.
Lily is pulled into the mystery of the young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story. Lilian becomes obsessed with the story but she is not the only one looking for the remaining books and what began as a diverting intrigue quickly becomes a very dangerous pursuit.
Lily's search leads her from the eccentric booksellers of London to the private libraries of unscrupulous collectors and the dusty archives of society papers, deep into the heart of the mystery.
But with sinister forces closing in, willing to do anything for the books, Lilian’s world begins to fall apart and she must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the risk to her own life.
The Chateau on Sunset by Natasha Lester
In 1957, newly orphaned Aria Jones is sent to live with her aunt, a fading star who hides away in Hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont. There, two aspiring actresses, Calliope and Flitter, take the grieving Aria under their wing.
But the Marmont isn’t meant for small girls with big hearts, and Aria’s first few nights reveal an insidious secret that continues to haunt her as she grows up in the hotel’s halls, where the bright lights of Hollywood cast even darker shadows. If Aria can just stay invisible and invite no trouble as she saves money, then she can leave the Marmont and live life on her own terms—alone but free.
Her carefully laid plans fall apart when the hotel is bought by Theo Winchester, a reclusive rock star turned unexpected caretaker of his daughter, Adele, and unlike any man Aria has met before. To earn the last bit of money she needs to escape, Aria becomes Adele’s tutor, which brings Aria closer to Theo and ignites a passion she never expected.
Suddenly, Aria finds herself wondering if she still wants to remain invisible—and if inviting trouble is a risk she’s willing to take to pursue what she truly desires.
In the Great Quiet by Laura Vogt
A cannon booms at high noon, and the race begins in the Oklahoma land rush of 1893.
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Amid the crowd is Minnie Hoopes. Tenacious and fiercely independent, she is determined to endure the brutal frontier and create a life of her own. Guarding her solitude, she distances herself from bordering homesteaders and finds peace under the starry nights of the vast frontier.
But this is outlaw country, and Minnie soon has the blood of two gunfighters on her hands. After a renegade outlaw named Stot discovers her secrets, she forms an unlikely friendship with him.
With each passing season, Minnie’s past grows more haunting and threatens the future she has risked everything to build. Minnie raced into the Wild West alone, but her grandest journey in the frontier wilderness is one she never saw coming.
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Based on the true story of the author’s great-great-grandparents, this sweeping and transportive survival story explores a woman’s connection with the land, her reconciliation with the past, and her elemental search for home against all odds.
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Settle in, I’ve stories to tell.
The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden
Anne of Brittany was a child when France invaded and drove her royal father to his death. Now she is a young woman, sovereign duchess of an occupied realm, and France means to crown their conquest by marrying her to their king. Such an alliance would put her title, her lands, and her body forever in the hands of her enemies.
But Anne refuses to be the last duchess of Brittany.
Her only hope of resisting conquest is another alliance sealed with marriage, so Anne arranges a daring last gambit: a secret betrothal to Charles of France’s greatest rival. But secrets are hard to keep in a world where rival courts spy on each other with diviners.
The forest of Brocéliande was once the haunt of Merlin the Enchanter and the long-lost faerie queen. But magic is long gone from Broceliande, except for the occasional sight of a unicorn and one critical quirk: This ancient forest is completely hostile to divination.
While pretending compliance with France, Anne plans a unicorn hunt in Brocéliande. A bit of pointless pageantry. A diversion so she can wed in secret.
Or so she thinks.
Skylark by Paula McLain
1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece.
When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated.
But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined.
1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland.
When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.
A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few—the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above.
The Parisian Heist by Jo Piazza
Emma, a struggling American artist in Paris, thought she had left her dreams behind when she took a job cleaning for the city’s wealthy elite. Then she meets Stella Swanson, the widow of one of the most notorious art dealers in the business. The Swansons move in a world where billionaires, oligarchs, and heads of state pay fortunes for masterpieces. Drawn in by their dazzling wealth and the pull of a dangerously charming grandson, Emma becomes both a player and a pawn in a family battle to protect their empire and conceal its crimes.
