Guide to historical novels for 2015
Below is our guide to mainstream and small press titles from 2015, set in the 1960s and earlier. Details were compiled by Sarah Johnson (US) and Sarah Cuthbertson (UK).
For newer titles, check out of lists of forthcoming adult historical novels for 2021 and for children and YA for 2021.
January 2015
Tessa Arlen, Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman, Minotaur (upstairs/downstairs mystery set in 1912 England)
Martine Bailey, An Appetite for Violets, St. Martin’s (novel, with recipes, taking a journey through 18th-century Europe)
Jo Bloom, Ridley Road, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (love story set against the anti-fascist unrest in 1960s Soho and Hackney in London)
Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, Delacorte (latest Flavia de Luce mystery set in ’50s England)
Nancy Brandon, Dunaway’s Crossing, Lake Union (the deadly influenza of 1918 hits a small Georgia town)
Pamela Christie, Death and the Cyprian Society, Kensington (mystery featuring courtesan Arabella Beaumont in Regency England, 3rd in series)
Paul Fraser Collard, The Devil’s Assassin, Headline (third in thriller series set in British India in the 1850s)
Bernard Cornwell, The Empty Throne, Harper (eighth entry in his Saxon Tales saga set in 10th-century Britain)
David Dickinson, Death Comes to the Ballets Russes, Constable (mystery set in 1912 London)
Cecilia Ekbäck, Wolf Winter, Hodder & Stoughton / Weinstein (murder and secrets in Swedish Lapland in 1717)
Esther Freud, Mr. Mac and Me, Bloomsbury USA (based on the Scottish architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh)
Lucy Foley, The Book of Lost and Found, HarperCollins (woman in 1980s London inherits a portrait form her grandmother which takes her on a journey into the past including Paris in 1939)
Elizabeth Fremantle, Sisters of Treason, Michael Joseph (story of Lady Jane Grey’s sisters after her execution)
Mary Gibson, Jam and Roses, Head of Zeus (In 1920s London during the General Strike, three sisters struggle to make ends meet and protect their mother from the violence of their father)
David Gibbins, Rome, Total War 2 [untitled], Pan Macmillan (military adventure in ancient Rome)
Susanna Gregory, The Cheapside Corpse, Sphere (latest in mystery series set in C17 London, featuring spy Thomas Chaloner)
Annie Groves, Child of the Mersey, Harper (saga of the women at the dockside of Liverpool at the outbreak of WW2)
Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale, Pan Macmillan (story of two French sisters during WWII)
Nellie Hermann, The Season of Migration, FSG (novel of Vincent van Gogh’s early years in which he finds his true calling)
Ravi Howard, Driving the King, Harper (race and class in ’50s America, seen through the eyes of Nat King Cole’s driver)
Angela Hunt, Esther: Royal Beauty, Bethany House (novel of the Old Testament figure Esther; inspirational)
Vanessa Lafaye, Summertime, Orion (Florida, 1935: a hurricane hits a small town already torn apart by racial tension)
Alison Jean Lester, Lillian On Life, Putnam (a single woman born in the 1930s Midwest reflects on her choices and imagines her future)
Greer Macallister, The Magician’s Lie, Sourcebooks Landmark (debut novel, set in 1890s America, in which the country’s most notorious female illusionist stands accused of her husband’s murder)
James MacManus, Sleep in Peace Tonight, Gerald Duckworth (story of high diplomacy, low intrigue and a dangerous love affair set during the London Blitz in WWII)
Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, The Body Snatchers Affair, Forge (Carpenter and Quincannon mystery set in old San Francisco)
Peter Nichols, The Rocks, Heron (beginning in 2005 and looking back over three generations, two families and the dangerous delights of Mallorca reflect our changing morals and mores over the decades)
Thomas O’Malley and Douglas Graham Purdey, Serpents in the Cold, Mulholland (serial killer on the loose in post WWII Boston, USA)
Stewart O’Nan, West of Sunset, Viking (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood)
Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister, Ballantine (novel of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf)
Tracie Peterson, Steadfast Heart, Bethany House (adventure, romance, and history in early Seattle; inspirational)
Vladimir Pistalo, Tesla: A Portrait with Masks, Graywolf (novel about one of the 20th century’s most prolific and colorful inventors)
Anthony Quinn, Curtain Call, Jonathan Cape (Murder, ambition, ugly politics and dangerous love in London’s Theatreland in 1936)
Lucy Ribchester, The Hourglass Factory, Simon & Schuster (young Fleet Street hack investigates the disappearance of acrobat and suffragette Ebony Diamond in 1912)
Jennifer Robson, After the War Is Over, Morrow (a tale of class, love, and freedom post-WWI, in which a young woman must find her place in a world forever changed)
Ian Ross, War at the Edge of the World, Head of Zeus (first in series set in reign of Emperor Constantine: Roman soldier sent to negotiate with Picts finds his mission is not what it seemed)
Maggie Ross, The Villa Rouge, Maclehose Press (secrets, lies and adultery by the Thames estuary in World War II)
Robert Ryan, A Study in Murder, Simon & Schuster (WWI crime thriller: Dr Watson, held in a German POW camp, investigates a murder for which he needs the long-distance help of his friend Sherlock Holmes)
Harry Sidebottom, Iron and Rust, Overlook (book 1 in Throne of the Caesars series; historical adventure)
Andrew McConnell Stott, Summer in the Shadow of Byron, Canongate (1816: story of the creative summer Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley spent at the Villa Diodati, which resulted in Frankenstein etc but also damaged Byron’s young doctor Polidori and Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who fell madly in love with Byron)
Karla Stover, A Feather for a Fan, Five Star (a woman’s life in Washington Territory in the late 19th century)
S.D. Sykes, Plague Land, Pegasus (young girls go missing from a medieval English village and Lord Oswald de Lacy must find the killer before tragedy strikes again)
Sam Thomas, The Witch-Hunter’s Tale, Minotaur (3rd Bridget Hodgson mystery set in Puritan England)
Sophia Tobin, The Widow’s Confession, Simon & Schuster (two sisters come to the Kent seaside resort of Broadstairs in 1850 to escape a secret and find the town has secrets of its own)
Charles Todd, A Fine Summer’s Day, Morrow (takes readers into Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge’s past—to his perplexing final case before the outbreak of World War I)
Heather Webb, Rodin’s Lover, Plume (the volatile love affair between Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel)
John Wilcox, Treachery in Tibet, Allison & Busby (latest in military adventure series set in British India)
Isabel Wolff, Shadows over Paradise, Bantam (woman ghostwriting the memoirs of an elderly woman whose family was torn apart in a Japanese POW camp in Java in WWII must confront her own past too)
Fotini Zolikoglu, The Secret Sister, Europa (a Greek family’s haunted history, from 1922 to present)
February 2015
Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Alphabet House, Dutton (psychological thriller set in WWII Germany and 1970s England)
Kate Alcott, A Touch of Stardust, Doubleday (a young woman moves to Hollywood to become a screenwriter and gets drawn into the drama on the set of Gone with the Wind)
Belinda Alexandra, White Gardenia, Gallery (a White Russian woman, Alina Kozlova, must make a heartbreaking decision if her only child, Anya, is to survive the final days of World War II)
Jeffrey Archer, Mightier than the Sword, St. Martin’s & Pan Macmillan (5th in Clifton Chronicles series moves forward to 1960s/70s when the family is involved in events from an IRA bombing to a Gulag prisoner)
Rosie Archer, The Munitions Girls, Quercus (WW2 saga set in Hampshire in 1943)
Ryan Bartelmay, Onward Toward What We’re Going Toward, Corsair (epic story of the decline and fall of an American family from 1945)
Jessica Blair, Just One More Day, Piatkus (WWII romance between a WAAF and an RAF pilot)
Patricia Bracewell, The Price of Blood, Viking (2nd in Emma of Normandy trilogy set in a politically troubled 11th-century England)
Barbara Taylor Bradford, The Cavendon Women, St. Martin’s (2nd in Cavendon family series set in 1920s England)
Frances Brody, A Woman Unknown, Minotaur (traditional British mystery set in 1920s England, featuring detective Kate Shackleton)
Ben Byrne, Fire Flowers, Europa (lives converge in war-torn Tokyo after WWII)
Andrea Chapin, The Tutor, Riverhead (imagines the muse of William Shakespeare in a novel of love, passion, and ambition)
David Churchill, The Leopards of Normandy: Devil, Headline (story of William the Conqueror, beginning before his illegitimate birth)
Rory Clements, Holy Spy, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Elizabethan thriller series featuring intelligencer John Shakepeare)
Anita Diamant, The Boston Girl, Simon & Schuster (Jewish girl tells the story of growing up against the backcloth of WWI)
Ariana Franklin and Samantha Norman, The Siege Winter, Morrow (mystery and murder, adventure and intrigue, a battle for a crown, told by two courageous young women whose fates are intertwined in twelfth-century England’s devastating civil war)
Hazel Gaynor, A Memory of Violets, Morrow Paperbacks (in Victorian London, the story of two long-lost sisters, whose lives take different paths, and the young woman who will be transformed by their experiences)
David Gilman, Sworn Sword, Head of Zeus ( second in 14thC Master of War series: last-ditch defence on the blood-soaked field of Poitiers; desperate pursuit across southern France; single combat high in the Alps)
Kristen Hannah, The Nightingale, St. Martin’s (love and war in a French town, spanning the 1940s to the present)
Tessa Harris, Shadow of the Raven, Kensington (Dr. Thomas Silkstone mystery set in Georgian England)
Antonia Hodgson, [untitled], Hodder & Stoughton (second in crime series set in 18thC London)
Bruce Holsinger, The Invention of Fire, HarperCollins (second in historical thriller series featuring John Gower, poet and trader of secrets, set in the turbulent 14thC)
