Guide to historical novels for 2013
Below is our guide to historical novels for adults published in 2013.
For newer titles, check out of lists of forthcoming adult historical novels for 2021 and for children and YA for 2021.
January 2013
Alison Atlee, The Typewriter Girl, Gallery (a young woman in turn-of-the-century England finds love and independence at a seashore resort)
Mignon F. Ballard, Miss Dimple Suspects, Minotaur (on the WWII home front, Georgia schoolteacher Dimple Kilpatrick fights crime; 3rd in series)
Joanna Barnden, Running against The Tide, Robert Hale (1800: When Virginia Marcombe, daughter of a great shipping magnate, falls for Edward Allerdice, an apprentice lighterman, storms soon start to brew across the choppy waters of the Thames)
Ros Barber, The Marlowe Papers, St. Martin’s (novel in verse featuring Christopher Marlowe, who faked his death in a bar brawl to avoid a charge of heresy)
Melanie Benjamin, The Aviator’s Wife, Delacorte (biographical novel of Anne Morrow Lindbergh)
Maryka Biaggio, Parlor Games, Doubleday (about May Dugas, a beautiful con artist whose turn-of-the-century escapades take her around the world as she’s doggedly pursued by a Pinkerton Agency detective)
D.L. Bogdan, The Forgotten Queen, Kensington (novel of Margaret Tudor, sister to Henry VIII)
Paula Brackston, The Winter Witch, St. Martin’s (a fledgling witch in 19th-c Wales must defend her love, her home, and her life)
T.J. Brown, Summerset Abbey, Gallery (1st in series, follows two sisters and their maid as they’re separated by class divisions on an aristocratic estate in pre-WWI England)
Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Painted Girls, Riverhead (the story of the Van Goethem sisters, models, actors, and dancers in 1878 Paris)
Christian Cameron, Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities, Orion (latest in series set during the Siege of Rhodes, 306BC)
Joy Chambers, The Great Deception, Headline (Australian woman uncovers Nazi mystery about her missing husband)
Tracy Chevalier, The Last Runaway, Dutton (an English Quaker is drawn to assist slaves along the Underground Railroad in 1850s Ohio)
Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, Dutton (the extraordinary friendship between Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave who won her freedom by the skill of her needle)
Bernard Cornwell, 1356, Harper US & UK (re-creates the pivotal Battle of Poitiers during the Hundred Years War)
Michael Dean, I, Hogarth, Overlook (novel told in the voice of painter William Hogarth in 18th-c London)
Maurizio de Giovanni, I Will Have Vengeance, Europa (murder mystery set in the opera world of 1931 Naples)
Ruth Downie, Semper Fidelis, Bloomsbury (historical mystery set in Roman Britain, 5th in series)
Shusaku Endo, Kiku’s Prayer, Columbia University Press (a self-assured young woman from a rural village falls in love with Seikichi, a devoted Catholic man in 19th-c Japan)
Robert Fabbri, False God of Rome, Corvus (latest in series about Vespasian, Rome 1st C AD)
Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life, Hutchinson (a young prisoner in the Second World War, a father in a Victorian workhouse too ashamed to acknowledge his son, a girl with a guitar: Soldiers and lovers, parents and children, scientists and musicians risk their bodies and hearts in search of connection – some key to understanding what makes us the people we become)
Sara Fraser, Till Death Do Us Part, Severn House (latest in Thomas Potts Victorian mystery series)
David Gillham, City of Women, Fig Tree (A gripping and evocative tale of life in Berlin at the height of the Second World War: romance, duplicity and unfathomable choices)
Natalia Ginzberg, The Manzoni Family, Arcade (in ducal Italy and post-revolutionary France, a story of passions, writing, rivalries, deaths, and war, centered on nobleman Alessandro Manzoni)
C.W. Gortner, The Queen’s Vow, Hodder & Stoughton (early life of Queen Isabella of Castile)
Seth Grahame-Smith, Unholy Night, Transworld (what if the Three Wise Men were really a gang of thieves on the run?)
