Guide to historical novels for 2012
January 2012
Ellis Avery, The Last Nude, Riverhead (a young American model and art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka in the art world of 1927 Paris)
Anne Clinard Barnhill, At the Mercy of the Queen, St. Martin’s Griffin (story of Madge Shelton, cousin of Anne Boleyn)
Nancy Bilyeau, The Crown, Touchstone (in 16th-c England, the adventures of an aristocratic young novice who must find a legendary crown)
Christian Cameron, God of War, Orion (story of Alexander the Great)
Cassandra Clark, A Parliament of Spies, Minotaur (Abbess Hildegard mystery set in 14th-c England)
Bernard Cornwell, Death of Kings, Harper (6th volume of Saxon Tales)
Ellie Dean, Far From Home, Arrow (second in WWII boarding house saga series)
Carola Dunn, Gone West, Minotaur (Daisy Dalrymple mystery set in 1920s England)
Leah Fleming, The Captain’s Daughter, Simon & Schuster (a meeting on the Titanic changes two women’s lives forever)
Genevieve Graham, Under the Same Sky, Berkley (historical romance set in 18th-c Scotland and early America)
Susanna Gregory, The Piccadilly Plot, Sphere (latest Thomas Chaloner mystery set in Restoration London)
Tessa Harris, The Anatomist’s Apprentice, Kensington (detective Dr. Thomas Silkstone in 18th-century Oxfordshire)
Beth Hoffman, Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt, Little, Brown (eccentric aunt comes to the rescue of 12-year-old orphan in Georgia, USA in 1951)
Simonetta Agnello Hornby, The Nun, Europa (a young woman’s love and spiritual fortitude, set in 1869 Italy)
M K Hume, Prophecy: Death of an Empire, Headline (second in series about Merlin)
Conn Iggulden, Conqueror, Bantam (historical adventure novel about Kublai Khan)
Eloisa James, This Duke is Mine, Piatkus (Regency romance)
Janette Jenkins, Little Bones, Chatto & Windus (adventures of crippled Jane, a doctor’s assistant in the seedier parts of 1899 London)
Duncan Jepson, All the Flowers in Shanghai, Morrow (sweeping debut novel set in 1930s Shanghai)
Wendy Jones, The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals, Corsair (in a 1920s Welsh village Wilfred proposes to Grace then falls in love with another girl& in the ensuing tangle a secret revealed changes everything)
Ben Kane, Spartacus: The Gladiator, Preface (first in series about the Spartacus slave revolt in 1stC BC Rome)
Raymond Khoury, The Devil’s Elixir, Orion (thriller set in 1800 Mexico & present day)
Vilmos Kondor, Budapest Noir, Harper (crime novel set in 1936 Budapest)
Freda Lightfoot, The Queen and the Courtesan, Severn House (Henriette d’Entragues, mistress of Henry IV of France)
Robert Lyndon, Hawk Quest, Sphere (1072: a race-against-time quest to rescue a Norman knight captured by Turks takes a Frankish warrior to Greenland, Russia & Constantinople)
Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, The Broken Land, Tor (3rd book of the Longhouse quartet set in prehistoric America)
Rachel Hore, A Place of Secrets, Holt (multi-period gothic saga set now and amid the world of 18th-century science)
Dewey Lambdin, Reefs and Shoals, St. Martin’s (latest Alan Lewrie naval adventure, set in 1805)
Michele Lang, Dark Victory, Tor (werewolves and demons in Nazi Germany, sequel to Lady Lazarus)
Sarah McCoy, The Baker’s Daughter, Crown (a multi-period novel about wartime choices and the redemptive power of love; literary)
Alison McQueen, The Secret Children, Orion (two Anglo-Indian sisters seek cultural belonging in WWII & partition India)
Terence Morgan, The Shadow Prince, Macmillan (story of Perkin Warbeck)
Susan Sherman, The Little Russian, Counterpoint (a young Jewish mother struggles for survival in early 20th-century Russia)
Tom Rob Smith, Agent 6, Grand Central (in 1965, a former Soviet secret police agent comes to the US to investigate a crime against his family)
Gillian Slovo, An Honourable Man, Virago (moral dilemmas of a young doctor in the expedition to rescue Gen. Gordon in the Siege of Khartoum, 1884)
Natasha Solomons, The House at Tyneford, Plume (WWII story of an upstairs-downstairs romance in an English country house)
Eva Stachniak, The Winter Palace, Bantam US & Doubleday UK (novel of Catherine the Great, seen through the eyes of her servant girl & spy)
John Stack, Armada, HarperCollins (Spanish Armada novel)
Charles Todd, The Confession, Morrow (Ian Rutledge post-WWI mystery in which he solves a case that leads far back into the past)
Barry Unsworth, The Quality of Mercy, Talese (sequel to Sacred Hunger, clash
between haves and have-nots in eighteenth-century England)
Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man, Atlantic Monthly (literary western set in the late 19th c; personal and historic revenge, and an unlikely love affair)
Kaki Warner, Colorado Dawn, Berkley (romantic novel of a new bride in the Old West)
John Wilcox, The War of the Dragon Lady, Allison & Busby (latest Simon Fonthill army scout adventure, set in 1900 in China during the Boxer Rebellion)
Kate Williams, The Pleasures of Men, Michael Joseph (Gothic murder mystery set in 1840s Spitalfields)
Geling Yan, The Flowers of War, Harvill Secker (American missionary shelters a group of schoolgirls, prostitutes & wounded Chinese soldiers during the Nanking Massacre of 1937, as the Japanese invade the city)
[top]
February 2012
Kate Alcott, The Dressmaker, Doubleday (a spirited young seamstress survives the Titanic only to find herself deeply torn between two men)
Ramona Ausubel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, Riverhead (novel set in a remote Jewish village in Romania as WWII hits)
Charlotte Betts, The Apothecary’s Daughter, Piatkus (girl starts a new life in Restoration London before the Great Plague and Fire)
Nancy Bilyeau, The Crown, Orion (mystery featuring novice nun in 1537 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries)
Christine Blevins, The Turning of Anne Merrick, Berkley (romantic historical novel set during the fight for America’s independence)
Sam Bourne, Pantheon, HarperCollins (1940: British don discovers a shocking plot at Yale whilst trying to find his missing wife and son)
Frances Brody, Dying in the Wool, Minotaur (Kate Shackleton mystery set in 1920s Yorkshire, 1st in series)
Stacia M. Brown, Accidents of Providence, HMH; UK title The Glovemaker, Arrow (Rachel, an unmarried glove-maker, is arrested for killing her child during the English Civil War)
Milton Burton, The Devil’s Odds, Minotaur (mystery set in 1940s Texas, featuring a Texas Ranger and the New Orleans Mafia)
Jennifer Chiaverini, Sonoma Rose, Dutton (a Prohibition-era saga set on a Southern California rye farm)
Cassandra Clark, A Parliament of Spies, Allison & Busby (latest in medieval crime series: Abbess Hildegard of Mieux investigates a murder which may be part of a plot to depose Richard II)
Colleen Coble, Blue Moon Promise, Thomas Nelson (a proxy marriage in 19th-c Wichita, Texas)
Katy Darby, The Whore’s Asylum, Fig Tree (Gothic drama, romance & intrigue set in 1887 in Oxford)
J.D. Davies, The Mountain of Gold, HMH (nautical adventure set along the African coast in the 17th century)
Tatiana de Rosnay, The House I Loved, St. Martin’s (one woman resists the destruction of her family home, set in Belle Epoque Paris)
Frank Delaney, The Last Storyteller, Random House (saga of mid-20th century Ireland, 3rd in series)
Friedrich Christian Delius, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, FSG (psychological novel about a German woman in WWII-era Rome)
Margaret Dickinson, Jenny’s War, Macmillan (saga of a young girl evacuated from the East End to Derbyshire during WWII)
Helen Dunmore, The Greatcoat, Hammer (ghost story set 1954, as a GP’s wife newly moved to Yorkshire puts on an RAF greatcoat she finds in a cupboard and has visions of a young airman)
Carola Dunn, Gone West, Minotaur US & Robinson UK (Daisy Dalrymple mystery set in 1926 England)
Jeremy Duns, The Moscow Option, Simon & Schuster (double-agent spy thriller set in Moscow, 1969)
Sam Eastland, Siberian Red, Faber / US title Archive 17, Bantam (1939: Insp Pekkala is sent by Stalin to investigate the murder of a Gulag prisoner who claimed to know the location of the Tsar’s missing treasure)
Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues, Picador (mysterious disappearance of a black jazz musician in pre-WWII Berlin)
Rosslyn Elliott, Sweeter than Birdsong, Thomas Nelson (inspirational fiction set along the Underground Railroad in 19th-c Ohio, based on historical characters)
Sherry Lynn Ferguson, Merely A Mister, Avalon (Regency aristocrat finds intrigue and romance in the Lake District)
Jean Fullerton, Hold on to Hope, Orion (Victorian saga set in East End, woman threatened by husband’s release from prison)
Anna Funder, All That I Am, Harper (in 1930s Europe, a group of German exiles educates the world about the threat of Nazi Germany, based on a true story)
Kate Furnivall, The White Pearl, Sphere (tensions arise for family and friends on a yacht fleeing Pearl Harbor for Singapore)
Stephen Gallagher, The Bedlam Detective, Crown
Alex George, The Good American, Amy Einhorn/Putnam (about a family caught up in the sweep of history)
Anthony Giardina, Norumbega Park, FSG (novel about the consequences of pursuing the American dream, set in the Boston area in 1969)
Julia Gregson, Jasmine Nights, Orion (nurse meets WWII burns victim in Sussex hospital, loses him, then they meet again in Egypt)
Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill, Canongate (sequel to The Secret River, set in colonial Australia & New Zealand)
Romesh Gunesekera, The Prisoners of Paradise, Bloomsbury (young Englishwoman is attracted to Ceylonese translator in Mauritius in 1825 whilst slavery is ending and unrest is brewing in India)
Jane Harris, Gillespie and I, HarperPerennial (an elderly woman relates the story of her friendship with a talented artist; set in the late 19th century and in the 1930s)
Robin Lee Hatcher, Heart of Gold, Thomas Nelson (inspirational romance in a 19th-c Gold Rush town)
Gary Inbinder, Confessions of the Creature, Fireship (the story of Frankenstein’s monster continues)
Margot Livesey, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Harper (homage to and modern variation on Jane Eyre, set in the 1960s)
Dorothy Love, Beauty for Ashes, Thomas Nelson (inspirational romance set in the South just after the Civil War)
Robert Low, The Lion at Bay, HarperCollins (second in series on Wallace, Bruce and the making of Scotland)
Jack Ludlow, A Bitter Field, Allison & Busby (spy novel set in 1938 as the SIS recruits Cal Jardine to find out if Hitler is planning to invade Czechoslovakia)
Thomas Mallon, Watergate, Pantheon (fictional retelling of the Watergate scandal)
Richard Mason, History of a Pleasure-Seeker, Knopf (set at the height of Europe’s belle epoque, a handsome young man secures a position as a tutor in Amsterdam)
Bernice L. McFadden, Gathering of Waters, Akashic (the town of Money, Mississippi, hometown of Emmett Till, over decades)
Tamar Myers, The Cannibal’s Children, Morrow (rituals, religion, and murder in this mystery set in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s)
Mary Nichols, Girl on the Beach, Allison & Busby (orphaned as a child, Julie seeks her son in the London Blitz & must choose between making a new life or restoring her shattered identity)
Jonathan Odell, The Healing, Doubleday/Talese (a mysterious and charismatic healer in the pre-Civil War South)
Olaf Olafsson, Restoration, Ecco (sweeping story of love tested by the terrors and tragedies of war, set in the breathtaking landscape of Tuscany in the 1940s)
Matthew Pearl, The Technologists, Random House & Harvill Secker (students of newly-formed MIT must stop technological attacks on Boston in 1868)
Taylor M. Polites, The Rebel Wife, S&S (a young widow trying to survive in the violent world of Reconstruction Alabama)
Ralph Peters, Cain at Gettysburg, Forge (combat fiction set during the US Civil War)
Tim Powers, Hide Me Among the Graves, Morrow (historical thriller in which art and the supernatural collide in 1862 London)
Frederick Ramsay, The Eighth Veil, Perfect Niche/Poisoned Pen Press (mystery set in the year 28 CE in Jerusalem during the feast of Tabernacles)
Roberta Rich, The Midwife of Venice, Gallery (suspense and adventure; a midwife in 16th-c Venice saves a Christian mother and child)
Lucinda Riley, The Orchid House, Atria (family secrets span the 1930s to the present day, from war-torn England to Thailand)
Imogen Robertson, Anatomy of Murder, Pamela Dorman/Viking (mystery, 2nd outing of Harriet Westerman in 1781 London)
Morgan Callan Rogers, Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea, Viking (young heroine comes of age in coastal Maine in the early 1960s)
Imogen Robertson, Anatomy of Murder, Viking (Georgian mystery featuring Harriet Westerman, set in London of 1781; 2nd in series)
Andromeda Romano-Lax, The Detour, Soho (In 1938, a lonely young German man’s life spins out of his control during a three-day trip to Rome)
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Noah’s Child, Atlantic (in Belgium under Nazi occupation, a Jewish boy separated from his parents is sheltered by a priest with a secret)
Audrey Schulman, Three Weeks in December, Europa (tension between progress and preservation in 1899 Africa and today)
Lynn Shepherd, Tom-All-Alone’s, Corsair (detective story set in Victorian London, reminiscent of Bleak House & The Woman In White)
John Stack, Armada, Harper UK (a man confronts his long-estranged father when England faces the Spanish Armada)
Christine Trent, By the King’s Design, Kensington (romantic novel set during the English Regency)
Dan Vyleta, The Quiet Twin, Bloomsbury (literary fiction set in 1939 Vienna; atmospheric crime novel)
Katie Ward, Girl Reading, Scribner (women over the last seven centuries, caught in the act of reading)
Jack Whyte, The Forest Laird, Forge (1st in trilogy about William Wallace)
Lauren Willig, The Garden Intrigue, Dutton (9th installment of the Pink Carnation series, in which an atrocious poet teams up with an American widow to prevent Napoleon’s invasion)
Margaret Wurtele, The Golden Hour, NAL (novel of love and hope set in Tuscany in the summer of 1944)
[top]
March 2012
Lyn Andrews, Beyond a Misty Shore, Headline (saga set in 1945 Liverpool)
Jeffrey Archer, The Sins of the Father, Macmillan (second in the Clifton chronicles opens in New York in 1939)
Peter Behrens, The O’Briens, Pantheon (spans half a century in the lives of a restless 20th-c California family)
Rhys Bowen, Hush Now, Don’t You Cry, Minotaur (Molly Murphy Sullivan investigates an alderman’s death in 1904 Newport, RI)
Sarah Bower, The Needle in the Blood, Sourcebooks (sex, love, and embroidery in a tale of 11th-century England)
William Boyd, Waiting for Sunrise, Bloomsbury (1913: Englishman in Vienna for psychiatric treatment falls in love with a young woman in a story spanning Londin, Geneva and the battlefields of France)
Margaret Brownley, Dawn Comes Early, Thomas Nelson (inspirational romance set in 1895 Arizona Territory)
Tom Bullough, Konstantin, Viking (boy in 1860s Russia realises the possibility of space travel)
Peter Cameron, Coral Glynn, FSG (period novel set in the English countryside in 1950)
Jetta Carleton, Clair de Lune, HarperPerennial (newly discovered novel of small-town love; set in 1941)
Alicia Clifford, The Affair, St. Martin’s (following an author’s funeral, a story is revealed of her postwar affair)
Clive Cussler and Justin Scott, The Thief, Putnam US & Michael Joseph UK (action-adventure spy thriller set on the ocean liner Mauretania during WWII)
Vilborg Davidsdottir, On the Cold Coasts, AmazonCrossing (love and personal sacrifice in 15th-c Norway and England)
Lindsey Davis, Master and God, Hodder & Stoughton (story of a couple trying to survive during the Emperor Domitian’s reign of terror, plots & intrigue in Rome, 1stC AD)
Anna Dean, A Woman of Consequence, Minotaur (3rd in Dido Kent mystery series set in early 19th-c England)
Carole DeSanti, The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R., HMH (a young woman’s struggle with life and love in the backstreets and bordellos of 19th-c Paris)
David Dickinson, Death at the Jesus Hospital, Soho (Edward period whodunnit)
Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes, Dial (brainy love story set during the Cold War)
Sam Eastland, Archive 17, Bantam (in 1939, Russia’s greatest detective goes undercover at the Gulag where he was once imprisoned)
Nicholas Edlin, The Widow’s Daughter, Penguin (an artist is haunted by his WWII past, when he and his nemesis loved the same woman)
Rosslyn Elliott, Sweeter than Birdsong, Thomas Nelson (inspirational novel about the Hanby family of musicians in 1854 Ohio)
Lyndsay Faye, The Gods of Gotham, Putnam US & Headline UK (a serial killer stalks NYC in 1845, fanning the flames of anti-Irish sentiment)
Kate Furnivall, The White Pearl, Berkley (lush novel of romance and adventure set during the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1941)
Alan Furst, The Spies of Paris, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (thriller set in Paris in 1939)
Iain Gale, Jackals’ Revenge, HarperCollins (second in series: the British are struggling to hold their own in Greece against Germans and Italians)
W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear, A Searing Wind, Gallery (devastating culture clash that followed Europeans’ arrival in America)
Peter Golden, Comeback Love, Atria (nostalgic fiction of lost love, from the tumultuous1960s to present-day New York City)
T D Griggs, Distant Thunder, Orion (love & revenge in the late 19thC British Empire bracing itself for political opposition)
Paul Grossman, Children of Wrath, St. Martin’s (how Willi Kraus became a celebrated Jewish detective in Weimar Germany)
June Hampson, A Mother’s Journey, Orion (family tragedy set in 1940s Gosport)
Titania Hardie, The House of the Wind, Washington Square (love story of magic and healing, from modern San Francisco to medieval Tuscany)
Georgina Harding, Painter of Silence, Bloomsbury (1950: nurse meets a patient in a hospital who takes her back to when they knew each other before WWII)
C.S. Harris, When Maidens Mourn, Obsidian (Regency mystery involving aristocratic investigator Sebastian St. Cyr and the myth of King Arthur)
Kathryn Harrison, Enchantments, Random House (story of doomed love, set at the fall of Russia’s last tsar)
Dan James, Unsinkable, Arrow (conspiracy thriller set aboard the Titanic)
Sadie Jones, The Uninvited Guests, Chatto & Windus (1912: the arrival of accident survivors at a country house turn a birthday party into chaos)
Susanna Jones, When Nights Were Cold, Mantle (terrible events ensue when a group of early 20thC women defy society by planning an Antarctic expedition)