Laird Hunt, Neverhome, Chatto & Windus (Gallant Ash: hero, folk legend and master of war, a leader of men in the American Civil War and a brutal and fearless soldier with a secret: Gallant Ash is a woman)
Deborah Johnson, The Secret of Magic, Penguin (in 1946 Regina Robichard, a young New York civil rights lawyer working for Thurgood Marshall, stumbles across a letter asking her boss to investigate the case of a young black soldier whose body has been found floating in the river in Mississippi)
Lene Kaaberbol, Doctor Death, Atria (historical mystery set in 1894 France; Madeleine Karno wants to become a pathologist like her father)
Thomas Keneally, Shame and the Captives, Atria (explores a World War II prison camp, where Japanese prisoners resolve to take drastic action to wipe away their shame)
Mary Pat Kelly, Of Irish Blood, Forge (in 1903, an Irish American woman returns to the Old World and is challenged to join Ireland’s fight for independence)
Laurie R. King, Dreaming Spies, Bantam (Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes in Japan)
William Klaber, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, St. Martin’s (based on the true story of a woman who lived her life as a man in the mid-19th century)
Dewey Lambdin, Kings and Emperors, St. Martin’s (21st installment of Alan Lewrie naval adventures)
Andrew Latham, The Holy Lance, Knox Robinson (1191: an English Templar’s mission to recover the long-lost Holy Lance believed to be responsible for the success of the First Crusade)
Charles Lewinsky, Melnitz, Atlantic (Jewish family buffeted from respectability-of-sorts in 1871 to the Nazi death camps of 1945)
S.G. Maclean, The Seeker, Quercus (historical thriller featuring Damian Seeker, one of Cromwell’s most trusted and feared henchmen, set in London in 1657)
Larry McMurtry, The Last Kind Words Saloon, Picador (story of the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures: Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday)
Susan Meissner, Secrets of a Charmed Life, NAL (in modern Oxford, an American scholar interviews a WWII survivor who is keeping many secrets)
Sara Moliner, The Whispering City, Abacus (murder mystery set in 1950s Barcelona where Franco’s oppressive regime makes every secret lethal)
Alan Murray, Luigi’s Freedom Ride, HarperCollins (the story of one good-hearted Italian man as war begins)
Annie Murray, War Babies, Pan Macmillan (saga set in WWII Birmingham where a 16-year-old girl must fend for herself and her new baby)
William Nicholson, Amherst, Simon & Schuster / aka The Lovers of Amherst, Quercus (the story of two loves: one in 1881, one in the present, both intimately entwined with Emily Dickinson’s life)
Michael Oates, Wade in the Water, Knox Robinson (story set around the dam burst in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889)
Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared, Knopf (occupation, resistance, and collaboration in Estonia during and after World War II)
Priya Parmar, Vanessa and her Sister, Bloomsbury (London 1905: when Vanessa Stephen falls in love, and her sister (later Virginia Woolf) careens towards self-destruction, tragedy and betrayal threaten to destroy the family and Vanessa must choose whether to protect Virginia’s happiness or her own)
Allison Pataki, The Accidental Empress, Howard (the story of Elisabeth “Sisi,” Empress of Austria)
Anne Perry, The Angel Court Affair, Ballantine (in Victorian England, Thomas Pitt is charged with protecting a young woman visiting from Spain)
Kate Riordan, Fiercombe Manor, Harper (two women of very different eras are united by the secrets hidden within the walls of an English manor house; set in 1933 and 30 years earlier)
C.J. Sansom, Lamentation, Mulholland (as Henry VIII lies dying, a dangerous manuscript threatens to tear his world apart)
Jane Smiley, Early Warning, Mantle (moving from the 1950s to the 1980s, this is the second in series about an American family over the last 100 years)
Carrie Snyder, Girl Runner, Harper / Two Roads (an elderly woman who was once a track star for Canada in the 1928 Olympics looks back on her life)
Flora J. Solomon, A Pledge of Silence, Lake Union (WWII novel; an American nurse in Manila ends up in a prison camp)
David Treuer, Prudence, Riverhead (love, loss, race, and desire in post-WWII America)
Jonathan Trigell, The Tongues of Men or Angels, Corsair (battle between rival factions after Jesus’s resurrection: one led by Jesus’s brother wanting to remain devout Jews, the other led by Paul of Tarsus founding Christianity)
Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread, Knopf / Chatto & Windus (Abby Whitshank gathers her family to tell a story of love and family secrets beginning in 1959; literary)
Pam Weaver, For Better or Worse, Avon (When Henry Royal is found guilty of bigamy, the seaside town of Worthing is rocked by scandal. But what will become of his wives? Post-WWII saga)
Penelope Wilcock, The Hawk and the Dove Trilogy, Lion (three novels, The Hawk and the Dove, The Wounds of God and The Long Fall, set in a 14thC monastery in Yorkshire)
Alison Weir, The Marriage Game, Ballantine (Elizabeth I weighs her marital prospects)
Isabel Wolff, Shadows Over Paradise, Bantam (dual-period novel in which a modern ghostwriter travels to Cornwall to interview an elderly Dutch woman who was interned with her family in Indonesia after the fall of Java in 1942)
March 2015
Lyn Andrews, From Liverpool with Love, Headline (Liverpool saga set in 1920s: workhouse orphans have to make their way in life after the death of their mother)
Nancy Bilyeau, The Tapestry, Touchstone (3rd novel of Joanna Stafford, former nun in Henry VIII’s England, who tries to save her friend Catherine Howard from becoming his next victim)
Robin Blake, The Hidden Man, Minotaur (dark mystery set in small-town Georgian England)
Robin Blake, The Scrivener, Constable (latest in Cragg & Fidelis mystery series set in C18 Preston, Lancs)
Rhys Bowen, The Edge of Dreams, Minotaur (Molly Murphy mystery set in early 20th-c NYC; Molly’s husband, a police captain, has been receiving taunting notes)
Vito Bruschini, The Prince, Atria (tells the epic story of the mafia’s beginnings in war-torn Italy and Roaring Twenties New York)
Sandra Byrd, Mist of Midnight, Howard (Victorian-era novel; a young woman returns home from India after the death of her family to discover her identity and inheritance are challenged by the man who holds her future in his hands)
John M. Cahill, Primitive Passions, Bygone Era (Book 1 of the Boschloper Saga, following an Irish deserter from the British Navy who settles into an upstate New York Dutch colony and helps them with their relations with the Iroquois)
Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs Grant and Madame Jule, Dutton (First Lady Julia Grant and her complex relationship with the slave who was her namesake)
Cassandra Clark, The Dragon of Handale, Minotaur (historical mystery set in 14th-c England; latest in series about Hildegard, Abbess of Meaux)
Clive Cussler and Justin Scott, The Assassin, Putnam (action-adventure fiction in the Isaac Bell series, early 20th century)
Maurizio di Giovanni, Viper, Europa (evil lurks in Naples of 1932; Commissario Ricciardi mystery)
John Donoghue, The Death’s Head Chess Club, Atlantic (the impossibilities of forgiveness and friendship between a Nazi and a Jew when a Nazi officer sets up a chess club to improve soldiers’ morale in Auschwitz, then hears of a Jew in the camp who is reputed to be unbeatable)
Anne Donovan, Gone Are The Leaves, Canongate (story set in medieval Scotland of the friendship between a lost boy and a girl who must choose between marriage and a life of prayer)
Kathy Lynn Emerson, Murder in the Queen’s Wardrobe, Severn House (Elizabethan spy thriller about a female spymaster)
Vaughn Entwistle, The Dead Assassin, Minotaur (paranormal mystery with Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde)
Robert Fabbri, Rome’s Lost Son, Corvus (Rome, AD 51: latest in adventure series about rise to power of Emperor Vespasian)
David Flusfeder, John the Pupil, Harper (mystery-laden novel set in 13th-century Europe, against the backdrop of a medieval world where beauty and violence, science and mysticism, carnality and faith, exist side by side)
Christopher Fowler, Bryant & May: The Burning Man, Transworld (latest in WWII mystery series set in London, featuring the cases of the Peculiar Crimes Unit)
Miranda France, The Day Before The Fire, Chatto & Windus (paper restorer working on restoration of a stately home is forced to bring out the truth about her own past)
Patrick Gale, A Place Called Winter, Tinder Press (chance encounter and resulting scandal force a man to emigrate to the Canadian prairies in 1900s)
Ian Garbutt, Wasp, Polygon (18thC governess finds herself in a high-class brothel where secrets reach into government circles and the monarchy)
Gabriella Ghermandi, Queen of Flowers and Pearls, Indiana University Press (an Ethiopian girl links thousands of stories from ancient times to the 20th century, from Africa to Europe)
Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees, Harvill Secker (fable set in 1910 about a man who creates a forest in Provence)
C.W. Gortner, Mademoiselle Chanel, Morrow (the life of iconic fashion designer Coco Chanel)
Kerry Greenwood, Miss Phryne Fisher (10 novels: 11-20 in series), Allen & Unwin (detective series set in 1920s Australia)
Patricia Harman, The Reluctant Midwife, Morrow Paperbacks (sequel to Midwife of Hope River, set in Depression-era West Virginia)
Gregory Harris, The Connicle Curse, Kensington (Victorian mystery featuring detective Colin Pendragon in which a wealthy financier is found murdered)
Joanna Hickson, The Tudor Bride, Harper (Katherine de Valois, Queen of England)
Bruce Holsinger, The Invention of Fire, Morrow (thriller featuring medieval poet and fixer John Gower, followup to A Burnable Book)
Aislinn Hunter, The World Before Us, Hamish Hamilton (disappearance of a young girl evokes memories of a young woman who walked out of a Victorian lunatic asylum one day in 1877)
Glyn Iliffe, King of Ithaca, Macmillan (exiled soldier joins Odysseus on his voyage from Troy to Ithaca)
Roy Jakobsen, Borders, Maclehose Press (1942: can a father’s love save the doomed German 6th Army at Stalingrad when Hitler will not permit a retreat?)