Susanna Gregory, Death in St James’s Park, Sphere (latest Thomas Chaloner mystery set in Restoration London)
Lucretia Grindle, Villa Triste, Grand Central (two sisters in 1943 Florence find themselves surrounded by terror and death as bands of Partisans rise up to fight the Nazi occupation)
Katharina Hagena, The Taste of Apple Seeds, Atlantic (girl inherits her grandmother’s house and its dark secrets of the past)
Tessa Harris, The Dead Shall Not Rest, Kensington (Dr. Thomas Silkstone mystery set in Georgian England, 2nd in series)
Joanna Hickson, The Agincourt Bride, HarperCollins UK (epic story of the queen who founded the Tudor dynasty, Catherine de Valois, told through the eyes of her loyal nursemaid)
M.K. Hume, Prophecy: Web of Deceit, Headline (latest in retelling of Merlin legend)
Pam Jenoff, The Ambassador’s Daughter, MIRA (WWII fiction, revisiting some characters from her Holocaust novel The Kommandant’s Girl)
Toni Jordan, Nine Days, Sceptre (something that happens in 1939 in Melbourne, Australia reverberates down the generations)
Judith Kinghorn, The Last Summer, NAL (an upstairs-downstairs friendship turns to romance in the pre-WWI years)
Elizabeth Lord, Illusions of Happiness, Severn House (1914. Madeleine is expected to a wealthy young man but falls for a milkman, leading to disaster and a momentous choice)
Annabel Lyon, The Sweet Girl, Atlantic (story of Aristotle’s daughter Pythias who finds herself in a world of superstition after her father’s death)
Robert Knott, Robert B. Parker’s Ironhorse, Putnam (latest Western adventure in Parker’s Cole-Hitch series)
Nell Leyshon, The Colour of Milk, Ecco (a young English farm girl reveals her startling story in 1831 England)
Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Knopf US & Hutchinson UK (the story of the children of the Great Migration, as seen through the eyes of a young mother from Georgia)
Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, The Bughouse Affair, Forge (first in a series of lighthearted mysteries set in 1890s San Francisco)
Stuart Neville, Ratlines, Harvill Secker (1963: Lieutenant Ryan is given the poisonous assignment of protecting a former Nazi sheltering in Ireland)
Una-Mary Parker, The Fairbairn Girls, Severn House (1891: The Fairbairn family have occupied Lochlee Castle in Argyllshire for the past 500 years, and the current head of the family, the Earl of Rothbury, along with his wife, sons and daughters, all seem set for a happy future, until they fall victim to a wicked curse)
Nancy Richler, The Imposter Bride, St. Martin’s (a mysterious mail-order bride in 1940s Montreal, and whose sudden decision later impacts the daughter she never knew)
Derek Robinson, Goshawk Squadron, MacLehose Press (story of pilots in WWI)
Derek Robinson, A Splendid Little War, MacLehose Press (1919: Merlin Squadron volunteers for action against the Reds in the Russian Civil War)
Hallie Rubenhold, Mistress of My Fate, Grand Central (rollicking historical adventure set in 18th-century England, 1st in trilogy featuring Henrietta Lightfoot)
Anne Rutherford, The Opening Night Murder, Berkley Prime Crime (Restoration-era mystery set in the theatrical world, first in series)
Catherine Shaw, Fatal Inheritance, Allison & Busby (1900 investigation into apparent suicide of a brilliant violinist)
Kieran Shields, A Study in Revenge, Crown (historical thriller set in 1893 Portland, Maine)
Janice Steinberg, The Tin Horse, Random House (sweeping, multi-generational story about twin sisters of Jewish heritage, one of whom disappears without a trace in 1939 California)
Rosie Thomas, The Kashmir Shawl, Overlook (sweeping multigenerational tale of marriage, isolation, and finding love in a magical place, set in 1941 and contemporary India)
Sam Thomas, The Midwife’s Tale, Minotaur (historical mystery featuring midwife Bridget Hodgson during the English Civil War, circa 1644)
Charles Todd, Proof of Guilt, Morrow (latest Ian Rutledge mystery set in post-WWI England)
Christine Wade, Seven Locks, Atria (story of a colonial wife and mother whose husband abandons her during the American Revolution; set in NY’s Catskills)
Fay Weldon, Habits of the House, St. Martin’s (Downton Abbey-style British saga centered on an aristocratic family, first in trilogy)
Elizabeth Wilhide, Ashenden, Simon & Schuster (the story of an 18th-century English country house, seen through the generations)
Ellen Marie Wiseman, The Plum Tree, Kensington (follows a young German woman through the chaos of WWII as she struggles to save the love of her life, a Jewish man)
Jack Wolf, The Story of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, Chatto & Windus (1750: medical student, troubled visionary, twisted genius, loving sadist. What is real and what imagined in Tristan Hart’s brutal, beautiful, complex world?)
Chi Zijian, The Last Quarter of the Moon, Harvill Secker (At the end of the twentieth-century an old woman thinks back over her life, her loves, and the joys and tragedies that have befallen her family and her people. She is a member of the Evenki tribe who wander the remote forests of north-eastern China with their herds of reindeer)
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February 2013
Kate Alcott, The Dressmaker, Sphere (Aspiring seamstress is employed as lady’s maid on the Titanic but her career is threatened when rumours spread that she and her mistress saved themselves at the expense of others)
Belinda Alexandra, Tuscan Rose, Gallery (passion, longing, witchcraft, and magic, in Italy during WWII)
Lyn Andrews, Sunlight on the Mersey, Headline (post-WWI saga set in Liverpool)
Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard, HMH (novel loosely inspired by Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor in mid-20th century New York)
Clifford Beal, Gideon’s Angel, Solaris (1653: exiled Royalist officer sent back to England to assassinate Cromwell)
Maggie Bennett, Every Noble Knight, Severn House (1355. Young knight Wulfstan Wynstede, a hero of Poitiers, falls in love but can he stay true during their 4-year betrothal?)