David Kowalski, The Company of the Dead, Titan (alternate history surrounding the sinking of the Titanic)
Victoria Lamb, The Queen’s Secret, Bantam (when Elizabeth I sets a young black singer to spy on the Earl of Leicester and his lover, the Countess of Essex, she uncovers a plot to murder the Queen)
Camilla MacPherson, Pictures at an Exhibition, Arrow (modern woman becomes obsessed with a woman who wrote about the National Gallery’s monthly showing of a masterpiece during WWII and begins to find parallels with her own life)
Jennifer McVeigh, The Fever Tree, Viking (love story set in 1870s South Africa)
Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage, Vintage (portrayal of a love triangle, set in Hungary between the world wars)
Siri Mitchell, The Messenger, Bethany House (novel of the Quaker faith during the American Revolution)
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles, Ecco (retelling of the legend of Achilles: a tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart)
Donna Russo Morin, The King’s Agent, Kensington (in 1527, two people follow clues to find an unearthly relic intended for the King of France which could change the balance of power throughout Europe)
Annemarie Neary, A Parachute in the Lime Tree, History Press Ireland (love story set in neutral Ireland in 1941, told from the perspective of four characters)
Glenn Patterson, The Mill For Grinding Old People Young, Faber (old man recalls his life in Belfast from 1830 to 1897)
B.N. Peacock, The Tainted Dawn: The Great War, Book I, Fireship (nautical fiction set in teh Caribbean in 1789, as England and France sit on the brink of war)
Sharon Penman, Lionheart, Macmillan (story of Richard the Lionheart)
Sophie Perinot, The Sister Queens, NAL (relationship and rivalry between two sisters from Provence, Marguerite and Eleanor, who became queens of France and England in the 13th century)
Charlotte Rogan, The Lifeboat, Virago (Grace, adrift on an overfull lifeboat after her transatlantic liner is blown up in 1914, undergoes a life-changing experience)
M.J. Rose, The Book of Lost Fragrances, Atria (secrets, intrigue, and lovers separated by time, connected through the mystical qualities of a perfume created in the days of Cleopatra)
Sean Thomas Russell, A Ship of War, Michael Joseph (naval adventure set in 1794)
Hallie Rubenhold, A Perfect Deceit, Doubleday (latest in Confessions of Henrietta Lightfoot series, about a young woman at large in 18thC England)
Simone St. James, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, NAL (women’s fiction; a ghost story set in 1920s England)
Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, Bloomsbury USA (early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers in 19th-c Western Australia)
Mary Donnarumma Sharnick, Thirst, Fireship (historical suspense set in the Venetian Republic in 1613)
Lloyd Shepherd, The English Monster, Simon & Schuster (story spanning the first slaving voyage of Capt Hawkyns in 1564 & The Ratcliff Highway Murders in 1811 London)
Jill Eileen Smith, Sarai, Revell (novel of the matriarch Sarai/Sarah)
Kieran Shields, The Truth of All Things, Crown (gothic mystery and the
heritage of witchcraft in 19th-c Maine)
D J Taylor, Secondhand Daylight, Corsair (rent collector finds himself up to his neck in trouble in 1930s Soho)
Peter Troy, May the Road Rise Up to Meet You, Knopf (epic fiction of 19th-c America, told from four distinct perspectives)
Jessica Maria Tuccelli, Glow, Viking (Georgia mountain epic about the complex bonds of mothers and daughters, from 1836 to 1941)
Ciji Ware, A Light on the Veranda, Sourcebooks (historical time-slip novel set in Natchez, Mississippi in 1830-40 & contemporary)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them, Virago (reissue of 1948 novel set in a medieval convent in Norfolk during the Black Death)
Jacqueline Winspear, A Lesson in Secrets, Allison & Busby (1932: Maisie Dobbs is sent undercover to investigate suspicious activities at a Cambridge college when its principal is murdered)
Val Wood, The Harbour Girl, Doubleday (saga set in 1880s Scarborough)
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Commedia della Morte, Tor (Count of St. Germain vampire novel set during the Terror of the French Revolution)
[top]
April 2012
Jeffrey Archer, The Sins of the Father, St. Martin’s (part 2 of his multigenerational saga of fame and fortune, set in WW2 Britain and America)
Elizabeth Bailey, The Deathly Portent, Berkley Prime Crime (Georgian-era mystery centering on witchcraft in the English village of Witherley)
April Bernard, Miss Fuller, Steerforth (literary biographical fiction about Margaret Fuller, mid-19th c feminist and orator)
Marcel Beyer, Kaltenberg, HMH (a charismatic scientist and his dark secrets, set in 1940s-50s Germany)
Stewart Binns, Crusade, Michael Joseph (second in series set during the Norman Conquest & its aftermath)
Moonyeen Blakey, The Assassin’s Wife, Fireship (a woman with second sight fights to save two noble boys imprisoned in a tower in 15th-c England)
William Boyd, Waiting for Sunrise, Harper (deception and betrayal in 1913 Vienna)
Barbara Taylor Bradford, Letter from a Stranger, St. Martin’s (family secrets and betrayal, from WWII Berlin to Istanbul to the present day)
Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders, Touchstone (Oscar Wilde murder mystery)
William Broderick, The Day of the Lie, Little, Brown (latest Father Anselm mystery set after WWI)
Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden, Corvus (returning to Spain to renovate a villa left to her by her mother, Emma unlocks secrets from the Spanish Civil War)
DeAnna Cameron, Dancing at the Chance, Berkley (a chorus girl in turn-of-the-century NY is pulled into the intrigues of the city’s elite)
Mark Chadbourn, The Devil’s Looking Glass, Bantam (latest in supernatural adventure series set in Elizabethan England)
Sandra Dallas, True Sisters, St. Martin’s (novel about Mormon converts’ trek across the desert to Salt Lake City from Iowa, from the viewpoint of four women)
Anna Dean, A Woman of Consequence, Minotaur (latest Dido Kent mystery set in Regency England)
Vicki Delany, Gold Mountain: A Klondike Mystery, Dundurn (Fiona MacGillivray mystery set in 1897 Vancouver and Alaska)
Michelle Diener, Keeper of the King’s Secrets, Gallery (Tudor court intrigue featuring Henry VIII’s deadliest courtier and a female artist)
PC Doherty, The Mysterium, Minotaur (latest in Sir Hugh Corbett mystery series set in 1304, about the murder of a chief justice in the King’s court)
Maria Dueñas, Haute Couture, Viking (seamstress becomes a British spy in Morocco in WWII)
Gordon Ferris, Bitter Water, Corvus (latest in crime series set in post-WWII Glasgow)
Tony Hays, The Stolen Bride, Forge (Arthurian mystery, 4th in series, about a murdered king, his young and defenseless widow, and a one-armed scribe in search of his killer)
Kathy Hepinstall, Blue Asylum, HMH (a plantation wife wrongly sent to an asylum falls in love with a war-haunted Confederate soldier)
Susanna Kearsley, Mariana, Sourcebooks (time-slip novel set in the present day and in 17th-c England)
S. K. Keogh, The Prodigal, Fireship Press (nautical historical fiction, a story of relentless pursuit, betrayal, and revenge)
Philip Kerr, Prague Fatale, Putnam (a Bernie Gunther thriller set in 1941 Prague; a man on Heydrich’s staff is murdered)
Jane Kirkpatrick, Where Lilacs Still Bloom, WaterBrook (fictional account of a real pioneer housewife, circa 1900, whose love for flowers changed the lives of those around her)
Giles Kristian, The Bleeding Land, Bantam (first in a trilogy set in the English Civil War)
Maureen Lee, After The War Is Over, Orion (women trying adapt to life in Liverpool after WWII)
Kelly Long, Arms of Love, Thomas Nelson (Amish novel set in 1777 Pennsylvania, when they first came to America)
Elizabeth Loupas, The Flower Reader, NAL (a gifted young woman negotiates a maze of murder and conspiracy in the court of Mary, Queen of Scots)
Jim Lynch, Truth Like the Sun, Knopf (cat-and-mouse story of urban intrigue in 1962 and 2001 Seattle)
Anna MacLean, Louisa and the Crystal Gazer, NAL (third Louisa May Alcott historical mystery)
Kenneth Macleod, The Incident, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (interconnected stories of a present-day lifeguard, his grandfather on a torpedoed ship in WWII, & a Cold War refugee)
Susan Elia MacNeal, Mr Churchill’s Secretary, Bantam (Maggie Hope, Mr Churchill’s newest typist, balances her duty to King and Country with her need for survival; mystery)
Gillian Mears, Foal’s Bread, Allen & Unwin (pre-WWI story of a family in a rural community in New South Wales that revolves around the land and the local showjumping circuit)
Jude Morgan, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, Headline (story of Shakespeare)
Laura Moriarty, The Chaperone, Michael Joseph (girl’s life changes when she becomes chaperone to a young woman hungry for stardom, set in 1922)
Dora Levy Mossanen, The Last Romanov, Sourcebooks (centers on a wise old beauty whose time spent with the Russian Imperial family has haunted her entire life)
Andrew Motion, Silver, Jonathan Cape (sequel to Treasure Island)
Robert Olmstead, The Coldest Night, Algonquin (fast-moving love affair that changes the course of a boy’s life, set in 1950 US and Korea)