Christopher Jory, The Art of Waiting, Polygon (Russia 1943: a girl rescues a soldier but when he gets home he must choose between love and revenge)
Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin, Atria (historical thriller about a German Jew who returns to Berlin in 1948 as a member of the CIA)
Judith Kinghorn, The Snow Globe, NAL (love and loss in 1920s England)
Laura Lebow, The Figaro Murders, Minotaur (Lorenzo La Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, must either find a killer or take the fall himself)
Yan Lianke, The Four Books, Chatto & Windus (story set in a labour camp during China’s Great Famine)
Karen Maitland, The Raven’s Head, Headline Review (medieval apprentice librarian stumbles on a secret and is on the run after using it in a failed blackmail attempt)
Allan Mallinson, Words of Command, Transworld (1830: Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Hervey returns to take command of the 6th Light Dragoons)
Francine Mathews, Too Bad to Die, Riverhead (historical thriller featuring British Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming)
Judith Claire Mitchell, A Reunion of Ghosts, Harper (multi-generational literary novel; three sisters who have decided to kill themselves at the end of the 20th century look back on their family’s legacy and achievements)
Jan Moran, Scent of Triumph, St. Martin’s Griffin (WWII-era romantic novel about a French perfumer and an American naval captain)
Michelle Moran, Rebel Queen, Touchstone (story of Queen Lakshmi—India’s Joan of Arc—who against all odds defied the mighty British invasion to defend her beloved kingdom)
David Morrell, Inspector of the Dead, Mulholland (latest in detective series set in mid-19th London)
Mary Morris, The Jazz Palace, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (two Jewish families in Jazz Age Chicago)
James Naughtie, Paris Spring, Head of Zeus (in Paris in 1968, a city full of revolutionaries and spies, Will Flemyng and his brother are caught in the thick of the action)
Caryl Phillips, The Lost Child, FSG (literary reimagining of Wuthering Heights)
Malcolm Pryce, The Case of the ‘Hail Mary’ Celeste, Bloomsbury (a Boy’s Own derring-do adventure of disappearing nuns, trainspotting and an unforgettable new detective, set in 1948 just before the nationalisation of the British railway system
Kate Quinn, Lady of the Eternal City, Berkley (fourth volume in the Empress of Rome series; the fate of Rome lies in the hands of an untried girl)
M.J. Rose, The Witch of Painted Sorrows, Atria (gothic novel set against the lavish spectacle of 1890s Belle Époque Paris)
Mary Doria Russell, Epitaph, Ecco (subtitled “a novel of the O.K. Corral,” continuing the story she began in Doc)
Eleanor Parker Sapia, A Decent Woman, Booktrope (Puerto Rico, 1900: Spanning thirty years, this is the unforgettable journey of friendship between an Afro-Cuban midwife and a socialite set against the backdrop of colonial Puerto Rico.)
Amy Scheibe, A Fireproof Home for the Bride, St. Martin’s (coming-of-age of a young woman in the strict Lutheran world of 1958 Minnesota)
Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart, Little Brown (In 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Henry James come to America to investigate the suicide of Clover Adams, wife of the historian Henry Adams – a member of the family that has given the United States two Presidents)
Diana Souhami, Gwendolen, Holt (a 19th-century Englishwoman looks back on her difficult formative years)
Cynthia Swanson, The Bookseller, Harper (follows a woman in the 1960s who must reconcile her reality with the tantalizing alternate world of her dreams)
David C. Taylor, Night Life, Forge (historical crime novel set in 1950s NY, first in series)
Sara Taylor, The Shore, William Heinemann (set on a group of islands off Virginia, various generations over the course of 150 years tell interconnecting stories)
Jane Thynne, War of Flowers, Simon & Schuster (latest in Berlin mystery series: in 1938 British actress Clara Vine is tasked by British Secret Service to befriend Hitler’s girlfriend Eva Braun and pass on any information)
Donna Thorland, Mistress Firebrand, NAL (action-packed novel with romance, set during the American Revolution)
Jacqueline Winspear, A Dangerous Place, Harper (Maisie Dobbs mystery, set in 1937; a brutal murder in the British garrison town of Gilbraltar leads the investigator into a web of lies, deceit and danger)
Russell Whitfield, Imperatrix, Myrmidon (latest in female gladiator series set in ancient Rome)
D K Wilson, The Traitor’s Mark, Sphere (latest in Tudor crime series featuring goldsmith Thomas Treviot, based on a real mystery of Henry VIII’s reign)
Louisa Young, The Heroes’ Welcome, HarperPerennial (the turbulence of the year 1919, in the sequel to My Dear I Want To Tell You)
April 2015
Chantel Acevedo, The Distant Marvels, Europa (a storyteller tries to keep eight women’s hopes alive during a ferocious hurricane in Cuba of 1963)
Tasha Alexander, Behind the Shattered Glass, Constable (C19 English manor house mystery)
Elizabeth Berg, The Dream Lover, Ballantine (a novel of 19th-century writer George Sand)
Anne Blankman, Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke, Headline (girl formerly in Hitler’s inner circle flees to Oxford after a quarrel but returns to Nazi Germany to clear her boyfriend’s name of murder, only to discover a deadly conspiracy)
Paula Brackston, The Silver Witch, St. Martin’s (love and magic in the story of a modern woman and her counterpart from the ancient Celtic past)
Conor Brady, A June of Ordinary Murders, Minotaur (mystery debut set in 1880s Dublin)
Susanna Calkins, The Masque of a Murderer, Minotaur (in 17th-c England, printer’s apprentice Lucy Campion learns a dangerous secret when she listens to a Quaker man’s dying words)
Kristy Cambron, A Sparrow in Terezin, Thomas Nelson (dark days for two women, one in the present day and the other in WWII-era Czechoslovakia)
M.J. Carter, The Strangler Vine, Putnam (historical thriller set in 19th-c colonial India)
Mary Chamberlain, The Dressmaker of Dachau, Borough Press (ambitious London seamstress trapped in Paris by Nazi invasion is sent to Dachau where she must survive on her wits and sewing skills)
Andrea Chapin, The Tutor, Penguin (a young Elizabethan widow finds the corpse of a Catholic priest and Shakespeare turns up as her family’s tutor)
Kaaren Christopherson, Decorum, Kensington (lush novel set in Gilded Age New York)
Tim Clare, The Honours, Canongate (1935: on a country estate a girl decides to uncover the secrets of an elite society that took in her father and unstable mother)
Clare Clark, We That Are Left, Harvill Secker (budding physicist becomes involved in the lives of wealthy sisters after their brother is killed in WWII)
Rosie Clarke, Emma’s War, Ebury Press (saga set in WWII when widow of RAF pilot meets an American businessman)
Mary Costello, Academy Street, Canongate (story of a girl from 1940s rural Ireland to present-day New York)
Lindsey Davis, Deadly Election, Hodder & Stoughton (third in Flavia Albia Roman detective series featuring Falco’s adopted daughter)
Jodi Daynard, The Midwife’s Revolt, Lake Union (follows one woman’s path from her grieving days of widowhood after Bunker Hill, to her deepening friendship with Abigail Adams and midwifery, and finally to her dangerous work as a spy for the Cause)
Patricia Duncker, Sophie and the Sybil, Bloomsbury (a comedy of manners, a mischievous modern take on Victorian society and a playful imagining of the author George Eliot)
Patrick Easter, Cuckold Point, Quercus (fourth in a series of historical thrillers featuring former naval officer Tom Pascoe)
Hermione Eyre, Viper Wine, Hogarth (postmodern novel of Venetia Stanley, a great beauty of 17th-century England)
Colin Falconer, Colossus, St. Martin’s (courage, honor, and betrayal in the army of Alexander the Great)
Joel Fishbane, The Thunder of Giants, St. Martin’s (debut about two exceptional women in 1937, both nearly 8 feet tall)
Anna Freeman, The Fair Fight, Riverhead (female pugilists and their patrons in late 18th-c England)
Peter Fröberg Idling, Song for an Approaching Storm, Pushkin Press (Cambodia 1955: story of a young woman loved by the man who will become Pol Pot)
Kelly Gardiner, Goddess, HarperCollins (Versailles, 1686: the tragic rise and fall of the beautiful 17thC swordswoman and opera singer, Julie d’Aubigny, also known as La Maupin