Nancy Bilyeau, The Chalice, Orion (1538: Joanna Stafford gets involved in a conspiracy against Henry VIII)
Patricia Bracewell, Shadow on the Crown, Viking (tale of power and forbidden love revolving around a young medieval queen, Emma of Normandy, in 11th-c England)
Andre Brink, Philida, Vintage (set in 1832, a South African slave and her determination to survive and to be free)
Frances Brody, A Medal for Murder, Minotaur (Kate Shackleton mystery set in 1920s Harrogate)
Carol K. Carr, India Black and the Shadows of Anarchy, Berkley Prime Crime (a Madam of Espionage mystery set in Victorian London)
Rory Clements, The Heretics, John Murray (latest in Elizabethan mystery series featuring intelligencer John Shakespeare)
Tara Conklin, The House Girl, Morrow (dual-period novel set in the modern world of art and law and on a slave plantation in 1852 Virginia, on how to repair a century-old wrong)
Christina Courtenay, The Gilded Fan, Choc Lit (romance involving Japanese girl forced to flee to England just as the Civil War is starting)
Andrew Cowan, Worthless Men, Sceptre (the effects of WWI on the people of an English city in 1916)
Jim Crace, Harvest, Picador (The arrival of a trio of outsiders et in motion series of events resulting in a ruined harvest, accusations of witchcraft and an English village changed for ever during the Enclosures)
Margaret Dickinson, The Clippie Girls, Macmillan (story of a female conductor on the Sheffield trams as WWII begins)
Stephanie Draven, It Stings So Sweet, Berkley (three sensual novellas set in the 1920s)
Sam Eastland, The Red Moth, Faber (Insp Pekkala thriller set in Stalinist Russia during the German invasion)
Katie Flynn, The Forget-Me-Not Summer, Century (saga set in 1930s Liverpool)
Kate Forsyth, Bitter Greens, Allison & Busby (Weaving the Rapunzel fable with the scandalous life of one of the tale’s first tellers, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, Bitter Greens moves from sixteenth-century Venice to the glittering court of the Sun King, Louis XIV)
Elizabeth Gill, Miss Appleby’s Academy, Quercus (American woman sets up a school in Yorkshire where her father was born. Undaunted by local hostility, soon her past catches up with her)
Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point, Harper (three generations of one remarkable family and the summer place that both shelters and isolates them; spans 50 years of the 20th century)
Kerry Greenwood, Out of the Black Land, Poisoned Pen (mystery set during Akhenaten’s time, Egypt of 1335 BCE)
Robert Hudson, The Dazzle, Jonathan Cape (Sex, drugs, and tuna… The inter-war fast set gathers in 1930s Scarborough to hunt giant tuna. It’s going to be murder)
Syrie James, The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen, Berkley (a modern woman discovers a lost Austen manuscript; story within a story)
Katherine Keenum, Where the Light Falls, Berkley (an American woman’s struggle with love and ambition in Belle Epoque Paris)
Julie Kibler, Calling Me Home, St. Martin’s (interweaves the story of a heartbreaking,
forbidden love in 1930s Kentucky with an unlikely modern-day friendship)
Barbara Kyle, The King’s Daughter, Canvas (second in romantic series set in Tudor times – Mary Tudor has become queen and one of two sisters plots to overthrow her and discovers secrets in her own family)
Victoria Lamb, His Dark Lady, Transworld (Secrets, spies and murderous plots besiege Shakespeare’s Muse and the court of Elizabeth I)
Dewey Lambdin, Hostile Shores, St. Martin’s (Alan Lewrie naval adventure set in 1805)
Martha Lee, The Specimen, Canongate (Victorian woman on trial for the murder of her husband, a butterfly collector)
Tosca Lee, Iscariot, Howard (biblical fiction; a novel of Judas)
Rita Leganski, The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow, Harper Paperbacks (a mute boy whose gift of magical hearing unveils family secrets, set in 1920s-50s New Orleans)
Morgan Llewelyn, After Rome, Forge (novel of Celtic Britain; anarchy rules in Britannia as the Roman Empire collapses, and two men fight to build stable lives among the chaos)
Jenny Mandeville, A Crown of Despair, Robert Hale (story of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last queen)
D.E. Meredith, The Devil’s Ribbon, Allison & Busby (detective story set in 1850s London)
M.E. Metcalfe, Homecoming, Matador (Tribulations of John seeking his lost father in northern England and Scotland from the 1930s to post WWII)
William Nicholson, Motherland, Quercus (Sussex 1942: Kitty an ATS driver stationed in Sussex meets Ed, a Royal Marine commando, and Larry, a liaison officer with Combined Ops and falls in love with both. Repercussions from the war will echo through the generations to come)
William Palmer, The Devil Is White, Jonathan Cape (1792: a fleet of English abolitionists in Africa, their ne’er-do-well neighbours and a fateful utopian experiment. They say their devil is white…)
Barbara Corrado Pope, The Missing Italian Girl, Pegasus (historical mystery of 1897 Paris)
Tanis Rideout, Above All Things, Putnam (the story of George Mallory’s wife, Ruth, left behind in Cambridge, England, in 1924 while he attempts the climb of Mt. Everest)
Derek Robinson, War Story, MacLehose Press (young WWI pilot grows up quickly during Battle of the Somme)
Dana Sachs, The Secret of the Nightingale Palace, Morrow Paperbacks (love and family secrets in modern NYC and 1940s San Francisco)
Guy Saville, The Afrika Reich, Holt (historical thriller / alternate history set in 1952 Africa, which presumes a German victory in WWII)
Lynn Shepherd, A Treacherous Likeness, Corsair (1850s literary mystery inspired by the Young Romantic poets)
John Shors, Temple of a Thousand Faces, NAL (epic fiction set at Angkor Wat in the 12th century)
Sharon Short, My One Square Inch of Alaska, Plume (a pair of siblings escapes the strictures of their 1950s industrial Ohio town on the adventure of a lifetime)
Paullina Simons, Children of Liberty, Morrow Paperbacks (epic story of love in turn-of-the-century America; prequel to The Bronze Horseman)
Aria Beth Sloss, Autobiography of Us, Holt (debut novel about friendship, loss and love; a
confession of what passed between two women who met as girls in 1960s Pasadena)
Andrea Thalasinos, An Echo Through the Snow, Forge (alternates between the Red Army’s displacement of Siberia’s Chukchi people in 1929 and a modern young woman who rescues a Siberian husky)
Christine Trent, Lady of Ashes, Kensington (historical mystery featuring a female undertaker in 19th-c London)
V.M. Whitworth, The Traitors’ Pit, Ebury (2nd Wulfgar novel finds Wulfgar’s brother accused of plotting to overthrow King Edward and place his cousin, Athelwald Seriol on the throne. Can Wulfgar unearth the evidence to exonerate his brother before Wystan suffers a traitor’s death?