Regina O’Melveny, The Book of Madness and Cures, Little Brown (literary fiction about the adventures of a female midwife in Renaissance Venice)
S.J. Parris, Sacrilege, HarperCollins UK & Doubleday US (historical thriller set in 16th-c England, centered on the highly secretive cult of Saint Thomas Becket)
Anne Perry, Dorchester Terrace, Ballantine (Charlotte & Thomas Pitt Victorian mystery in which they race to find a traitor within Special Branch)
Amanda Quick, Crystal Gardens, Putnam (Victorian romance/thriller with a touch of the paranormal)
Kate Quinn, Empress of the Seven Hills, Berkley / UK title Empress of Rome, Headline (sequel to Mistress of Rome, epic saga set during the reign of Emperor Trajan)
Peter Ransley, The Price, Harper UK (2nd in Tom Neave trilogy set in 1647)
Ron Rash, The Cove, Ecco (nature and love and the darkness of superstition and fear, set in Appalachia during World War I)
Anthony Riches, The Leopard Sword, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Roman Empire army adventure series)
Imogen Robertson, Circle of Shadows, Headline (thriller set in Germany in 1784 when Harriet sets out to investigate a murder of which her brother-in-law is charged)
D.J. Taylor, Derby Day, Pegasus (romance and rivalry, gambling and greed, set on the Epsom Downs in the 19th century)
Penny Vincenzi, More Than You Know, Doubleday (custody battle over a little girl, set against the glossy backdrop of the magazine and advertising worlds in 1960s London)
Charlotte Rogan, The Lifeboat, Little Brown (the sinking of an ocean liner in 1914 leaves a newly married woman battling for survival)
Alex Scarrow, The Candle Man, Orion (story linking the Titanic and Jack the Ripper)
Elif Shafat, Honour, Viking (multi-generational story of Kurdish women, ending in London in 1978)
Dan Smith, The Child Thief, Orion (thriller involving a lynching and a kidnapped child in the Ukraine in 1930)
M L Stedman, The Light Between Oceans, Doubleday (lighthouse keeper and his wife on an island off W Australia in the 1920s, bring up a baby found on a dinghy with the body of a dead man, later discovering someone is looking for the child)
Nicola Upson, Fear in the South, Faber (Josephine Tey and murders connected with Hitchcock films, 1936)
Jack Whyte, Rebel, Sphere (story of William Wallace, first in Braveheart Chronicles)
Jacqueline Winspear, Elegy for Eddie, Harper (Maisie Dobbs investigates the murder of a slow-witted man in 1933 England)
Ling Zhang, Gold Mountain Blues, Corvus (story of a Chinese family from 1879 Opium war in China to modern Canada)
Youssef Ziedan, Azazeel, Atlantic (a 5thC Coptic monk’s journey from upper Egypt to Alexandria to Syria in a time of upheaval for Christianity)
[top]
May 2012
Tessa Afshar, Harvest of Rubies, River North (Biblical-era fiction about a female scribe at the Persian court)
A L Berridge, Into the Valley of Death, Michael Joseph (first in new series set in the Crimean War)
Rachel Billington, Maria and the Admiral, Orion (intriguing relationship between Admiral Thomas Cochrane and Maria Graham, an Englishwoman he met in Valparaiso in 1822)
Laurent Binet, HHhH, FSG & Harvill Secker (assassins of Reinhard Heydrich in WWII Prague)
Robin Blake, A Dark Anatomy, Minotaur (historical mystery set in 1740 Lancashire)
D.L. Bogdan, The Sumerton Women, Kensington (Tudor-era family saga)
Jane Borodale, The Knot, HarperPress (love, rural life, and gardening in remote Somerset between 1565-78)
Nick Brown, Agent of Rome: The Imperial Banner, Hodder & Stoughton (second in adventure series set in the eastern Roman Empire in the 3rdC AD)
Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears, Knopf (dual-narrative literary fiction; a modern-day museum conservator uncovers an old story while restoring a 19th-c automaton)
Meg Clothier, The Empress, Century (Young French princess wed to the son of the Emperor of Constantinople is widowed and later finds true love just as the Crusaders’ siege of Constantinople starts)
Lindsey Davis, Master and God, St. Martin’s (epic of 1st-century Rome and the Emperor Domitian)
Victor del Arbol, The Sadness of the Samurai, Holt (historical thriller; a betrayal and murder in pro-Nazi Spain spark a struggle for power that grips a family for generations)
Donna Douglas, The Nightingale Girls, Arrow (first in a series about a group of girls who sign up to be nurses in 1936 in London’s East End)
David Downing, Lehrter Station, Soho (a John Russell post-WWII thriller in which he gets caught between Soviets and Americans)
Nataša Dragnić, Every Day, Every Hour, Viking (novel of star-crossed love, set in 1960s Croatia and decades later in Paris)
Ed Falco, The Family Corleone, Grand Central (Godfather-themed novel set in Depression-era NYC)
Robert Fabbri, Vespasian: Rome’s Executioner, Corvus (second in series: AD30 Vespasian is caught up in the deadly politics of a disintegrating empire headed by a mad emperor)
Nicole Galland, I, Iago, Morrow Paperbacks (recrafting of Shakespeare’s Othello)
Jane Gardam, Crusoe’s Daughter, Europa (a young woman’s life along the Irish Sea during the 20th c)
Robert Goolrick, Heading Out to Wonderful, Algonquin (about the dark side of passion in mid-century America in a small Virginia town)
Genevieve Graham, Sound of the Heart, Berkley (historical romance set in the 18th-c Scottish Highlands and in North America)
Juliet Grey, Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow, Ballantine (part 2 of Marie Antoinette trilogy)
Ravi Howard, Driving the King, Harper (novel of Jim Crow Alabama featuring Nat King Cole’s driver)
Jane Johnson, The Sultan’s Wife, Viking (Englishwoman captured by Barbary corsairs finds love & adventure in 17thC Morocco)
Douglas C. Jones, Roman, NAL (Western novel set in post-Civil War Leavenworth, Kansas)
Sherry Jones, Four Sisters, All Queens, Gallery (about four 13th-c noble sisters from Provence, each of whom became queen of a different land)
Ismail Kadare, The Fall of the Stone City, Canongate (what happened at dinner in Albania with a local doctor and Nazi officers is connected to a later conspiracy to undermine Socialism)
Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage, Simon & Schuster US & UK (American undercover agent in Istanbul in 1945)
Gabrielle Kimm, The Courtesan’s Lover, Sourcebooks (a courtesan and her two young daughters in Renaissance-era Ferrara)
Eleanor Kuhns, A Simple Murder, Minotaur (the murder of a young Shaker woman in 1796 Maine)
Lois Leveen, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, Morrow Paperbacks (based on the true story of Mary Bowser, a former slave who became a Union spy during the US Civil War)
Nell Leyshon, The Colour of Milk, Fig Tree (1830s: an illiterate farm girl tries to tell what happened to her when she worked for a vicar’s invalid wife)
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams, Corsair (collage of stories dreamed by Einstein in 1905)
Malcolm MacDonald, Strange Music, Severn House (sequel to Dower House; concentration camp survivors join a society for communal living in postwar England)
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies, 4th Estate/Henry Holt (the sequel to Wolf Hall portrays the destruction of Anne Boleyn)
Simon Mawer, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, Little, Brown (story of young woman who volunteers for SOE & is parachuted into occupied France during WWII)
Michael McGarrity, Hard Country, Dutton (novel about the rough-hewn men and courageous women of the American Southwest, 1875-1918)
James McGee, Hawkwood: A Regency Crime Thriller, Pegasus (first US release for Hawkwood action-adventure Regency crime series)
Alex Miller, Autumn Laing, Allen & Unwin (in old age a woman reflects on the 1930s artistic circle she created and the effect of one artist on both their lives)
Danny Miller, The Gilded Edge, Robinson (2nd in detective series set in 1960s London)
Alan Monaghan, The Soldier’s Farewell, Macmillan (last in trilogy set during WWI and the Irish war for independence in 1921)
Meg Mitchell Moore, So Far Away, Little Brown (a wayward teenager and a lonely archivist’s lives come together over the reading of a 1920s diary of an Irish servant)
Toni Morrison, Home, Knopf (Korean war vet confronts racial tension in 1950s America)
Juliet Nicolson, Abdication, Atria (novel set in England, 1936, the year of Edward VIII’s abdication)
Bernadette Pajer, Fatal Induction, Poisoned Pen Press (2nd in Professor Bradshaw historical mystery series set in 1901 Seattle; sequel to A Spark of Death)
Oliver Poetzsch, The Dark Monk, HMH (historical mystery set in 17th-c Bavaria; sequel to The Hangman’s Daughter)
Sara Poole, The Borgia Mistress, St. Martin’s Griffin (historical thriller with Borgia court poisoner Francesca Giordano)
David Rain, The Gravity of Americans, Atlantic (bookish boy makes flamboyant friend at school and later discovers a darker side to him in frenetic 1920s New York)
Matt Rees, A Name in Blood, Corvus (the disappearance of Caravaggio in early 17thC Rome ruled by the Borgias)
James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, Bloomsbury USA & UK (first in the Grantchester Mysteries spanning 1953 to 1981, Rev Chambers investigates murder in the year of the Queen’s Coronation)
Alex Rutherford, Empire of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne, Headline (fourth in a series, set in 17thC India)