Maureen Gibbon, Paris Red, Norton (imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired the great Impressionist painter Edouard Manet)
Cynthia A. Graham, Beneath Still Waters, Blank Slate Press (a dreadful murder of a baby in post-WWII Arkansas stirs up the investigating sheriff’s memories of a war crime)
Iona Grey, Letters to the Lost, Simon & Schuster (American bomber pilot falls in love with British girl in London in 1943 and tries to find her 60 years later)
Sheila Hancock, Miss Carter’s War, Bloomsbury USA (a woman fights social injustice in postwar Britain)
C. S. Harris, Who Buries the Dead, NAL Obsidian (Sebastian St. Cyr Regency-era mystery about the murder of a West Indies slave owner)
Lindsay Hawdon, Jakob’s Colours, Hodder & Stoughton (spanning 2 world wars, the story of a half-gipsy boy on the run across England, Switzerland and Austria)
Kathy & Becky Hepinstall, Sisters of Shiloh, HMH (two sisters join the Confederate army disguised as men)
Ben Kane, Eagles at War, Preface (first in series set in AD 9 around massacre of a Roman army led by Varus at the hands of a German chieftain, Arminius)
Susanna Kearsley, A Desperate Fortune, Sourcebooks (timeslip romance centering on the journal of a Jacobite exile, Mary Dundas)
Liza Klaussmann, Villa America, Picador (story of a complex, generous marriage, of artistry and tragedy, set on the 1920s French Riviera)
Mary Lawrence, The Alchemist’s Daughter, Kensington (first in Bianca Goddard mystery series featuring the daughter of an infamous alchemist who earns her living making medicines in 1540s London)
Jeffrey Lent, A Slant of Light, Bloomsbury (epic literary historical set at the close of the Civil War in New York State)
Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden, Thomas Dunne (lost love, family secrets, and creating the perfect perfume in 1936 Spain)
Michelle Moran, The Last Queen of India, Quercus (1857: when the British invade, the skills of the greatest female warriors India has ever seen are put to the test)
Barbara Klein Moss, The Language of Paradise, Norton (nineteenth-century New England; tests a woman’s love against her husband’s utopian quest)
Sofi Oksanen, When The Doves Disappeared, Atlantic (the little-known occupation, resistance and collaboration in Estonia during and after WWII)
Mark Oldfield, The Sentinel, Head of Zeus (novel set in 1954 and 2010: Comandante Guzmán, brutal officer in Spanish Civil War, has been posted into the Basque country to confront a man known only as ‘El Lobo’. Modern-day investigator follows up hs story)
Anne Perry, Corridors of the Night, Headline (Victorian murder mystery featuring William and Hester Monk)
Mario Reading, The Templar Inheritance, Corvus (second in series set in 2013 and 12thC, involving the hunt for the Copper Scroll of the Knights Templar)
Anthony Riches, Thunder of the Gods, Hodder & Stoughton (8th in Roman Empire series takes Centurion Marcus Aquila and his Tungrian legion on a dangerous mission to the heart of the Parthian empire)
Alex Rutherford, Empire of the Moghul: Traitors in the Shadows, Headline Review (sixth in series set in Moghul India featuring Emperor Aurangzeb)
Simone St. James, The Other Side of Midnight, NAL (new 1920s-set ghost story)
Elif Shafak, The Architect’s Apprentice, Viking (magical tale set at the height of the Ottoman Empire)
Barbara Stark-Nemon, Even in Darkness, She Writes Press (the story of the dutiful daughter of a prosperous German-Jewish family: a saga of family, a lover, two world wars, a concentration camp and the unconventional life she builds in post-war Germany)
Christine Trent, The Mourning Bells, Kensington (Violet Harper mystery featuring a female undertaker in Victorian England)
Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Big Green Tent, FSG (dissident life in the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1950s)
Norah Vincent, Adeline, HMH & Virago (literary novel of Virginia Woolf, reimagining what brought her to the riverbank at the end of her life)
Giles Waterfield, The Iron Necklace, Allen & Unwin (Anglo-German marriage shattered by the impact of WWI)
Angus Watson, Clash of Iron, Orbit (historical fantasy about British tribes in the Iron Age fighting each other whilst Julius Caesar plans an invasion from Gaul)
Paul Willets, Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms, Constable (the furtive escapades of Tyler Kent, a handsome, womanising 28-year-oldIvy League graduate who doubles as a US Embassy code clerk and Soviet agent in WWII)
Cecily Wong, Diamond Head, Harper (sweeping debut spanning China to Hawaii that follows four generations of a wealthy shipping family, from the Boxer Rebellion through the 1960s, whose rise and decline is riddled with secrets and tragic love)
May 2015
Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman, Corsair (story of a 72-year-old book-obsessed Beirut woman, childless and divorced, follows her back through her life and events in Lebanon, interspersed with musings on art and philosophy)
Abdulaziz al-Mahmoud, The Holy Sail, Bloomsbury (whilst Portuguese fleets head to the Gulf intent on securing the spice trade, a young girl oblivious to the invasions, massacres and religious fanaticism that characterise the 15thC, falls in love with a noble Arabian tribal leader)
Laura Andersen, The Virgin’s Daughter, Ballantine (alternate history of Elizabeth I)
Kate Atkinson, A God In Ruins, Transworld (the life of Toby, younger brother of Ursula from Life After Life, as he negotiates the 20thC)
Martine Bailey, The Penny Heart, Hodder & Stoughton (Manchester 1809: a young wife employs a new cook and is swiftly drawn into a world of deceit and shadows that culminates in murder)
Malcolm Brooks, Painted Horses, Grove Press (young woman’s quest to tame a wild landscape in the mid-1950s American West)
Robyn Cadwallader, The Anchoress, Sarah Crichton/FSG (young girl’s desperate choice to isolate herself from the world in 13th-century England)
Miranda Carter, The Infidel Stain, Fig Tree (1841, 3 years after we left them at the close of The Strangler Vine, Blake and Avery reunite to investigate a series of murders in the slums of the printing district, which the police mysteriously refuse to investigate)
Alan Chin, The Lonely War, DSP Publications (WWII novel in which a half-Chinese man falls in love with his superior officer)
John Henry Clay, At the Ruin of the World, Hodder & Stoughton (story set in Gaul in the last years of the Roman Empire)
Toby Clements, Kingmaker 2: Betrayal, Century (continuing story set during Wars of the Roses)
Diney Costeloe, The Throwaway Children, Head of Zeus (story of two sisters sent first to an English, then an Australian orphanage, in the aftermath of WWII)
Joanna Courtney, The Chosen Queen, Pan Macmillan (1066: story of Edyth, once married to the first king of Wales, now asked to make a sacrifice, perhaps the greatest of all)
Suzannah Dunn, The Lady of Misrule, Little Brown (story of Elizabeth Tilney, Lady Jane Grey’s companion in the Tower of London)
Iain Gale, Keane’s Charge, Heron (third adventure in maverick Captain Keane’s Peninsular War tales)
W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear, People of the Songtrail, Forge (saga of the Vikings’ first contact with the New World)
Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire, John Murray (final part of trilogy set in colonial India: a fleet sets out to attack China in the first Opium War, 1839)
Rosemary Goring, Dacre’s War, Polygon (10 years after the Battle of Flodden, Adam Crozier plans to avenge his father’s death at the hands of Lord Thomas Dacre, the most powerful man in the North of England)
Iona Gray, Letters to the Lost, Thomas Dunne (story of an impossible, unstoppable love affair set in London during World War II and the present day)
Ruth Hamilton, Meet Me At The Pier Head, Pan Macmillan (saga set in 1950s Liverpool involving an American headmaster and the daughter of an ageing dynasty)
Patricia Hopper, Kilpara, Bygone Era (only the heart knows where home truly is; Ellis O’Donovan discovers this as he is torn between his life in 1860s America and his ancestral home in Ireland)
C.C. Humphreys, The Curse of Anne Boleyn, Sourcebooks (sequel to The French Executioner pits father against son in the quest for Anne Boleyn’s famed six-fingered hand)
Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr Pickwick, Jonathan Cape (story of the creation and afterlife of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers)