Paul Witcover, The Emperor of All Things, Transworld (In a reimagined 18th-century, England is at war with France and the race is on to track down a sinister time-piece – a pocket watch with the power to alter the course of history)
Janet Woods, I’ll Get By, Severn House (young woman finds romance working as a Wren in a decoding unit in WWII)
Margaret Wrinkle, Wash, Atlantic Monthly (journey across continents in the 1800s as Wash, a young male slave, is forced to work as a breeding sire)
Sofka Zinovieff, The House on Paradise Street, Atria (epic tale of two sisters in the war-torn streets of Nazi-occupied Athens)
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March 2013
Simon Acland, The Waste Land, Beaufort (chronicles the adventures of Hugh de Verdon, a monk turned knight, during the extraordinary historical events of the First Crusade)
Naomi Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel, Little Brown (imagines the life of Jesus from the viewpoints of four people closest to him before his death)
Ian Anderson, Knight, Matador (Early 15thC, a king’s champion, having lost love and status finds himself on the battlefields of France)
Jeffrey Archer, Best Kept Secret, Macmillan (3rd in Clifton Chronicles saga begins in 1945 with a dispute over a fortune)
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, Transworld (through a woman born in 1910 who lives through the most turbulent events of the 20th century, this novel asks: What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?)
Mary Balogh, The Arrangement, Delacorte (love, redemption, a runaway bride, and a marriage of convenience set in Regency England)
Nancy Bilyeau, The Chalice, Touchstone (historical thriller, 2nd featuring novice Joanna Stafford in 1538 England)
Rhys Bowen, The Family Way, Minotaur (Molly Murphy mystery set in early 1900s NYC in which Molly, expecting her first child with husband Daniel Sullivan, is drawn into a kidnapping case)
Anne Brear, The Day Embroidered, Knox Robinson (romance set in Victorian Scotland and Yorkshire)
Elizabeth Chadwick, Shadows and Strongholds, Sourcebooks (medieval coming-of age
tale set in a world where chivalry is a luxury seldom afforded)
Tracy Chevalier, The Last Runaway, HarperCollins (When modest Quaker Honor Bright sails from Bristol with her sister, she is fleeing heartache for a new life in 1850s America. But tragedy leaves her alone and vulnerable, torn between two worlds and dependent on the kindness of strangers)
Meg Clothier, The Empress, Century (1179: as Constantinople falls to the Crusaders, Princess Agnes of France wife to their heir to Byzantium, struggles to save herself, and the man she loves)
Jeanine Cummins, The Crooked Branch, NAL (a modern woman finds her great-grandmother’s diary, dating from the Great Famine, and discovers a confession of murder)
Elizabeth Day, Home Fires, Bloomsbury (A present-day mother grieves for her soldier son while her mother-in-law remembers WWI)
E.A. Dinely, The Death of Lyndon Wilder and the Consequences Thereof, Corsair (the death of the heir to Ridley Hall exposes the complex undercurrents of Georgian society)
Michael Ennis, The Malice of Fortune, Century (Niccolò Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci come together to unmask a terrifying serial killer)
Jennifer Cody Epstein, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, Norton (a young woman struggles to build a new life in 1945 Japan)
Alex Espinoza, The Five Acts of Diego Leon, Random House (a man from rural Mexico meets up with Hollywood’s Golden Age)
Alicia Foster, Warpaint, Fig Tree (Four female artists create propaganda during the darkest hour of WW2 in this story based on real life events and paintings)
Kathleen Grissom, The Kitchen House, Transworld (1791: Irish orphan Lavinia is transported to Virginia to work in the kitchen of a wealthy plantation owner and becomes part of the family of black slaves. But Lavinia’s skin will always set her apart)
Therese Ann Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, St. Martin’s (biographical fiction about an American power couple during the Jazz Age)
Teresa Grant, The Paris Affair, Kensington (historical intrigue set in the Bourbon court in early 19th-c Paris)
James Hamilton-Paterson, Under The Radar, Faber (the lives of British pilots at the height of the Cold War)
C.S. Harris, What Darkness Brings, NAL (Sebastian St. Cyr mystery set in Regency England involving a diamond merchant’s death)
Jack Hight, Holy War, John Murray (story of Saladin)
Ann Hood, The Obituary Writer, Norton (literary mystery and love story about the poignant lives of two women in 1919 and during the JFK years)
C.C. Humphreys, Shakespeare’s Rebel, Orion (swordsman friend of Shakespeare gets caught up in intrigue, politics, love and war)
Anna Jacobs, The Trader’s Dream, Hodder & Stoughton, (third in saga series set in Europe, the Orient and Australia)
Mary Beth Keane, Fever, Scribner (novel about the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the early twentieth century)
Sarah Kennedy, The Altarpiece, Knox Robinson (a nun’s story set in Yorkshire during the Dissolution of the Monasteries)
David Kirk, Child of Vengeance, Doubleday (epic of 16th-c Japan, based on the real-life
exploits of the legendary samurai Musashi Miyamoto)
Nancy Kricorian, All the Light There Was, HMH (an Armenian family in WWII Paris and their life of survival)
William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace, Atria (novel about a young man, a small town, and murder in the summer of 1961)
Victoria Lamb, The Queen’s Secret, Berkley (a young African singer is asked to spy on Elizabeth I and finds herself thrust into danger)
Maureen Lee, [untitled], Orion (saga set in Liverpool in the aftermath of WWII)
Freda Lightfoot, The Duchess of Drury Lane, Severn House (biographical novel of Dorothy Jordan, celebrated London actress and mistress of the future William IV)
James Markert, A White Wind Blew, Sourcebooks (a doctor and an enigmatic patient help the
most unlikely of orchestras rise from the ashes of one of history’s most crippling epidemics)
Jude Morgan, A Little Folly, St. Martin’s (witty and romantic novel of Regency love, family and
appalling scandal)
Stuart Nadler, Wise Men, Picador (When Hilton Wise, son of a powerful and wealthy lawyer falls for a young black girl in 1952, he has no idea that his passion will lead to the exposure of his father’s deepest secrets and the result will shatter his family, and hers)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed, HarperCollins (power, loss, and family curses in early twentieth-century Princeton; literary)
Tanis Rideout, Above All Things, Viking (British mountaineer George Mallory’s fatal attempt to conquer Everest from his own point of view and that of his devoted wife left at home)
Mercè Rodoreda, In Diamond Square, Virago (Wife and mother Natalia struggles to feed her children when her husband goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War)
Jennie Rooney, Red Joan, Chatto & Windus (Cold War: Working in a government ministry with access to top-secret information, Joan is suddenly faced with the most difficult question of all: what price would you pay to remain true to what you believe? Would you betray your country, your family, even the man you love?