Steven Saylor, The Seven Wonders, Minotaur (prequel to Roma Sub Rosa series, following 18-year-old Gordianus the Finder as he visits the Seven Wonders of the World)
Simon Scarrow,[title TBC], Headline (adventure set during the Siege of Malta by the Turks in 1565)
Angelika Schrobsdorff, You Are Not Like Other Mothers, Europa (a woman who refuses to be imprisoned by society’s rules, spanning the 20th-c’s first half)
M C Scott, Eagle of the Twelfth, Bantam (latest in 1stC AD Emperor’s Spy series: band of Roman legionaries avenge a catastrophic defeat by Judaean rebels)
Lynn Shepherd, The Solitary House, Delacorte (historical thriller of 1850 London)
Rosie Sultan, Helen Keller in Love, Viking (the little-known romance between Keller and Peter Fagan)
Victoria Thompson, Murder on Fifth Avenue, Berkley Prime Crime (gaslight murder mystery set in late 19th-c NYC)
Christopher Tilghman, The Right-Hand Shore, FSG (race, family, and forbidden love in the post-Civil War era on Chesapeake Bay)
Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker’s Wife, Harper (multigenerational love story of Italy and America, from 1912 through post-WWII)
Wendy Wallace, The Painted Bridge, Simon & Schuster (1859: a newly-married woman is incarcerated in an asylum and finds her attempts to be released are thwarted although she isn’t insane)
Alison Weir, A Dangerous Inheritance, Hutchinson (Lady Catherine Grey, imprisoned for having a child that might threaten Elizabeth I’s title, finds papers relating to Richard III’s bastard daughter and the mystery of the Princes in the Tower)
Beatriz Williams, Overseas, Putnam (novel of a love that transcends time, moving between 2007 and the Great War)
Felicity Young, The Anatomy of Death, Berkley (historical mystery featuring England’s first female autopsy surgeon, set in the early 20th c)
Richard Zimler, The Seventh Gate, Overlook (literary murder mystery set in 1932 Berlin)
[top]
June 2012
Rosemary Agonito, Miss Lizzie’s War, Globe Pequot (Civil War novel about Elizabeth Van Lew, who risked her life to form an underground Unionist network and spied for General Grant in Richmond, the heart of the Confederacy)
Anita Amirrezvani, Equal of the Sun, Scribner (power, loyalty, and love in the royal court of 17th-c Iran)
Daniel Arsand, Lovers, Europa (literary fiction about a man and his affair with a nobleman in Louis XV’s court)
Larry Bjornson, Wide Open, Berkley (debut novel about the historical evolution of Abilene, Kansas)
Richard Blake, The Ghosts of Athens, Hodder & Stoughton (in AD 612, Senator Aelric of the Roman Empire finds himself facing murder and worse in corrupt Athens)
Francesca Brill, The Harbour, Bloomsbury (war, love & culpability in 1940s Hong Kong & New York)
Eli Brown, Cinnamon and Gunpowder, FSG (swashbuckling epicurean adventure set on the high seas in 1819)
Sandra Byrd, The Secret Keeper, Howard (a novel of Kateryn Parr)
Clare Clark, Beautiful Lies, Harvill Secker (secrets of politician’s wife in 1887 London during time of political stirrings)
Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics, Bloomsbury (adventure with pirates, Byron, Shelley & Mary his fiancée in Geneva and Romania, early 19thC)
Tatiana de Rosnay, The House I Loved, Macmillan (woman resists the destruction of her home during Napoleon III’s renovation of Paris, 1869)
William Dietrich, The Treasure of Montezuma, Harper (Ethan Gage adventure in which he searches for Montezuma’s lost treasure in the early 19th c)
C.W. Gortner, The Queen’s Vow, Ballantine (biographical fiction about the young Isabella, Queen of Castile in the 15th century)
E A Dineley, The Death of Lyndon Wilder, Corsair (new governess finds her charge’s household fraught with tension after the death of the eldest son in the Napoleonic Wars)
Lesley Downer, Across A Bridge of Dreams, Bantam (As Japan enters the modern era in the 1870s, star-crossed lovers find themselves tested to the limit)
Francine du Plessix Gray, The Queen’s Lover, Penguin Press (the untold love affair between Count Alex von Fersen and Marie Antoinette)
Richard Ford, Canada, Bloomsbury (family escapes from Montana to Canada after robbing a bank in 1956)
Sue Gee, [title TBC], Headline (story of four generations of an English family beginning in 1947)
Ann Granger, A Particular Eye for Villainy, Headline (4 th in husband-and-wife Victorian crime series)
Alex Grecian, The Yard, Michael Joseph/Putnam (London in 1889, after Jack the Ripper, is again in the grip of murder)
Susanna Gregory, Murder by the Book, Sphere (latest Matthew Bartholomew mystery set in 14thC Cambridge)
Julia Gregson, Jasmine Nights, Touchstone (novel set in Cairo, Alexandria and Istanbul in 1942)
Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill, Grove (sequel to The Secret River, set in frontier Australia)
Tracy Groot, Flame of Resistance, Tyndale
Ruth Hamilton, Lights of Liverpool, Macmillan (three connected families in post-war Liverpool)
Deborah Harkness, Shadow of Night, Headline (sequel to A Discovery of Witches: going back to 1590, couple fall in with a group of radicals, The School of Night)
Susan Higginbotham, Her Highness, The Traitor, Sourcebooks (story of Jane Grey, her mother, and her mother-in-law)
Michael Jecks, City of Fools and Fiends, Simon & Schuster (latest in 14thC Baldwin de Furnshill mystery series)
Suzanne Joinson, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar, Bloomsbury USA (two lady adventurers along the Silk Road in 1923, juxtaposed against a present-day London story)
Daniel Kalla, The Far Side of the Sky, Forge (on the eve of WWII, a Jewish family’s last hope lies in Shanghai)
Ben Kane, Spartacus: The Gladiator, St. Martin’s (adventure in ancient Rome)
Alma Katsu, The Reckoning, Gallery (2nd in historical/paranormal trilogy set in colonial/modern New England)
Anna Keesey, Little Century, FSG (debut novel about the range wars in the American West at the turn of the century)
G W Kent, One Blood, Robinson (murder mystery set in the Solomon Islands in the 1960s)
Mercedes Lackey, Home from the Sea, DAW (fantasy novel, part of the Elemental Masters series set in a magical Edwardian Britain)
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Dream of the Celt, FSG (novel about Roger Casement, early 20th-c human rights pioneer)
Elizabeth Loupas, The Flower Reader, Preface (dangerous secrets in a maze of murder & conspiracy as Mary Queen of Scots comes to reign in divided Scotland)
Andrew Martin, The Baghdad Railway Club, Faber (latest in railway detective Jim Stringer series: Jim Investigates treason in Baghdad in 1917)
Alice Mattison, When We Argued All Night, Harper Perennial (three generations in Brooklyn, from 1936 to 1986 and after)
Catriona McPherson, Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for Murder, Minotaur (amateur sleuth Dandy is caught between two feuding families; set in early 20th-c Scotland)
Laura Moriarty, The Chaperone, Riverhead (about the woman who chaperoned Louise Brooks to NYC in 1922, and the summer that changed them both)
Christopher Nicole, Queen of Glory, Severn House (in 19th-c India, Lakshmi Bai, the recently deposed Rani of Jhansi, is embroiled in the developing Indian Mutiny)
Anne O’Brien, The King’s Concubine, NAL (novel of Alice Perrers, mistress to Edward III in medieval England)
Julia Quinn, A Night Like This, Piatkus (historical romance described as “Jane Austen meets Bridget Jones”)
Steven Saylor, The Seven Wonders, Constable (prequel to Gordianus the Finder series: young Gordianus, not yet The Finder, sets out to visit all Seven Wonders of the World)
Jeff Shaara, A Blaze of Glory, Ballantine (novel of the Battle of Shiloh)
Lloyd Shepherd, The English Monster, Atria (historical thriller in which two tales converge: the investigation into a brutal series of murders in 1811 London and the seafaring adventures of a young man in Elizabethan England)
Elizabeth Speller, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, HMH (dark family secrets are unearthed in 1911 England)
Jane Sullivan, Little People, Allen & Unwin (the story of midget General Tom Thumb’s 1870s tour of Australia)
Diana Wallis Taylor, Mary Magdalene: A Novel, Revell (Biblical fiction)
Carrie Tiffany, Mateship With Birds, Picador (1n 1950s Australia lonely farmer meets a woman whilst birdwatching and boundaries are threatened when he decides to teach her fatherless young son about sex)
Charles Todd, An Unmarked Grave, Morrow (4th Bess Crawford mystery about a battlefield nurse in WWI England)
Henry Venmore-Rowland, The Last Caesar, Bantam (story set in Rome during the Year of the Four Emperors, AD 69)
Jess Walter, The Beautiful Ruins, Harper (humor and romance, from the stage set of Cleopatra in 1962 Italy to modern Hollywood)
Kaki Warner, Bride of the High Country, Berkley (historical romantic fiction about a new bride in the Old West, 3rd in series)
Katherine Webb, The Unseen, Morrow Paperbacks (mystery and spiritualism in 1911 England)
Elizabeth Wilhide, Ashenden, Fig Tree (story of England through the fortunes of a Palladian house & the people connected with it from 1775 to present day)
[top]
July 2012
Annamaria Alfieri, Invisible Country, Minotaur (murder mystery in war-torn 19th-c Paraguay)
Belinda Alexandra, Tuscan Rose, Simon & Schuster (romance and redemption set in Mussolini’s Italy)
Roberto Ampuero, The Neruda Case, Riverhead (private eye novel set against the backdrop of the Chilean coup in the ’70s)