In the late 1800s, the young widow Jo van Gogh inherits hundreds of paintings from her brother-in-law Vincent that the art world deems worthless. Determined to prove their genius, and to secure a future for herself and her young son, she becomes consumed by Vincent’s legacy. As her devotion deepens, a vanished painting and a thwarted love affair leave her unsure who she can trust and how much of herself she’s willing to lose in the process.
From glittering auction houses to the idyllic canals of Amsterdam and the grand museums of Paris, the lives of these two women converge as Emma uncovers the Swanson family’s darkest secrets and agrees to mastermind a daring heist inside the Musée d’Orsay. The stakes have never been higher, and these women refuse to be written out of history, no matter the cost.
Call of the Camino by Suzanne Redfearn
Reina Watkins lost her father when she was eight. Seventeen years later, she still carries that grief. When her budding journalism career takes an unexpected turn, it leads her to the ancient five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain.
Now she finds herself embarking on the same pilgrimage that her father made at her age, unaware of how profoundly it will change her.
Back in 1997, Isabelle Vidal is a teenager on the run. Fleeing from her boarding school, she heads straight for the Way of Saint James. She’s heard the Camino will provide. And so it does, in the form of a handsome young American and the promise of a new life.
But it could all fall apart if her troubles catch up with her.
One woman is coming to grips with her past; the other is grasping for her future. But as each treads the same hallowed trail, it will knot their destinies together in a most miraculous way.
The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman
When Lena Conti—a young, unwed mother—sees immigrant families being forcibly separated on Ellis Island, she vows not to let the officers take her two-year old daughter. But the inspection process is more rigorous than she imagined, and she is separated from her mother and teenage brother, who are labeled burdens to society, denied entry, and deported back to Germany. Now, alone but determined to give her daughter a better life after years of living in poverty and near starvation, she finds herself facing a future unlike anything she had envisioned.
Silas Wolfe, a widowed family relative, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his weathered cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to care for his home and children. Though the hills around Wolfe Hollow remind Lena of her homeland, she struggles to adjust. Worse, she is stunned to learn the children in her care have been taught to hide when the sheriff comes around. As Lena meets their neighbors, she realizes the community is vibrant and tight knit, but also senses growing unease. The State of Virginia is scheming to paint them as ignorant, immoral, and backwards so they can evict them from their land, seize children from parents, and deal with those possessing “inferior genes.”
After a social worker from the Eugenics Office accuses Lena of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, her own worst fears come true. Sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics, Lena face impossible choices in hopes of reuniting with her daughter—and protecting the people, and the land, she has grown to love.
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau by Kristin Harmel
Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother, Annabel: take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance.
But one night in 1942, it all went wrong. Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette’s four-year-old sister, Liliane, disappeared in the chaos of the raid, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel was executed, and Liliane’s body was found floating in the Seine—but the bracelet was nowhere to be found.
Seventy years later, Colette—who has “redistributed” $30 million in jewels over the decades to fund many worthy organizations—has done her best to put her tragic past behind her, but her life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston. If Colette can discover where it has been all this time—and who owns it now—she may finally learn the truth about what happened to her sister. But she isn’t the only one for whom the bracelet holds answers, and when someone from her childhood lays claim to the diamonds, she’s forced to confront the ghosts of her past as never before. Against all odds, there may still be a chance to bring a murderer to justice—but first, Colette will have to summon the courage to open her own battered heart.
The Wondrous Life and Loves of Nella Carter by Brionni Nwosu
Most humans cower in the face of Death. Not Nella May Carter. She sees him. She doesn’t hide. Instead, she bargains.
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Born enslaved in eighteenth-century Georgia, Nella still believes in the will to survive amid the most untenable of conditions, in the glory of life, and in the ultimate goodness of the human race.
She asks that Death, doubtful and curious, allow her to live long enough to prove it. He’s giving Nella all the time in the world.
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Challenged, Nella embarks on an epic journey across the globe and centuries. Each new incarnation records the joys and losses, and the friendships and heartbreaks, throughout her lifetimes.
When she meets handsome and passionate professor Sebastian Moore―the first man to whom she has ever revealed her secrets―Nella yearns for the mortality that escapes her. She can’t bear to leave this love behind.
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As Death keeps watch, has Nella’s journey come to an end? Or is a new one just beginning?
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