Simone St. James, An Inquiry into Love and Death, NAL (ghost story set in 1920s England)
M C Scott, Rome: The Art of War, Transworld (latest novel featuring the spy Pantera, set in Rome during the Year of the Four Emperors, AD 69)
Jan-Philipp Sendker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Polygon (love story set in Burma between 1950s and present day)
Elif Shafak, Honor, Viking (an honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London)
Marisa Silver, Mary Coin, Blue Rider/Penguin (reimagining of the iconic woman in Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph)
Kate Southwood, Falling to Earth, Europa (the story of one man and his family who survive the tornado that hits Marah, Illinois, in 1925)
Rupert Thomson, Secrecy, Granta Books (intrigue and mystery in 17thC Florence under the last Medicis)
Donna Thorland, The Turncoat, NAL (romantic historical novel set during America’s fight for independence)
Ann Weisgarber, The Promise, Mantle (1900, a young pianist flees home after a scandal and agrees to marry her childhood admirer, now widowed)
Geoffrey Wilson, The Place of Dead Kings, Hodder & Stoughton (second in alternative history series set in the 19thC occupied England with a quest for the Holy Grail in Scotland)
Kate Worsley, She Rises, Bloomsbury (1740 the lives of a maid at Harwich and boy press-ganged into a warship collide)
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April 2013
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, Reagan Arthur (a woman born in 1910 and her multiple possible lifetimes, as the century marches towards its second world war)
Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard, Chatto & Windus (1957: Frances and Bernard meet at writer’s colony. Afterwards, he sends her a letter, and with it begins an almost holy friendship told through an absorbing correspondence that chronicles – and changes – the course of their lives)
James Benmore, Dodger, Heron (The Artful Dodger returns from an Australian penal colony to London in search of hidden fortune)
Vanora Bennett, Midnight in St Petersburg, Century (girl flees pogroms of 1911 and is caught up in romance and conflict in pre-Revolutionary Russia)
Richard Blake, The Ghosts of Athens, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in 7thC series featuring British adventurer and Roman senator Aelric)
Alan Brennert, Palisades Park, St. Martin’s (a family of dreamers and their lives within the legendary Palisades Amusement Park, beginning in ’30s New Jersey)
Amy Brill, The Movement of Stars, Riverhead (love story set in 1845 Nantucket, between a female astronomer and the unusual man who understands her dreams)
Sandra Byrd, Roses Have Thorns, Howard (novel of Elin von Snakenborg, a Swedish noblewoman in the court of Elizabeth I)
Susanna Calkins, A Murder at Rosamund’s Gate, Minotaur (a chambermaid must uncover a murderer in 17th-century plague-ridden London)
Berwick Coates, The Last Conquest, Simon & Schuster (a novel of the Norman Conquest)
Stevie Davies, Awakening, Parthian Books (Wiltshire 1860: One year after Darwin’s explosive publication of The Origin of Species, two sisters awaken to a world shattered by science, radicalism and the stirrings of feminist rebellion)
Lindsey Davis, The Ides of April, Hodder & Stoughton (1st in a new Roman detective series featuring Flavia Alba)
Maurice Druon, The Iron King, Harper Voyager (first in Accursed Kings series set in medieval France)
Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen, Harper Voyager (second in Accursed Kings series set in medieval France)
Gordon Ferris, Pilgrim Soul, Atlantic (latest in detective series set in post-WWII Britain)
Kimberley Freeman, Lighthouse Bay, Touchstone (travels more than a century between two love stories set in the Australian seaside town of Lighthouse Bay)
Jean Fullerton, Call Nurse Millie, Orion (story of nurse in 1945 East End of London)
Rosie Goodwin, Home Front Girls, Canvas (saga of three shop girls in Coventry during WWII)
Robert Goolrick, Heading Out To Wonderful, Hutchinson (the arrival of a stranger in a small American town in 1948 sets in motion a series of events around a tragic love affair)
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Exiled Blade, Orbit (third in Assassini series, set in Venice)
Graham Hancock, War God, Coronet (the Spanish conquest of Mexico seen through an Aztec girl and a Spanish boy)
Daisy Hildyard, Hunters in the Snow, Jonathan Cape (woman discovers an eccentric unfinished history of England among her dead grandfather’s papers)
Ken Kalfus, Equilateral, Bloomsbury USA (irreverent novel, set in the late 19th century, about the centuries-old quest for interplanetary communication)
Rebecca Kanner, Sinners and the Sea, Howard (imagines the life of Noah’s wife)
Guy Gavriel Kay, River of Stars, Roc (historical fantasy inspired by China’s glittering, decadent Song Dynasty)
Frances Kazan, The Dervish, Opus (action-packed romance set during the dying days of the Ottoman Empire)
Jane Kirkpatrick, One Glorious Ambition, WaterBrook (novel of 19th-c social reformer Dorothea Dix)
Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train, Morrow Paperbacks (two women generations apart form an unusual friendship: a young Penobscot woman, and a 91-year-old woman sent west on an orphan train in the ’30s)
Barbara Kyle, Blood Cousins, Rival Queens, Kensington (latest in Thornleigh saga of royal intrigue, set in Tudor England)