J. I. Baker, The Empty Glass, Dutton (conspiracy thriller about the death of Marilyn Monroe)
John Banville, Ancient Light, Viking (Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s Ireland)
Kim Barnes, In the Kingdom of Men, Hutchinson (an American marriage implodes in the heat & corruption of 1960s Saudi Arabia)
Chris Bohjalian, The Sandcastle Girls, Doubleday (following the Armenian genocide of 1915, a young Mount Holyoke grad travels to Syria to care for ill refugees)
Joanna Brady, The Woman at the Light, St. Martin’s Griffin (in 1839, a Southern woman overcomes tragedy with an unexpected new love)
Simon Brett, Blotto, Twinks and the Bootlegger’s Moll, Constable (4th in fun detective series set in the 1920s)
Rebecca Cantrell, A City of Broken Glass, Forge (Hannah Vogel mystery, as she’s trapped in Berlin with her son just before Kristallnacht)
Pauline A. Chen, The Red Chamber, Knopf US & Virago UK (orphan girl living in an aristocratic household in 18th-C Beijing, finds herself embroiled in intrigue and hidden passions which reach all the way to the Imperial palace)
G W Dahlquist, The Chemickal Marriage, Viking (final part of fantastical period trilogy that began with The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters)
Stella Duffy, The Purple Shroud, Virago (second novel about Theodora who is now Empress alongside her husband Justinian and must deal with terrifying riots and vengeful enemies)
Barbara Erskine, River of Destiny, HarperCollins UK (story spanning Anglo Saxon Britain, Victorian Suffolk and the present day)
Jennie Fields, The Age of Desire, Pamela Dorman/Viking (Edith Wharton and the scandalous love affair that threatened her closest friendship)
James Forrester, The Final Sacrament, Headline (1566, a man with a secret document is spied on by Francis Walsingham and goes on the run from a vengeful Lady Percy who hates him for having betrayed the Catholic cause)
Alan Furst, Mission to Paris, Random House (European WWII spy thriller)
Posie Graeme-Evans, The Island House, Atria (young archaeologist unearths ancient secrets, a tragic romance, and Viking treasure on a remote Scottish island)
Deborah Harkness, Shadow of Night, Viking (epic of romance and witchcraft, sequel to A Discovery of Witches, involving time-travel to Elizabethan London)
Karen Harper, Mistress of Mourning, NAL (in 1501 London, a young woman is sent to investigate the death of Prince Arthur on behalf of Henry VII’s queen)
Elizabeth Hay, Alone in the Classroom, MacLehose Press, (teacher in a Canadian prairie school teaches a backward boy to read whilst being observed by the strangely-behaved principal and two murders ensue)
Victoria Hislop, The Thread, Harper Paperbacks (multi-period novel of Thessaloniki, Greece, set in 1917 and 2007)
D.B. Jackson, Thieftaker, Tor (historical fantasy set in colonial Boston)
Ryan David Jahn, The Last Tomorrow, Pan Macmillan (murder story set in 1952 Los Angeles involving a crime boss and a comic book creator)
David John, Flight from Berlin, Harper (historical thriller set in 1936 Berlin, during the Olympic Games)
Tabish Khair, The Thing About Thugs, HMH (macabre novel about an Indian man’s misadventures in Victorian London)
Barbara Lazar, The Pillow Book of the Flower Samurai, Headline (prostitutes and Samurais in 12thC Japan)
Francine Mathews, Jack 1939, Riverhead (thriller; Jack Kennedy is sent to Europe by FDR for a secret mission)
Carol McCleary, The Formula for Murder, Forge (Nellie Bly mystery in which she hunts down a murderer in England)
Pat McIntosh, The Fourth Crow, Constable (10th in crime series set in medieval Glasgow)
Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure, Harper (in 1871 NYC, a wealthy socialite aims to stop the myth that syphilis can be cured by deflowering a virgin)
Frances McNamara, Death at Woods Hole, Allium Press of Chicago (4th Emily Cabot mystery set on Cape Cod in 1894)
Lorenzo Mediano, The Frost On His Shoulders, Europa (in the isolated Pyrenees in the 1930s, an aging teacher reconstructs a bloody and tragic event)
The Medieval Murderers, The First Murder, Simon & Schuster (5 Interlinked stories set in 1199 by Karen Maitland, Ian Morson, Philip Gooden, Susanna Gregory & Bernard Knight)
Michelle Moran, The Second Empress, Quercus (story of Empress Josephine, her daughter Hortense & Napoleon’s sister Pauline)
William Napier, The Red Sea, Orion (latest in Clash of Empires series set in the 16th-C Mediterranean)
Brandy Purdy, The Queen’s Pleasure, Kensington (Tudor fiction about Robert Dudley and Amy Robsart)
David Rain, The Heat of the Sun, Atlantic (in 1920s New York a bookish boy discovers a dark side to his daring, exotic friend)
Austin Ratner, The Jump Artist, Viking (Austria, 1928. A young artist stands unjustly accused of murdering his father. Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann speak out on his behalf. Sigmund Freud is called to testify)
Matt Rees, A Name in Blood, Corvus (the dangerous life and loves of the 17th –C artist Caravaggio)
Brenda Reid, Heavenly’s Child, Orion (romance of runaway girls set in Crete in the 1960s)
Kim Rendfeld, The Cross and the Dragon, Fireship (tale of love, revenge, and sacrifice set in the early years of Charlemagne’s reign, based on characters from “The Song of Roland”)
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Prisoner of Heaven, Harper (sequel to The Shadow of the Wind, humor and suspense in 1950s and WWII-era Barcelona)
Alex Rutherford, Ruler of the World, St. Martin’s (3rd in adventure series set in the Moghul Empire)
Kate Sedley, The Tintern Treasure, Severn House (Roger the Chapman medieval mystery)
Harry Sidebottom, The Caspian Gates: Warrior of Rome Book 4, Overlook (historical adventure set in 262 AD)
Harry Sidebottom, The Wolves of the North, Michael Joseph (latest in military adventure series set in 3rd-C Roman Empire)
Peter Tremayne, Behold a Pale Horse, Minotaur (Sister Fidelma mystery of 7th-c Ireland)
V. E. Ulett, Captain Blackwell’s Prize, Fireship (romantic adventure from the days of wooden ships and iron men)
Wendy Wallace, The Painted Bridge, Scribner (a new bride is institutionalized against her will in 1859 London)
Katherine Webb, A Half-Forgotten Song, Orion (girl falls in love with artist in Dorset in 1937, leading to a secret revealed decades later)
James Wilde, Hereward: The Devil’s Army, Bantam (2nd in series: 1067, Hereward resists encroaching Normans in E Anglian Fens)
Joan Wolf, This Scarlet Cord, Thomas Nelson (Biblical fiction, the love story of Rahab)
Donna VanLiere, The Good Dream, St. Martin’s (an unlikely path to motherhood, set in 1950 Tennessee)
Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster, Viking (historical thriller and love story set in 17th-c Manhattan)
[top]
August 2012
Naomi Alderson, The Liars’ Gospel, Viking (a re-imagining of the death of Christ)
Jenny Barden, Mistress of the Sea, Ebury (an epic, romantic, swash-buckling adventure set at the time of Francis Drake)
Pat Barker, Toby’s Room, Hamish Hamilton (a brother and sister, friends and confidants, are sharers of a dark secret, carried from the summer of 1912 into the battlefields of France and wartime London in 1917)
M C Beaton, Refining Felicity, Perfecting Fiona, Enlightening Delilah, Canvas (reissue of Regency romance series)
Robin Blake, Dark Waters, Pan Macmillan (Preston, 1741: coroner Cragg and doctor Fidelis investigate a publican’s murder on the eve of a General Election, second in series)
Alaric Bond, The Patriot’s Fate, Fireship (nautical fiction; 5th entry in Bond’s “Fighting Sail” series, set in 1798 as Ireland rises up against years of repression and injustice)
Joseph Connolly, England’s Lane, Quercus (the lives of three shopkeeping couples in winter 1959)
Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist, Harper (in turn-of-the-20th-century Washington State, a solitary orchardist encounters two pregnant girls whose plight transforms his life forever)
Debra Dean, The Mirrored World, Harper (novel of St. Xenia, 18th-century saint in the Russian Orthodox Church)
Rebecca Dean, The Shadow Queen, Broadway (novel of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor)
Suzanne Desrochers, Bride of New France, Norton (the story of a fille du roi, a Parisian orphan sent to marry a farmer in Quebec in the 17th century)
Ivan Doig, The Bartender’s Tale, Riverhead (one-of-a-kind father and his precocious son, set in 1960 Montana)
James Douglas, The Isis Covenant, Bantam, (historical adventure set in AD64, 1945 & 2009, beginning with a Roman centurion seeking a mythical treasure)
Selden Edwards, The Lost Prince, Dutton (sequel to The Little Book, a time-bending novel about a privileged young woman in 1890s Boston)
Kate Emerson, The King’s Damsel, Gallery (about King Henry VIII’s mistress, when he was married to Anne Boleyn)
Colin Falconer, Stigmata, Corvus (1205: As the brutal Cathar crusades sweep through France, a Christian knight and a Cathar woman must choose between God, love and honour)
Kim Fay, The Map of Lost Memories, Ballantine (character-centered female adventure in 1920s Shanghai and Cambodia)
Katie Flynn, A Sixpenny Christmas, Century (2 women give birth in the same hospital and support each other in hard times: saga set in post-WW2 Liverpool & Snowdonia)
David Gillham, City of Women, Amy Einhorn (a seemingly perfect Nazi soldier’s wife and her clandestine life)