Dinah Jefferies, The Tea Planter’s Wife, Penguin [nfi]
Marci Jefferson, Enchantress of Paris, Thomas Dunne (Marie Mancini, first love of the Sun King)
Emma Kennedy, Shoes for Anthony, Ebury Press (story of WWII Bevan Boy in Welsh village divided by American forces preparing for D-Day)
Philip Kerr, The Lady from Zagreb, Quercus (Zurich, 1942: detective Bernie Gunther is back, in deeper trouble than ever)
David Lagercranz, Fall of Man in Wilmslow, Maclehose Press (honour, prejudice, code-breaking and the the Bletchley Park mathematician Alan Turing, whose apparent suicide in Wilmslow, Cheshire in the early 1950s a local detective is investigating)
Paul Lynch, The Black Snow, Little Brown (pastoral novel meets the crime thriller in 1945 Donegal)
Bruce Macbain, Odin’s Child, Blank Slate Press (Viking saga, first book detailing the adventures of Odd Tangle-Hair in 11th-century Scandinavia)
Beatrice Masini, The Watercolourist, Mantle (19thC: young female artist invited to stay with a famous poet and his family near Milan finds herself embroiled in secrets, lies and love)
Simon Mawer, Tightrope, Little Brown (Ravensbruck survivor returns to 1950s London and is plunged into the Cold War as a result of her undercover activity in WWII Paris)
Alyssa Maxwell, Murder at Beechwood, Kensington (part of Gilded Age mystery series; in 1890s Newport, Vanderbilt cousin Emma Cross searches for the mother of an abandoned infant)
Sarah McCoy, The Mapmaker’s Children, Crown (Sarah Brown, daughter of John Brown, becomes one of the Underground Railroad’s most talented mapmakers; intertwined with the story of a modern woman)
Susan McGregor, The Harlot Saint: A Story of St. Mary of Edessa, Bygone Era (the remarkable story of this 4th century saint’s road to ruin and back to redemption told from her own point of view)
Shirley McKay, Queen and Country, Polygon (latest Huw Cullen mystery set in St Andrews in 1587 just after the death of Mary Queen of Scots)
Leslie Parry, Church of Marvels, Ecco & Two Roads (the lives of four outsiders intertwine in turn-of-the-century NYC)
Matthew Pearl, The Bookaneers, Harvill Secker (adventure set at end of C19 when loose copyright laws allowed unscrupulous publishers to issue books without the author’s permission and two such ‘bookaneers’ try to steal Robert Louis Stevenson’s last MS)
Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Balm, Amistad/HarperCollins (three people explore the pain of their past and search for a new life in the aftermath of slavery)
Sarah Pinborough, The Cunning Man, Jo Fletcher Books (a 16thC tale of secrets, jealousy, sex and murder set in a country house involving witchcraft and the supernatural)
Lucinda Riley, The Seven Sisters, Atria (a modern woman discovers her true heritage lies in 1920s Paris)
Erika Robuck, The House of Hawthorne, NAL (the relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia)
James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins, Bloomsbury (the loveable full time priest and part time detective Canon Sidney Chambers continues his sleuthing adventures in 1960s Cambridge)
Alex Rutherford, The Serpent’s Tooth, Forge (conclusion of the action-packed saga set in the 17th-c Moghul Empire)
Pamela Schoenewaldt, Under the Same Blue Sky, Morrow Paperbacks (during the Great War, a German-American woman explores the secrets of her past)
Manda Scott, The Girl Who Walked Into Fire, Transworld (story linking arson attacks in modern-day France with the story of Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years’ War)
Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog, Polygon (latest in 1950s mystery series featuring Mirabelle Bevan on the trail of an RAF pilot who disappeared during the war, and an espionage operation in Paris)
Jeff Shaara, The Fateful Lightning, Ballantine (novel of the Civil War)
F R Tallis, The Silence, Pan Macmillan (unsettling events aboard German submarine in WWII involving secret prisoners, a British submarine commander and an Austrian academic)
Paul Witcover, The Watchman of Eternity, Transworld (Set in a reimagined 18thC, the sequel to the historical fantasy, The Emperor of All Things)
June 2015
Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie, Grand Central (story of a Prohibition-era bad girl turned good)
Nick Brown, Agent of Rome: The Emperor’s Silver, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Roman Empire thriller series)
Stephen Bywater, Night of the Damned, Headline (a murder in the Brazilian rainforest rubber plantation in 1935 unleashes supernatural forces)
Nadine Dorries, The Ballymara Road, Head of Zeus (1960s saga in Four Streets series, set between Liverpool and Ireland)
Lissa Evans, Crooked Heart, Harper (black comedy set in WWII England)
Kate Furnivall, The Italian Wife, Sphere (intrigue, romance and betrayal in 1930s Italy)
Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Himmler’s Cook, Atlantic (picaresque tale of a woman who witnessed the very worst of the twentieth century, but never lost her passion for love, life, good people and fine food)
Susanna Gregory, A Poisonous Plot, Sphere (latest in medieval mystery series featuring Matthew Bartholomew, a Cambridge physician/sleuth)
Lucretia Grindle, The Lost Daughter, Grand Central (novel of lives lost and found, set in Italy in the present and 20th century)
Sara Gruen, At The Water’s Edge, Two Roads & Spiegel & Grau (Philadelphia socialite goes to Scotland in early 1945 in search of the Loch Ness Monster and finds threats from more than bombs and monsters)
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Keep The Home Fires Burning, Sphere (second in family saga set against the background of WWI, featuring the Hunters and their servants in 1915)
Anna Hope, A Different Season, Transworld (a story of love, insanity and eugenics at the brink of the Great War)
M.K. Hume, Tintagel, Headline (first in trilogy set in the Dark Ages, charting the life of the High King of the Britons, Magnus Maximus, a Roman officer)
Dan Jorgensen, And the Wind Whispered, Bygone Era (murder mystery set in 1890s Deadwood, S.D. with a cast of Who’s Who of the American West)
M.R.C. Kasasian, Death Descends on Saturn Villa, Head of Zeus (latest in mystery series set in 19thC London featuring grumpy personal detective Sidney Grice)
Barbara Kyle, The Traitor’s Daughter, Kensington (loyalty, heartbreak, and one woman’s undaunted courage in 1582 England; part of Thornleigh saga)
Joe R. Lansdale, Paradise Sky, Mulholland (ex-slave on the run becomes in turn a Buffalo Soldier, bouncer, ratcatcher, sharpshooter, star of dime novels, US Marshal and friend to Wild Bill Hickok in this mostly true tale of how the West was won)
Rebecca Mascull, Song of the Sea Maid, Hodder & Stoughton (18thC educated foundling who becomes a natural philosopher sets sail to Portugal todevelop her theories, finds an unheard-of civilisation and insights into her own heart)
Lucy Sanna, The Cherry Harvest, Morrow (a dangerous attraction between a Wisconsin farm wife and a German POW during WWII)
Simon Scarrow, [untitled], Headline (war, betrayal and friendship on a Greek island during WWII)
Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron, Quercus (Jewish boy is rescued from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943)
Carla Stewart, A Flying Affair, FaithWords (a female pilot in 1920s America; inspirational)
L.J. Trafford, Palatine: The Four Emperors – Book 1, Karnac Books (downfall of the Emperor Nero and its aftermath in the year 68 AD)
Peter Watson, Madeleine’s War, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (romance and drama during the lead-up to D-Day in England and France)
Lauren Willig, The Other Daughter, St. Martin’s (a story of revenge and reconsideration set in 1920s Europe and England)
Sarah Winman, A Year of Marvellous Ways, Tinder Press (Cornwall 1947: unlikely friendship between a 90-year-old woman and a young soldier returned from WWII)
July 2015
Anthony Anglorus, The Prince of Prigs, Bygone Era (the adventurous story of the English Civil War’s version of Robin Hood, Capt. James Hind)
Michael Arnold, Marston Moor, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in 17thC series set in the Civil War)
Virginia Baily, Early One Morning, Virago (woman in 1970s faces up to a decision she took in Rome in 1943)
Annie Barrows, American Everlasting, The Dial Press (young debutante working for the Federal Writer’s Project whose arrival in Macedonia, West Virginia changes the course of history for a prominent family who has been sitting on a secret for decades)