Tim Leach, The Last King of Lydia, Atlantic (story of Croesus and the elusiveness of happiness)
Elizabeth Loupas, The Second Duchess, Preface (young woman married to Duke of Ferrara, grandson of Lucrezia Borgia is driven to discover if he murdered his first wife)
Paul Lynch, Red Sky In Morning, Quercus (Ireland 1832: Irish farmer flees Donegal for USA whilst his pursuer swears bloody revenge)
Edward Marston, Peril on the Royal Train, Allison & Busby (mystery involving a conspiracy to assassinate Queen Victoria and Prince Albert en route to Balmoral)
Alison McQueen, The Letter, Orion (girl falls in love with someone forbidden on the eve of Indian independence in 1947 and years later tries to find him when her husband is posted to Delhi)
Jennifer McVeigh, The Fever Tree, Putnam (in 1880 South Africa, a young woman is forced to choose between passion and integrity)
Annie Murray, The Women of Lilac Street, Macmillan (saga set in Birmingham a decade after WWI)
William Nicholson, Motherland, Simon & Schuster (a love triangle set in England, France, India, and Jamaica against the backdrop of World War II)
Elaine Neil Orr, A Different Sun, Berkley (an American woman travels to West Africa as a missionary in 1853; a novel of social and spiritual awakening)
Jeremy Page, The Collector of Lost Things, Little Brown (1845: researcher Eliot Saxby is paid to go on an expedition to the Arctic in the hope of finding remains of the by now extinct Great Auk. He joins a regular hunting ship, but the crew and the passengers are not what they seem)
Anne Perry, Blind Justice, Headline (latest in Inspector Monk Victorian detective series)
Anne Perry, Midnight at Marble Arch, Ballantine (Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mystery set in Victorian London, surrounding an innocent man accused of two murders)
Sarah Pinborough, Mayhem, Jo Fletcher Books (While Jack the Ripper is making headlines in 1880s London, there’s another madman on the loose)
Tom Quinn, Cocoa at Midnight, Coronet (story of a maid working for various aristocrats beginning in 1925 with the ancestors of Princess Diana)
Deanna Raybourn, A Spear of Summer Grass, MIRA (story of Delilah Drummond, a scandalous flapper who journeys to Kenya in 1923 in search of adventure)
Rhonda Riley, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, Ecco (unconventional and passionately romantic love story set in the waning months of WWII)
Imogen Robertson, The Paris Winter, Headline (secrets, deception and opium for an English art student in Belle Epoque Paris, 1909)
Joanna Rossiter, The Sea Change, Fig Tree (A lost village taken by the war office in 1943, and an Indian beach town devastated by a tsunami in 1971: a mother and daughter’s stories intertwine)
Edward Rutherfurd, Paris: The Novel, Doubleday (epic portrait of Paris that leaps through centuries as it weaves the tales of families whose fates are forever entwined with the City of Lights)
James Salter, All That Is, Knopf (literary love story set in post-WWII America)
Christina Schwarz, The Edge of the Earth, Atria (atmospheric novel set at the closing of the frontier; a young wife moves to a far-flung and forbidding lighthouse where she uncovers a life-changing secret)
Simon Scarrow, Sword and Scimitar, Headline (1565: Siege of Malta)
Taiye Selasi, Ghana Must Go, Viking (family story spanning generations set in Ghana, USA and London)
Harry Sidebottom, Wolves of the North, Overlook (5th in Warriors of Rome series, set in 263 AD)
Joanna Campbell Slan, Death of a Dowager, Berkley Prime Crime (Jane Eyre mystery, 2nd in series)
Beverly Swerling, Bristol House, Viking (dual-period mystery/supernatural thriller that stretches from modern London to Tudor England)
David Thomas, Killer at the End of the Line, Quercus (brilliant detective in WWII Berlin becomes a mass-murderer)
Rose Tremain, Merivel: A Man of His Time, Norton (Sir Robert Merivel, Restoration-era physician, and his travels in Europe)
Liz Trenow, The Last Telegram, Sourcebooks (story of forbidden love set amongst the looms of a World War II silk factory)
Nicola Upson, Fear in the Sunlight, Harper (Josephine Tey mystery set in 1936 Portmeirion, Wales)
Eva Weaver, The Puppet Boy of Warsaw, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Jewish boy puppeteer in the Warsaw Ghetto forced to entertain German troops the effect on a guilt-stricken German soldier)
Fay Weldon, Long Live The King, Head of Zeus (second in trilogy about the lives and loves of an aristocratic family begins in 1901)
John Wilcox, Fire Across The Veldt, Allison & Busby (latest in Victorian military adventure series)
Gene Wilder, Something to Remember You By, St. Martin’s (novella; romantic, dramatic fiction set during World War II)
Lauren Willig, The Ashford Affair, St. Martin’s (epic of long-held family secrets, moving from WWI British society to modern Manhattan to the red-dirt hills of Kenya)
Jack Wolf, The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, Penguin (Enlightenment-era tale of a young surgeon-in-training whose study of anatomy is complicated by his sadistic tendencies)
Julie Wu, The Third Son, Algonquin (novel set in WWII Taiwan and 1950s America, literary fiction)
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May 2013
Jeffrey Archer, Best-Kept Secret, St. Martin’s (latest in Clifton Chronicles saga, bringing story up to the 1960s)