Amanda Grange, Dear Mr. Darcy, Berkley (retells Pride & Prejudice through Darcy’s eyes)
Philippa Gregory, The Kingmaker’s Daughter, Touchstone (the story of Anne and Isabel Neville, during the Wars of the Roses)
Patricia Harman, The Midwife of Hope River, Harper (Appalachian midwife in the 1930s struggling against disease, poverty, and prejudices-and her own haunting past)
Pamela Hartshorne, Time’s Echo, Pan Macmillan (a woman trying to escape memories of the Boxing Day tsunami, finds herself in York, haunted by an Elizabethan girl drowned as a witch)
James Holland, [untitled], Bantam (latest Jack Tanner military adventure set in North Africa in 1943
Duong Thu Huong, The Zenith, Viking (imagined account of Ho Chi Minh’s final months at an isolated mountaintop compound in Vietnam)
Douglas Jackson, Avenger of Rome, Bantam (in this follow-up to Hero of Rome, set in Nero’s Rome, Verres is sent from Rome with the army to fight the Parthians)
Ben Kane, Spartacus: Rebellion, Preface (2nd of two novels about the famous slave revolt in 1st-C BC Rome)
Jessie Keane, Nameless, Pan Macmillan (1941: mixed-race girl is deserted by her aristocratic lover and has to give away the twins she has by him. When she grows rich she tries to find them)
Vincent Lam, The Headmaster’s Wager, Hogarth (suspenseful literary fiction set against the turmoil of the Vietnam War)
Karen Maitland, The Falcons of Fire and Ice, Michael Joseph (dark tale set in Portugal and Iceland during the 16th-C Inquisition)
Michelle Moran, The Second Empress, Crown (a novel of Napoleon’s court)
Andrew Motion, Silver, Crown (sequel to Treasure Island)
Maryanne O’Hara, Cascade, Viking (literary fiction about an artist and reluctant new wife in 1930s Massachusetts)
Nicky Pellegrino, When In Rome, Orion (romance set in 1950s Rome)
Mary Hart Perry, The Wild Princess, Morrow Paperbacks (novel about Queen Victoria’s “wild child” daughter, Princess Louise)
Lucinda Riley, The Light Behind The Window, Pan Macmillan (female British agent contacts the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, with repercussions in the present)
Tim Severin, Saxon: The Book of Dreams, Pan Macmillan (a minor 8th-C Saxon prince who has prophetic dreams is exiled to the court of Charlemagne who sends him to spy on the Saracens in Spain)
Enid Shomer, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, Simon & Schuster (Florence Nightingale andGustave Flaubert, both travelling in Egypt in 1849, form a deep friendship)
Joanna Campbell Slan, Death of a Schoolgirl, Berkley Prime Crime (in which Jane Eyre, married to her Mr Rochester, turns detective)
M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans, Scribner (in 1926, a Western Australian couple finds a boat washed ashore with an infant and a dead man)
Andrew Swanston, The King’s Spy, Bantam (bookseller becomes and spy and cryptographer in the English Civil War)
Sandi Tan, The Black Isle, Grand Central (epic about a woman’s coming of age amid ghosts and the forces of modernity, from 1920s Shanghai to Indonesia to the present)
Gail Tsukiyama, A Hundred Flowers, St. Martin’s (an ordinary family faces extraordinary times at the start of the Chinese Cultural Revolution)
Jeane Westin, The Spymaster’s Daughter, NAL (danger and intrigue in the court of Elizabeth I, featuring Walsingham’s daughter Lady Frances Sidney)
Jeanette Winterson, The Daylight Gate, Hammer (story of the Pendle Witches set in 16thC Lancashire)
[top]
September 2012
Maggie Anton, Rav Hisda’s Daughter: Book 1, Apprentice, Plume (love and faith in 3rd-century Babylonia)
James Aitcheson, The Splintered Kingdom, Preface (2nd in series set during the Norman Conquest featuring a Norman soldier begins in 1069 in the Welsh Marches and ends with the conqueror’s brutal campaign known as the Harrying of the North)
Bernardo Atxaga, Seven Houses in France, FSG (brooding novel of colonial intrigue in
the Congo, circa 1903)
Jose Barreiro, Taino, Fulcrum (retelling of the elderly Taino man who, in his youth, was adopted by Christopher Columbus and saw history unfold; seen from the Indian viewpoint)
M C Beaton, Finessing Clarissa, Animating Maria, Marrying Harriet Canvas (reissue of Regency romance series)
Libba Bray, The Diviners, Atom (Evie arrives in 1920s New York to find that it isn’t all flappers and parties – girls are being murdered and Evie has a secret power)
Christopher Buehlman, Those Across the River, Ace (eerie horror novel set in post-WWI Georgia)
T.C. Boyle, San Miguel, Viking (three women’s lives on a California island, 1880s-1930s)
Jean Burnett, Who Needs Mr Darcy?, Sphere (the further adventures of Lydia Wickham – nee Bennet – in Regency-era London following her early widowhood)
Christian Cameron, [Untitled], Orion (latest in Ancient Greek military adventure series)
Clare Clark, Beautiful Lies, HMH (in late Victorian London, the exotic wife of a Scottish aristocrat is not what she seems)
Bernard Cornwell, 1356, HarperCollins (latest in Thomas Hookton series set during the wars with France involves a mythical sword and culminates in the Battle of Poitiers in 1356)
Diane M. Denton, A House Near Luccoli, All Things That Matter Press (set in Genoa, Italy in 1681-1682, imagining an intimacy with Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Stradella)
Michael Ennis, The Malice of Fortune, Doubleday (Machiavelli and Da Vinci join forces with a courtesan to unmask a serial killer in Renaissance Italy)
Carolly Erickson, The Unfaithful Queen, St. Martin’s (novel of Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII)
Patricia Ferguson, The Midwife’s Daughter, Fig Tree (novel set in a small Cornish village just before WWI, about two sisters and the young black orphan who changes their lives)
Jérôme Ferrari, Where I Left My Soul, Maclehose Press (soldiers and captives in the 1950s Algerian War)
Ken Follett, The Winter of the World, Pan Macmillan & Dutton (English, German and American characters swept up in the tumultuous events of 1933 to 1941)
Essie Fox, Elijah’s Mermaid, Orion (Victorian Gothic story)
Diana Gabaldon, The Space Between, Orion (4 stories featuring characters from the Outlanders series)
Sarah Gainham, Night Falls on the City, Abacus (WWII Vienna: a young woman hides her Jewish husband from the SS and makes hateful bargains with the oppressor to protect him after the Anschluss)
Dolores Gordon-Smith, Frankie’s Letter, Severn House (thrilling WWI spy story)
Diane Haeger, I, Jane, NAL (novel of Jane Seymour, 3rd wife of Henry VIII)
F. G. Haghenbeck, The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo, Atria (reimagining of Frida Kahlo’s fascinating life and loves)
Liz Harris, The Road Back, Choc Lit (split-era historical novel, set in the 1950s and 1995, in both London and Ladakh)
Jody Hedlund, Unending Devotion, Bethany House (drama and romance in log towns of 1880s Michigan; inspirational)
Katherine Howe, The House of Velvet and Glass, Michael Joseph (1915: a young Boston socialite is haunted by the deaths of her mother and sister on the Titanic)
Claude Izner, In the Shadows of Paris, Minotaur (murderer is at large in belle-epoque Paris)
D.E. Johnson, Detroit Breakdown, Minotaur (mystery of early 20th-c Detroit)
Bernard Knight, Crowner’s Crusade, Severn House (prequel to Crowner John medieval mystery series)
Robert Low, Crowbone, HarperCollins (latest in Oathsworn, 10th-C Viking series)
Valerio Massimo Manfredi, A Winter’s Night, Europa (a barn in WWI-era Italy united a family and passing strangers)
Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure, Orion (young girl alone in the underbelly of 1870s New York)
Anne Mateer, At Every Turn, Bethany House (Janette Oke-style prairie romance)
Judith Miller, A Hidden Truth, Bethany House (bonnet fiction set in the Amana Colonies, 19th-c Iowa)
Kate Mosse, Citadel, Orion (latest in Languedoc series, set in the Resistance in WWII France)
Jojo Moyes, The Girl You Left Behind, Michael Joseph (two young women, separated by a century (1916-present day), are united in their determination to fight for the thing they love most)
Douglas Nicholas, Something Red, Atria (fantasy of love, murder, and sorcery set in one of the coldest winters of thirteenth-century England)
Felix J. Palma, The Map of the Sky, Atria (literary fantasy with H.G. Wells; the extraterrestrial invasion from War of the Worlds become reality)
Tracie Peterson, Taming the Wind, Bethany House (adventure and romance in 19th-c Texas, inspirational)
Erika Robuck, Hemingway’s Girl, NAL (a young woman is caught up in the world of the Hemingway household in 1930s Key West)
Laura Joh Rowland, The Incense Game, Minotaur (Sano Ichirō races to solve a crime that could bring down the shogun’s regime; mystery of 18th-c Japan)
Jane Sanderson, Ravenscliffe, Sphere (second in Netherwood series involving those living in Ravenscliffe, Netherwood Hall and the local mining community in 1904 Yorkshire)
Goce Smilevski, Freud’s Sister, Penguin (the life of Freud’s sister Adolfina, who died in a concentration camp)
Emma Straub, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, Riverhead (a Midwestern girl during Hollywood’s Golden Age)
Alison Stuart, Gather the Bones, Lyrical Press (The horrors of the Great War are not the only ghosts that haunt Helen Morrow – unquiet spirits from another time and another conflict touch them).
