Historical Fiction

After the hellish experience of the past few years, Aki Ito finally feels like it might be possible to be happy again. She and her parents are about to leave Manzanar, the California desert internment camp into which her family and other Japanese-Americans were forced by the government following Pearl Harbor, for an unfamiliar Chicago neighborhood the government has deemed acceptable for ‘resettlement’.

I am shallow enough to say that I do sometimes pick a book by it's cover. So, confession made, I'll say if I knew nothing else about Harper St. George's new historical romance series, I would have picked up the books for the gorgeous covers alone. Luckily for me, the stories have fulfilled the promise of those eye-catching covers.

Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001?  I was at home, watching the news, I stepped away to help my young daughter and when I came back, the South Tower was gone.  

A few years ago, my son's fifth grade class read Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes. I read along with him, and it was one of the first times that I understood that to my children, and so many others, September 11, 2001 was not a powerful memory or a deep wound, but a historical event.  

In this the 5th (I cannot believe this is book 5 already) of the Verity Kent mystery series, author Huber marks a slower cadence to her story. Verity and her husband Sydney are visiting Verity's family home in the Yorkshire Dales for the first time since before the death of Verity's beloved brother whose plane was shot down during the war. And if that emotional quagmire weren't enough, traveling with them is Verity's Great Aunt Ilse who has left war-ravaged Germany and returned to England seeking some peace.

Single motherhood with the responsibilities of earning enough to support several generations—it’s a situation not unfamiliar to many modern women. It’s the situation Christine de Pizan lives in, but her world—1393 Paris—is far from modern in Tania Bayard’s debut In the Presence of Evil. As an educated woman, Christine is already something of an oddity, but growing up as both beloved daughter and widow of scholars employed in the French court has given her a chance to earn her living as a scribe and support her children and mother.

In 1951 two British government officials, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, left on a boat sailing from Southampton to France and then disappeared. Though there were suspicions that they had defected to the Soviet Union, this wasn't confirmed until five years later when they appeard at a press conference in Moscow. In the years after this it became clear that they were not the only two British "gentlemen" to have been recruited by the KGB, there were at least 3 others and they all became known as the Cambridge Five.

Jim Agnihotri can’t shake the image of the two women falling from his mind. A former captain in Her Majesty’s forces, Agnihotri has read of the case while recuperating from terrible injuries to mind and body from a skirmish in 1891 Karachi, but it is the perplexing mystery surrounding the deaths of two wealthy Parsee women who apparently jumped from a Bombay clock tower on their own accord that haunts him. Why would the Framji women jump at such an interval apart? And why would two young women seemingly happy with their lives choose to end them so violently?