Patricia Beard, A Certain Summer, Gallery (debut novel set in an exclusive summer colony along America’s east coast during the aftermath of World War II)
Marlen Bodden, The Wedding Gift, Century (19th-C Southern USA plantation owner gives his daughter the present of a slave girl who is also his daughter by a slave)
Melvyn Bragg, Grace and Mary, Sceptre (a son tries to recreate lost family history to shore up his mother’s fading memory)
Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol, Touchstone (latest Oscar Wilde murder mystery)
Courtney Angela Brkic, The First Rule of Swimming, Little Brown (a woman leaves her Croatian island home to search for her missing sister and confront her family’s hidden history)
Rhidian Brook, The Aftermath, Viking (tensions arising when a British and and a German family live in the same house in Hamburg in 1946 during the de-Nazification of Germany)
Sally Cabot, Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, Morrow (novel of William Franklin, son of Benjamin and his mistress, who stayed a Loyalist during the American Revolution)
Christian Cameron, The Ill-Made Knight, Orion (chivalry and betrayal in the Hundred Years’ War)
Bill Cheng, Southern Cross the Dog, Ecco (literary fiction set in the Deep South in 1927)
Paul Fraser Collard, The Scarlet Thief, Headline (military adventure set in the Crimean War)
Gary Corby, Sacred Games, Soho (historical mystery set in classical Athens, 3rd in series)
Sarah Dunant, Blood and Beauty, Virago (story of the Borgias)
Jane Feaver, An Inventory of Heaven, Corsair (old lady reveals the secrets of a Devon farm she left London to live near after WWII)
Jane Finnis, A Bitter Chill, Head of Zeus (second in murder mystery series set in Roman Britain in AD 95 featuring Aurelia Marcella)
James Forrester, The Roots of Betrayal, Sourcebooks (2nd in Clarenceux King of Arms series of Tudor-era thrillers)
Iain Gale, Keane’s Company, Heron Books (latest in military adventure series set in the Peninsular War)
Rosemary Goring, After Flodden, Polygon (intrigue and romance in the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden, 1513)
Joanna Hershon, A Dual Inheritance, Ballantine (passion, betrayal, class and friendship in the lives of two generations, beginning in Cambridge, MA, in 1963)
Justin Hill, Hastings, Little Brown (second in series set around the Norman Conquest)
William W. Johnstone with J.A. Johnstone, Butch Cassidy: The Lost Years, Kensington (What if Butch Cassidy wasn’t killed in the infamous Bolivian shootout in 1908?)
Jeanne Kalogridis, The Inquisitor’s Wife, St. Martin’s Griffin (novel of Renaissance Spain)
Ben Kane, Spartacus: Rebellion, St. Martin’s (Spartacus and his ragtag army take on the mighty Roman army)
Barbara Kyle, Blood Between Queens, Kensington (Tudor drama, 5th in her Thornleigh Saga)
Philip Kazan, Appetite, Orion (a tale of love and longing set in 1466 Florence)
Jasper Kent, The People’s Will, Transworld (Part historical adventure, part vampire thriller – the fourth in the Danilov Quintet, set in Turkmenistan 1881)
Giles Kristian, Brothers’ Fury, Transworld (latest in series about a family torn apart by the English Civil War)
Dale M. Kushner, The Conditions of Love, Grand Central (a young woman learns all about the different kinds of love, set in the 1950s Midwest)
S.G. MacLean, The Devil’s Recruit, Quercus (4th in thriller series set in 17thC Scotland featuring Alexander Seaton)
Eduardo Mendoza, Madrid 1936, MacLehose Press (English art historian is shown a secret Velazquez painting by Primo de Rivera’s daughter and gets involved as Russian assassin is sent to kill the Nationalist leader)
Philipp Meyer, The Son, Ecco (multigenerational literary epic moving between 1880s Texas and the oil booms of the 20th century)
Aly Monroe, Black Bear, John Murray (British spy Peter Cotton is sent to Manhattan as part of the British effort to build intelligence into the new UN, and wakes up in a private facility reserved for very special patients and veterans)
David Morrell, Murder as a Fine Art, Little Brown & Mulholland (literary suspense set in gas-lit London as a series of horrific murders paralyze the city)
Virginia Pye, River of Dust, Unbridled (the child of American missionaries is stolen by Mongol bandits in 1910 China)
Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist, Amy Einhorn/Putnam (a new office girl gets people talking in 1924 Manhattan)
Erika Robuck, Call Me Zelda, NAL (novel of 1920s icon Zelda Fitzgerald)
M.J. Rose, Seduction, Atria (novel about a grieving woman who discovers the lost letters of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries)
Priscilla Royal, Tyrant Mind, Head of Zeus (latest in murder mystery series set in 13thC England)
James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night, Bloomsbury (Oxford 1955: latest in detective series)
Alex Rutherford, Serpent’s Tooth, Headline (latest in Empire of the Moghul series)
William Ryan, The Twelfth Department, Mantle (3rd in detective series set in Stalinist Russia, 1937)
Jeff Shaara, A Chain of Thunder, Ballantine (novel of the siege of Vicksburg)
Aria Beth Sloss, The Autobiography of Us, Picador (1960s California, teenage best friends dream of lives beyond their mothers’ narrow expectations until a
single act of betrayal changes everything)
Anne Easter Smith, Royal Mistress, Touchstone (the rise and fall of Jane Shore, the final and favorite mistress of Edward IV)