Kate Beaufoy, Another Heartbeat in the House, Transworld (1930s woman returns to Ireland and finds a memoir about a woman who lived 100 years earlier)
Toby Clements, Broken Faith, Century (2nd in Wars of the Roses series)
Jackie Copleton, A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, Hutchinson (elderley Japanese woman meets a man claiming to be her grandson whom she believed killed by the atomic bomb at Nagasaki in 1945)
Mitch Cullen, Mr Holmes, Canongate (93-year-old Sherlock Holmes revisits a case which might tell him about life and love and the limits to what one can know)
Louis de Bernières, The Dust That Falls From Dreams, Harvill Secker (love and war in England in the first half of the 20th century)
Carolina de Robertis, The Gods of Tango, Knopf (the story of tango in 1913 Argentina, as a young woman disguises herself as a male violinist)
Carola Dunn, Superfluous Women, Constable (latest in Daisy Dalrymple mystery series set in 1920s)
Robert Edric, Field Service, Transworld (story featuring the work of the War Graves Commission in identifying and burying the dead of WWI)
Natalie Meg Evans, The Milliner’s Secret, Quercus (Englishwoman’s struggle to survive in Nazi-occupied Paris)
Marina Fiorato, Kit, Hodder & Stoughton (18thC woman follows husband to Italy with the Duke of Marlborough’s regiment)
Kate Forsyth, The Wild Girl, Thomas Dunne (untold love story behind the famous fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, set in early 19th-c Germany)
Robert Goddard, The Ends of the Earth, Transworld (last in adventure trilogy about WWI ex-flying ace)
Christopher Gortner, Tudor Vendetta, Hodder & Stoughton (last in Elizabethan Spymaster series)
Kate Griffin, The Child of Ill-Fortune, Faber (murder mystery set in Victorian Limehouse, London)
Tessa Harris, The Anatomist’s Apprentice, Constable (murder mystery set in 18thC)
James Heneage, The Lion of Mistra, Heron (third In series about Byzantium)
Jason Hewitt, Devastation Road, Simon & Schuster (amnesiac British soldier in Germany in April 1945 joins a Czech man and a Polish woman concentration camp survivor in a trek to find home)
Joanna Hickson, Red Rose, White Rose, Harper (novel of Cecily Neville, mother of Edward IV and Richard III)
Anna Jacobs, Time to Remember, Time for Renewal, Hodder & Stoughton (Lancashire saga set just after WWII)
Maggie Joel, Half the World in White, Allen & Unwin (secrets and tragedy in Victorian family in London)
Philip Kazan, Painter of Souls, Orion (story of Renaissance artist Fra Filippo Lippi)
Liza Klaussmann, Villa America, Little Brown (novel set in the Cap D’Antibes based on the real-life inspirations for Fitzgerald’s Tender is The Night)
Snorri Kristjansson, Path of Gods, Jo Fletcher (conflict between Christian and pagan Vikings in early medieval Norway)
Joanne Limburg, A Want Of Kindness, Atlantic (life of Queen Anne from a girl at the Restoration Court to Queen of England)
Paula McGrath, Generation, John Murray (novel set in Ireland & America over three generations spanning 80 years)
Catriona McPherson, Dandy Gilver and the Unpleasantness in the Ballroom, Hodder & Stoughton (murder mystery set in 1930s Glasgow)
Sarita Mandanna, Good Hope Road, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (love, friendship and the legacy of war affect two young Americans who survive WWI)
Paula McLain, Circling the Sun, Ballantine (novel of early 20th-c aviator Beryl Markham)
Sean Michaels, Us Conductors, Bloomsbury (spy story of the Russian scientist who invented the theremin and ended up in a Soviet gulag)
Santa Montefiore, Songs of Love and War, Simon & Schuster (early 20thC Anglo-Irish aristocratic girl falls for handsome vet instead of agreeing to marry an English lord)
Jill Morrow, Newport, Morrow Paperbacks (glitzy novel of Newport, Rhode Island, during the Roaring Twenties)
Charles O’Brien, Death at Tammany Hall, Kensington (1894 New York: intrepid Pamela Thompson takes on Tammany Hall’s corruption and murder)
Nuala O’Connor, Miss Emily, Penguin USA and Penguin Canada (set in 1866, reimagines the private life of one of America’s most beloved poets through her own voice and through the eyes of her family’s Irish maid)
Stewart O’Nan, West of Sunset, Allen & Unwin (F Scott Fitzgerald’s last years)
Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Bloomsbury (1884: Home Office employee who finds a watch under his pillow which saves his life after a bomb threat, sets out to find the maker)
Eliza Redgold, Naked: A Novel of Lady Godiva, St. Martin’s Griffin (the truth behind Lady Godiva’s legendary ride)
Michael Ridpath, Shadows of War, Head of Zeus (spy story set at start of WWII involving assassination attempt on Hitler)
Ian Ross, Swords Around the Throne, Head of Zeus (2nd in series set at end of Roman Empire when a conspiracy threatens Emperor Constantine)
John Joseph Ryan, A Bullet Apiece, Blank Slate Press (private eye novel set in post-WWII St. Louis)
Tim Severin, Saxon: The Pope’s Assassin, Pan Macmillan (latest in adventure series featuring a Saxon spy, set in Rome in AD 799)
Leland Shanle, Code Name: Infamy, Blank Slate Press (cat-and-mouse thriller set in WWII Germany)
Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron, Quercus (WWII story of Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto)
Andrew Swanston, Waterloo: The Bravest Man, Allison & Busby (Coldstream Guards officer ordered by Wellington to hold the Château of Hougumont against the French)
Vanessa Tait, The Looking Glass House, Corvus (story of the beginnnings of Alice in Wonderland through the eyes of a naïve governess)
Kathleen Tessaro, Rare Objects, Harper (in Depression-era Boston, two friends are bound by a dangerous secret)
Chantal Thomas, The Exchange of Princesses, Other Press (based on a true story about the fate of two young princesses of Spain and France caught in the intrigues and secrets of the 18th century)
June Thomson, Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black, Allison & Busby (Holmes comes out of retirement to deal with a case)
William T. Vollman, The Dying Grass, Viking (literary fiction about the Nez Perce War)
Kent Wascom, Secessia, Grove (violence, racial tension, and emerging secrets from the past in New Orleans in 1862)
Pam Weaver, Blue Moon, Pan Macmillan (1930s saga set in Worthing during the Depression and rise of Fascist Blackshirts)
Jack Whyte, Uprising, Sphere (Scotland 1297: last in triology about Robert the Bruce and William Wallace)
James Wilde, Hereward: The Immortals, Transworld (5th in 11thC series finds Hereward the Wake exiled and fighting for Byzantium)
August 2015
Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (19thC story of love, betrayal, war and reconciliation set in present-day Scotland and the court of the Tsar)
Pat Barker, Noonday, Hamish Hamilton (story of a group of artist friends who met at the Slade in 1914, went through WWI and struggled in the London Blitz in WWII)
Diana Bretherick, The Devil’s Daughters, Orion (murder mystery set in Victorian Scotland)
Christian Cameron, Salamis, Orion (latest in military series about Ancient Greece)
Meg Waite Clayton, The Race for Paris, Harper (WWII novel about two American journalists and an Englishman in occupied Paris on a quest for the scoop of their lives)
S. Copperstone, Bittersweet Tavern, Bygone Era (an American Revolutionary tale set in upper Mass. – later the State of Maine – about the difficulties of a widowed barmaid and her relationship with a sea captain who is fighting for the colonists)
Jonathan Crown, Sirius, Head of Zeus (German-Jewish man’s terrier steps into history from family pet to Hollywood star to Hitler’s lapdog)
Jill Dalladay, The Abbess of Whitby, Lion (story of Hild, a Saxon woman who converted to Christianity and spread the faith across Britain)
Kim Devereux, Rembrandt’s Mirror, Atlantic (Rembrandt and the three women who shaped his life)
Ivan Doig, Last Bus to Wisdom, Riverhead (coming-of-age story about a boy and his great-uncle on a cross-country odyssey in the 1950s West)
Patricia Duncker, Sophie and the Sibyl, Bloomsbury USA (erudite novel about George Eliot, literature, and a surprising romance)
Lissa Evans, Crooked Heart, Harper (black comedy set in WWII England)
Lucy Foley, The Book of Lost and Found, Back Bay (a young woman pursues the truth about her late mother, which leads her to search for the identity of a mysterious woman in a 1920s-era portrait)
Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (novel of Kateryn Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife)
Rosalie Ham, The Dressmaker, Penguin Books (love, revenge, and haute couture in a small Australian town in the 1950s)
Lilian Harry, Surprises in Burracombe, Orion (latest in series set in 1950s Devon)
Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites, Simon & Schuster (about the mother of painter Camille Pissarro, living in early 19th-century St. Thomas)
Douglas Jackson, Scourge of Rome, Transworld (6th in Roman army series features the Siege of Jerusalem in 70s AD)
Livi Michael, Rebellion, Penguin (latest in Wars of the Roses series)
Paula McLain, Circling the Sun, Virago (story of Beryl Markham, brought up in colonial Kenya in the 1920s and embroiled in a scandalous Happy Valley love triangle before becoming an adventurous aviatrix)
Valerie Mendes, The Hideaway, Orion (woman uncovers family secrets dating back to the 1930s)
Patrick Modiano, The Occupation Trilogy, Bloomsbury (three novels about the Nazi occupation of Paris in WWII)
Patricia Kullberg, Girl in the River, Bygone Era (the story of Mae, a prostitute, and her view of the underbelly of life in post-World War II Portland, Oregon. She is pursued by a sleazy Asst. D.A. as is her friend, a female doctor who performs illegal, but clean, abortions)
Anna Loan-Wilsey, A Deceptive Homecoming, Kensington (historical mystery; Hattie Davish travels to Missouri to solve a mystery at the home of the Pony Express)
Jack Martin, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, Blank Slate Press (When FDR’s life is threatened, FBI Director Hoover has no choice but to dispatch Agent Harry Beirce, the one man he can trust to stop an assassination)
Nuala O’Connor, Miss Emily, Sandstone Press (set in 1866, reimagines the private life of one of America’s most beloved poets through her own voice and through the eyes of her family’s Irish maid)
Margaret Redfern, The Heart Remembers, Honno (a story set in 14thC Europe as Kaza searches for her Welsh storytelling grandfather)
Phyll MacDonald Ross and I.D. Roberts, Bandaging the Blitz, Sphere (young woman’s coming-of-age and first romance, set amid the turmoil of WW2)
Ilka Tampke, Skin, Hodder & Stoughton (story set in Ancient Britain just before the Roman invasion of AD 43)
Joanna Taylor, Masquerade, Piatkus (Regency London romance)
Cat Winters, The Uninvited, Morrow Paperbacks (paranormal ghost story of love, loss, and second chances, set during the Great Influenza of 1918)
Bai Xiao, French Concession, Harper (literary noir set in Shanghai in 1931)
September 2015
Susan Wittig Albert, The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O’Clock Lady, Berkley Prime Crime (Depression-era cozy mystery set in Alabama)
Jeannine Atkins, Little Woman in Blue: A Novel of May Alcott, She Writes Press (explores the relationship between two sisters who crave wealth, travel, and fame as an artist or writer in 19th-century Massachusetts)
Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord, Viking (novel of King David)
William Boyd, Sweet Caress, Bloomsbury (story of woman photographer from 1920s to WWII)
Rita Cameron, Ophelia’s Muse, Kensington (the story of Lizzie Siddal and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
Marissa Campbell, Avelynn, Thomas Dunne (historical romance between a Saxon noblewoman and Viking warrior in 9th-century England)
Maia Chance, Come Hell or Highball, Minotaur (Prohibition era caper, society matron Lola Woodby agrees to recover a stolen film reel for its rightful owner)
Sally Christie, The Sisters of Versailles, Atria (the tale of the five Nesle sisters—Louise, Pauline, Diane, Hortense, and Marie-Anne—four of whom became mistresses to King Louis XV)
Elizabeth Cooke, The Gates of Rutherford, Berkley (novel set in Britain during WWI, part of Rutherford series)
H.S. Cross, Wilberforce, FSG (novel of adolescent lust and cruelty at a boys’ school in 1926 England)
Alexandra Curry, The Courtesan, Dutton (debut novel inspired by the life of the legendary Qing dynasty courtesan, Sai Jinhua)
Sandra Dallas, The Last Midwife, St. Martin’s (a midwife must prove her innocence in a murder case in 1880 Colorado)
Sara Donati, The Gilded Hour, Berkley (two women physicians in 1883 New York; latest in Wilderness saga)
Nadine Dorries, Ruby Flynn, Head of Zeus (saga set in 1947 Ireland when a terrible mistake during the Potato Famine comes back to haunt a prosperous family)
Nicole Dweck, The Debt of Tamar, Thomas Dunne (saga about two families, one Jewish and one Muslim, from Inquisition-era Spain to modern-day New York)
Sebastian Faulks, Where My Heart Used To Beat, Hutchinson (author commissioned to write a biography is forced to confront his own WWII past)
Elsa Hart, Jade Dragon Mountain, Minotaur (debut mystery; an exiled librarian traveling through the 18th-century Chinese/Tibetan borderlands must learn the truth about a Jesuit priest’s death before the Emperor arrives)
Jenny Holmes, Mill Girls of Albion Lane, Transworld (saga set in 1930s Bradford)
D. E. Ireland, Move Your Blooming Corpse, Minotaur (amateur detectives Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins are off to the races)
Kate Kerrigan, The Dress, Head of Zeus (interwoven stories of modern fashion blogger and 1950s beauty who disappears along with the unique dress she commissioned)
Robert Merle, City of Wisdom and Blood, Pushkin Press (adventure-filled epic of 16th-century France)
Livi Michael, Succession, Thomas Dunne (novel of the two remarkable women of the Wars of the Roses: Margaret Beaufort and Margaret of Anjou)
Mark Oldfield, The Exile, Head of Zeus (thriller set in Civil War Spain and 2010 Madrid)
Neil Oliver, Master of Shadows, Orion (adventure tale set in 15thC Scotland and the Siege of Constantinople)
Anne Perry, Corridors of the Night, Ballantine (21st installment of William Monk Victorian mystery series)
Rod Reynolds, The Dark Inside, Faber (crime story set in Texarkana, USA in 1946)
I.D. Roberts, For Kingdom and Country, Allison & Busby (second Kingdom Lock adventure, set around the true story of Townshend’s Regatta and the capture of Amara on the Tigris river in late May 1915)
Amy Stewart, Girl Waits with Gun, HMH (based on the forgotten, true story of one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs)
Jan Suzukawa, Kaminishi, DSP Publications (time-travel novel set in 19th-century and present-day Japan, featuring a romance between a modern-day man and a samurai warlord)
F R Tallis, The Passenger, Pan Macmillan (thriller set aboard German U-boat in 1941)
Jane Thynne, The Scent of Secrefs, Ballantine (In Berlin, 1933, British actress Clara Vine finds herself dangerously involved with the British intelligence service; 1st in series)
Adriana Trigiani, All the Stars in the Heavens, Harper (the story of Loretta Young, Hollywood starlet, intertwined with an Italian former nun in 1930s LA)
Catriona Ward, Rawblood, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (ghost story set on Dartmoor in 1910)
Angus Watson, Reign of Iron, Orbit (historical fantasy about Caesar’s invasion of Gaul)
Paul Willetts, Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms, Constable (WWII espionage thriller)
Kate Williams, The Storms of War, Pegasus (first of three novels about a privileged British family during the WWI years)
October 2015
Tasha Alexander, The Adventuress, Minotaur (Victorian-era mystery; Lady Emily Hargreaves travels to the south of France and investigates an apparent suicide)
Diane Allen, Like Father, Like Son, Pan Macmillan (Victorian saga set in Yorkshire)
Stewart Binns, The Darkness and the Thunder, Penguin (2nd in Great War series, set in 1915)
Melvyn Bragg, Now Is The Time, Sceptre (novel about the 14thC Peasants’ Revolt)
Frances Brody, Death in the Dales, Piatkus (latest in murder mystery series set in 1920s Yorkshire)
Jillian Cantor, The Hours Count, Riverhead (story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s neighbor, who gets caught up in the ensuing drama in 1950)
Clare Clark, We That Are Left, HMH (story of two sisters born into privilege, forced to make their way in a world turned upside down by WWI, and the man who, against all expectation, transforms them both)
Jennifer Chiaverini, Christmas Bells, Dutton (multi-period novel inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
Lynn Cullen, Twain’s End, Gallery (the personal life of iconic American writer Mark Twain)