Deborah Swift, The Gilded Lily, Pan Macmillan (the adventures of two Westmorland sisters flee to Restoration London after a robbery
Alberto Vigoleis Thelen, The Island of Second Sight, Viking (fictionalized autobiography of the author’s and his wife’s years on Mallorca in the 1930s)
Sandi Toksvig, Valentine Grey, Virago (a girl brought up in India volunteers for the Boer War in the uniform of her homosexual friend)
A N Wilson, The Potter’s Hand, Atlantic (1774: sent by his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, to America for clay to make a thousand-piece dinner service for Catherine the Great, Tom falls for a Cherokee woman who will play a part in the creation of the Portland Vase)
[top]
October 2012
Tasha Alexander, Death in the Floating City, Minotaur (part of Lady Emily mystery series set in Victorian-era Venice)
Lynn Austin, All Things New, Bethany House (inspirational fiction of Reconstruction-era Virginia)
Mary Ellen Barnes, Peregrine, Fireship (one woman’s indomitable spirit and her love for the hawks she raises in the time of Charles I of England, Cromwell, and the New Colonies)
Chris Bohjalian, The Sandcastle Girls, Simon & Schuster (a young American aid worker meets an Armenian soldier at the time of the Armenian genocide in 1915)
Christopher Buehlman, Between Two Fires, Ace (horror novel set in 1348 England)
Elizabeth Camden, Against the Tide, Bethany House (a female translator in Boston’s naval shipyard in 1891 meets a man on a quest to rid the world of opium; inspirational)
Jill Dawson, Lucky Bunny, Harper (World War II-era narrative of passion and memory told by London thief Queenie Dove)
Piero degli Antoni, Block 11, St. Martin’s (noir set in Auschwitz, past and present)
Stella Duffy, The Purple Shroud, Penguin (novel of Empress Theodora at the height of her power)
Carola Dunn, The Rothschild Trilogy: Miss Jacobson’s Journey, Lord Roworth’s Reward and Captain Ingram’s Inheritance, Canvas (Regency romance series)
Karen Engelmann, The Stockholm Octavo, Ecco (political intrigue, love, and belief in magic in late 18th-c Stockholm)
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, Europa (tale of two women friends from Naples, beginning in the 1950s)
Chris Greenhalgh, Seducing Ingrid Bergman, Viking (the 1940s love affair of Ingrid Bergman and Robert Capa)
Hélène Grémillon, The Confidant, Penguin (in 1975 Paris, a woman begins receiving letters about a WWII love affair)
Tinney Sue Heath, A Thing Done, Fireship (a jester’s prank-for-hire sets off a brawl in early 13th-century Florence)
Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow, HMH (epic love story set in post-war New York)
Alan Hunter, Gently with the Ladies, Gently North West, Gently Continental, Constable (reissues of Insp. George Gently detective series set in the 1960s)
Gary Jennings and Junius Podrug, Aztec Revenge, Forge (adventure fiction set in the world of the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico)
Sarah Jio, Blackberry Winter, Plume (an unsolved abduction in 1933 Seattle and a modern woman determined to uncover the truth)
Young-Ha Kim, Black Flower, HMH (1904, as Koreans fled political upheaval at home for Mexico)
Barbara Kyle, The Queen’s Lady, Canvas (Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting plays a dangerous game carrying letters for the queen while Henry VIII is falling for Anne Boleyn)
Dennis Lehane, Live By Night, Harper US & Little, Brown UK (gangster novel set in Prohibition-era Boston)
Marc Liebman, Big Mother 40, Fireship (helicopter rescue operations in the Vietnam era)
Elizabeth Ludwig, No Safe Harbor, Bethany House (inspirational romantic suspense set in 1897 NYC)
Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism, St. Martin’s (illustrated horror novella set in WWII-era Sicily)
Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper, Mantle (elderly actress looks back on a 1959 English summer of love and a mysterious crime)
Jennifer Niven, Becoming Clementine, Plume (love and war in 1944 France, 3rd in series about Velva Jean Hart)
Kelly O’Connor McNees, In Need of a Good Wife, Berkley (mail-order brides in 19th-century America)
Alyson Richman, The Rhythm of Memory, Berkley (two lovers caught up in the brutality of war; 1960s-70s Chile and Sweden)
Imogen Robertson, Island of Bones, Viking (3rd Harriet Westerman Georgian mystery)
Judith Rock, A Plague of Lies, Berkley (Jesuit and ex-soldier Charles du Luc meets royal intrigue in 17th-c Paris, 3rd in mystery series)
Anthony Riches, The Wolf’s Gold, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Roman military adventure series: the auxiliaries are sent to the Danube to defend gold mines against a savage enemy)
Carol Rivers, Putting on the Ritz, Simon & Schuster (love and loss in the music halls of East London in 1934)
Andrew Rosenheim, Fear Itself, Overlook (thriller of Depression-era America)
Simon Scarrow, Centurion, Overlook (adventure novel about the Roman Legion)
Simon Scarrow, The Sword and the Scimitar, Headline (knight of St John meets his past in the Siege of Malta, 1565)
Kim Scott, The Deadman Dance, Bloomsbury (the first encounters between Australian Aborigines and white colonists)
Mary Sharratt, Illuminations, HMH (novel of Hildegard von Bingen)
Robert J. Seidman, Moments Captured, Overlook (love, invention, and photography in late 19th-c San Francisco)
Jack Steel, The Ripper Files, Simon & Schuster (a new take on the Jack the Ripper mystery)
Julian Stockwin, Betrayal, Hodder & Stoughton / McBooks (book 13 in the Kydd naval adventure series, set during Britain’s invasion of Buenos Aires in 1806)
Shirley Tallman, Death on Telegraph Hill, Minotaur (attorney Sarah Woolson investigates a shooting in nineteenth-century San Francisco)
Margaret Thornton, Cast the First Stone, Severn House (saga set in the Yorkshire Dales in the early ’60s)
Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary, Viking (story of the Virgin Mary)
Jeri Westerson, Blood Lance, Minotaur (medieval noir starring Crispin Guest)
[top]
November 2012
Diane Allen, For the Sake of her Family, Pan Macmillan (saga set in the 1912 Yorkshire Dales when motherless orphans get work at the local manor house and become involved with the family)
Michael Asher, Death or Glory III: Highroad to Hell, Michael Joseph (WWII adventure as Lt. Tom Caine leads his SAS squad through the battlefields of Tunisia)
Alessandro Barbero, The Eyes of Venice, Europa (in 1500s Venice, a stonemason is accused of a crime he didn’t commit, fleeing on a series of adventures, while his wife remains behind)
Rhys Bowen, The Twelve Clues of Christmas, Berkley (holiday entry in Royal Spyness mystery series, set in 1930s Scotland)
Paul Doherty, The Straw Men, Severn House (Brother Athelstan medieval mystery)
Angus Donald, King’s Man, St. Martin’s (novel of the historical Robin Hood, set in 12th-c England)
Rosslyn Elliott, Lovelier than Daylight, Thomas Nelson (Christian romantic novel set in 19th-c Ohio, a story of love and faith based on the Westerville Whiskey War of 1875)
Charles Finch, A Death in the Small Hours, Minotaur (Charles Lenox mystery set in Victorian London)
Ronald Frame, Havisham, Faber (the story of young Miss Havisham before heartbreak struck)
Lilian Harry, Christmas in Burracombe, Orion (latest in series set in 1950s Devon village)
Anthony Hays, The Divine Sacrifice, Corvus (second in mystery series set in 5th-C Arthurian Britain)
Anna Lee Huber, The Anatomist’s Wife, Berkley (first in Lady Darby mystery series set in 1830s Scotland)
Rachel Johnson, Winter Games, Fig Tree (set in 1930s Germany and 2006 Britain, the story of two generations who didn’t see disaster looming)
Hans Keilson, Life Goes On, FSG (dark portrait of Germany between the wars)
Catherine King, The Secret Daughter, Sphere (maid to an American heiress who doesn’t love the aristocrat her father wants her to marry, finds her loyalties tested as they prepare to board the Titanic)
Kate Kingsbury, The Clue is in the Pudding, Berkley (Pennyfoot Hotel mystery series set in early 20th-c England)
Freda Lightfoot, The Duchess of Drury Lane, Severn House (novel of Dorothy Jordan, London actress and mistress of the future William IV)
John Pilkington, Marbeck and the Double Dealer, Severn House (1st in new series featuring Elizabethan intelligencer Martin Marbeck)
Mary Jane Staples, Love for a Soldier, Bantam (German girl has conflict when she comes across a crashed British pilot while en route to elope with an army officer)
Deborah Swift, The Gilded Lily, St. Martin’s Griffin (beauty, greed, and redemption in 1660s London)
Penny Vincenzi, Wicked Pleasures, Overlook (glitzy family saga, America and England through end of 20th century)
[top]
December 2012
Lois Battle, War Brides, Penguin (three young Australian women in post-WWII America)
William Burton McCormick, Lenin’s Harem, Knox Robinson (Set in Russia and Latvia between 1905 and 1941, story of nationhood, brotherhood and love throughout the most turbulent years of the twentieth century)
Jose Saramago, Raised from the Ground, HMH (multi-generational family saga that paints a sweeping portrait of modern Portuguese political history)
Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset, Atlantic (reissue of 1963 novel portraying Arthur as a tormented Dark Age warrior attempting with his faithful Companions to defend Romano-British civilisation from Anglo-Saxon encroachment)
Simon Tolkien, Orders from Berlin, Minotaur (historical thriller set in 1940 London)
Julius Wachtel, Stalin’s Witnesses, Knox Robinson (thriller set in early 20thC Russia)
[top]