David W. Frank, Vienna in Violet: A Musical Mystery, Blank Slate Press (Hours after Franz Schubert and Johann Michael Vogel perform a comissioned song for a notorious
countess, she ends up dead, and the two musicians become the prime suspects)
Laurie Graham, On The Night In Question, Quercus (childhood friends find different fates in Ripper-haunted Victorian London)
Robert Harris, Dictator, Hutchinson (last in trilogy about the life of Cicero)
Jody Hedlund, Luther and Katharina, WaterBrook (based on the 16th-century romance of Katharina von Bora and Christian theologian and reformer Martin Luther)
J. Tullos Hennig, Winterwode, DSP Publications (historical fantasy featuring Robyn Hood, undisputed ruler of the wild, green wode; 3rd in series)
Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home, Morrow (literary fiction about a man based on the author’s father, his wife, and their unusual wedding gift, an alligator, which she must bring back South where it belongs)
Lisa Hilton, The Stolen Queen, Corvus (12thC story of Isabelle of Angoulême, betrothed to Hugh de Lusignan, a follower of the ‘old religion’ before being married to King John)
Emily Holleman, Cleopatra’s Shadows, Little Brown (the beginning of Cleopatra’s story, as seen through the eyes of her younger sister, Arsinoe)
Conn Iggulden, Bloodline, Michael Joseph (latest in series about the Wars of the Roses)
Edward Marston, Dance of Death, Allison & Busby (latest in Home Front Detective series set in WWI)
Susan Carol McCarthy, A Place We Knew Well, Bantam (the story of one family during the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis)
Kate Morton, The Lake House, Atria & Mantle (family secrets surrounding a boy’s disappearance from his home in Cornwall reverberate 60 years later)
Howard Frank Mosher, God’s Kingdom, St. Martin’s (set in 1950s Vermont, a young man comes of age and uncovers his family’s deepest secret)
Steven Saylor, Wrath of the Furies, Minotaur (Gordianus the Finder mystery set in 88 BC, featuring the young Gordianus in Alexandria)
Wilbur Smith, Golden Lion, William Morrow (new volume in the ongoing Courtney Family swashbuckling adventure series, set in 1784)
Julian Stockwin, Tyger, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Kydd naval series set during the Napoleonic Wars)
S D Sykes, The Butcher Bird, Hodder & Stoughton (14thC thriller set during the Black Death)
Ashley Weaver, Death Wears a Mask, Minotaur (Amory Ames and her husband Milo take on murder at a masked ball in 1930s England)
November 2015
Isabel Allende, The Japanese Lover, Atria (love story and multigenerational epic that sweeps from San Francisco in the present-day to Poland and the United States during the Second World War)
Laura Andersen, The Virgin’s Spy, Ballantine (2nd in new “what if” trilogy featuring Elizabeth I)
Rhys Bowen, Away in a Manger, Minotaur (in 1905 New York City, Molly Murphy Sullivan’s generosity to a beggar turns dangerous)
Rita Bradshaw, The Colours of Love, Pan Macmillan (saga about Land Girls during WWII)
B.A. Brock, King of the Storm, DSP Publications (historical fantasy about Perseus, prophesied to be a great demigod hero and king in ancient Greece)
Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord, Little Brown (story of King David)
Dana Chamblee Carpenter, Bohemian Gospel, Pegasus (tale of a bold and unusual girl on a quest to uncover her past and define her destiny in 13th-c Bohemia)
David Donachie, The Perils of Command, Allison & Busby (latest in naval series set in Napoleonic Wars)
Ruth Downie, Tabula Rasa, Bloomsbury (latest in series featuring Roman military medic turned detective, set during the building of Hadrian’s Wall in 120s AD)
Umberto Eco, Numero Uno, Harvill Secker (conspiracy thriller set in Italy in 1945 and 1992)
Charles Finch, Home by Nightfall, Minotaur (in the 1870s, gentleman sleuth returns to the home where he grew up and investigates a crime in a neighboring village)
David Gibbins, Sword of Attila, Pan Macmillan (miltary adventure of Roman soldiers fighting the Vandals in AD 439)
Rosie Goodwin, Dilly’s Lass, Corsair (saga of families rebuilding their lives after WWI)
C Joseph Greaves, Tom & Lucky (and George & Cokey Flo), Bloomsbury (courtroom showdown in trial of American gangster Lucky Luciano, based on new evidence)
Elly Griffiths, Smoke and Mirrors, Quercus (murder mystery set in 1951 Brighton)
Oscar Hijuelos, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, Grand Central (follows famed 19th century journalist-explorer Henry Stanley, his wife, the painter Dorothy Tennant, and Stanley’s long friendship with Mark Twain, as they venture to Cuba in search of Stanley’s father)
Pierre Lemaitre, The Great Swindle, Maclehose Press (crime novel set in France at the end of WWI)
Bruce Macbain, Ice Queen, Blank Slate Press (second volume of Odd Tangle-Hair’s saga of the Viking era, in which Odd takes up his post as skald to Harald, the young renegade prince of Norway)
Kristina McMorris, The Edge of Lost, Kensington (ambitious and heartrending story of immigrants, deception, and second chances, set in 1937 and two decades earlier)
Andrea Molesini, Between Enemies, Atlantic (1917: Austrian forces requisition aristocratic Italian family’s home)
Piers Paul Read, Scarpia, Bloomsbury (18thC story based on Sicilian nobleman from the opera Tosca)
Renee Rosen, White Collar Girl, NAL (the newspaper world of 1950s Chicago)
Steve Sem-Sandberg, The Chosen Ones, Faber (novel set in Nazi hospital in Austria where euthanasia was carried out)
Antonia Senior, The Winter Isles, Corvus (woman claims to be Lord of the Isles in 12thC Scotland)
Javier Sierra, The Master of the Prado, Atria (the mysteries behind European art through the centuries)
Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Big Green Tent, FSG (sweeping saga beginning in 1950s Moscow and illustrating life in a society defined by the KGB)
Beatriz Williams, Along the Infinite Sea, Putnam (epic story of star-crossed lovers in pre-war Europe collides with a woman on the run in the swinging ’60s)
Kate Williams, The Edge of the Fall, Orion (family struggles to piece together their fragmented lives in the aftermath of WWI)
Mary Wood, All I Have To Give, Pan Macmillan (saga about nurse in WWI)
Gelin Yan, Little Aunt Crane, Harvill Secker (novel set in Manchuria after the Japanese withdrew in 1945)
December 2015
Paula Brackston, The Silver Witch, Corsair (newly-widowed modern woman connects with ancient Celtic witch in Wales)
Grant Bywaters, The Red Storm, Minotaur (debut mystery featuring a black ex-boxer PI in 1930s New Orleans)
Jacopo della Quercia, License to Quill, St. Martin’s Griffin (James Bond-esque thriller starring Shakespeare and Marlowe)
Ben Elton, Time and Time Again, Thomas Dunne (an ex-soldier discovers time travel is possible and returns to June 1914 to prevent WWI)
Marina Fiorato, Beatrice and Benedick, St. Martin’s (imagines the first youthful encounter between the famous Shakespearean lovers)
Daniel Freedman, Riot Most Uncouth, Minotaur (bawdy mystery featuring Lord Byron as sleuth)
Pamela Hartshorne, House of Shadows, Pan Macmillan (woman with post-traumatic amnesia remembers only scenes from the life of a woman who lived 400 years earlier, and must unlock the mystery contained therein which is linked to the present)
Holly Messinger, The Curse of Jacob Tracy, Thomas Dunne (dark historical fantasy set in the American West about a Civil War vet who sees ghosts)
Sophie Perinot, Médicis Daughter, Thomas Dunne (in the 16th century French courts ruled by her ruthless and intimidating mother, Catherine de Médicis, Princess Margot struggles between obedience to her dangerous family and her own conscience)
Alyssa Palombo, The Violinist of Venice, St. Martin’s Griffin (Antonio Vivaldi, his secret wealthy mistress, and their passion for music and each other)
William Shaw, The Kings of London, Mulholland (crime in London during the swinging Sixties)
Margaret Southall, A Jacketing Concern, Knox Robinson (London, 1811: bored aristocrat accepts wager to restore kidnapped climbing boy to his family).
Jan Suzukawa, Kaminishi: Four Seasons, DSP Publications (historical time-travel novel set in modern and 19th-century Japan; sequel to Kaminishi)
L C Tyler, A Masterpiece of Corruption, Constable (second in John Grey mystery series, set in 1657)
Richard S. Wheeler, Anything Goes, Forge (a vaudeville troupe makes its way to western mining towns)