Victoria Thompson, Murder in Chelsea, Berkley Prime Crime (latest in Gaslit mystery series set in late 19th-c New York)
Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins, Viking (comedy, romance and adventure as a man searches for a woman he met in Italy during the filming of Cleopatra in 1962)
Tim Willocks, The Twelve Children of Paris, Jonathan Cape (Paris 1572, the Huguenot Massacre in the Wars of Religion)
Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni, Harper (a mix of Jewish and Arab mythologies in the story of two supernatural creatures in 1899 NYC)
Fay Weldon, Long Live the King, St. Martin’s (2nd in Downton Abbey-style family saga trilogy, set at the time of Edward VII’s coronation)
Robert Wilton, Traitor’s Field, Atlantic (treachery and betrayal during the English Civil War)
Felicity Young, Antidote to Murder, Berkley (2nd in Doctor Dody McCleland series set in turn-of-the-20th-century London)
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June 2013
Patricia Bracewell, Shadow on the Crown, HarperCollins (1001: faced with Viking invasion, King Aethelred is offered Emma of Normandy as his new wife, but there are political factions at work)
Eli Brown, Cinnamon and Gunpowder, FSG (swashbuckling epicurean adventure set on the high seas in 1819)
Cate Campbell, Benedict Hall, Kensington (a wealthy Seattle family and their household staff face the challenges wrought by World War I and the dawn of a new age)
Elizabeth Chadwick, The Summer Queen, Sphere (first in trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine)
Tim Chapman, Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold, Allium Press of Chicago (conflicted scientific ethics, economic hardship, and criminal frenzy, tempered with the redemption of family love, set in the present day and in 1930s Chicago)
Pamela Christie, Death and the Courtesan, Kensington (Regency historical mystery with a courtesan sleuth)
Anne Cleeland, Tainted Angel, Sourcebooks (game of cat and mouse set during the Napoleonic Wars)
Susan Crandall, Whistling Past the Graveyard, Gallery (coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in 1963, befriends a lonely woman, and embarks on a life-changing roadtrip)
Anton DiSclafani, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Riverhead US / Headline UK (a troublemaking heroine comes of age at a riding camp in Depression-era North Carolina)
Loren D. Estleman, The Confessions of Al Capone, Forge (biographical novel about the iconic American mobster)
Nigel Farndale, The Road Between Us, Transworld (dual time story about forbidden love set in WWII Europe and present-day Afghanistan)
Maria Fiorato, Beatrice and Benedick, John Murray (love story set in 16th-c Italy)
Elizabeth Fremantle, Queen’s Gambit, S&S (novel of Katharine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII)
Laurie Graham, The Liar’s Daughter, Quercus (girl investigates her mother’s claim to be Nelson’s daughter)
Sam Halpern, A Far Piece to Canaan, HarperPerennial (a Kentucky professor returns to the hills where he was raised and revisits old memories from 1945)
Graham Hancock, War God, Coronet (1519 as the Spanish fleet sails towards Mexico)
John Harwood, The Asylum, HMH US, Jonathan Cape UK (a gothic mystery of intense suspense and terror, as a lone woman, held against her will, is forced to regain her mind, to delve as deeply as she can into the void of her memory to uncover the story that will free her)
CC Humphreys, A Place Called Armageddon, Sourcebooks (novel of the fall of Constantinople in 1453)
Maggie Joel, The Second-Last Woman in England, Canvas (post-WWII story of a conventional middle-class woman who murders her husband and is sentenced to death)
Ken Kalfus, Equilateral, Bloomsbury (1900s astronomer seeks a mysterious Egyptian triangle that may be able to communicate with Mars)
Ben Kane, Hannibal: Fields of Blood, Preface (novel about Hannibal)
Susanna Kearsley, The Firebird, Sourcebooks (time-slip novel; love, sacrifice, courage, and redemption set in modern times and 18th-century Scotland, France and Russia)
Hannah Kent, Burial Rites, Picador (1829 Iceland: a condemned murderess waiting for execution makes a confession to a priest that shows all is not as int seemed)
Philip Kerr, A Man Without Breath, Quercus (thriller set in 1943 when the Katyn Massacre is discovered in German-occupied Russia)
Stephanie Landsem, The Well, Howard (biblical fiction, story of the Samaritan woman’s daughter; faith, unexpected love, and heartbreak)
Annabel Lyon, The Sweet Girl, Knopf (literary novel of Aristotle’s daughter, Pythias, hoping to carve out a life for herself after her father’s death)
Jack Ludlow, Prince of Legend, Allison & Busby (latest in Crusader adventure series)
Henning Mankell, A Treacherous Paradise, Harvill Secker (based on the true story of a Swedish woman who ran the most famous brothel in Mozambique in the 1900s)
Shirley McKay, Friend and Foe, Polygon (latest in Hew Cullan mystery series set in 16thC St Andrews)
Kate Manning, The Notorious Life of Madame X, Bloomsbury (19th-C testament of the notorious Madame X: midwife, female physician, distributor of obscene materials, abortionist, and the most hated woman in New York)
M.E. Mayer, Two For Joy, Head of Zeus (second in mystery series set in Byzantium in the 6thC AD)
Philipp Meyer, The Son, Ecco (panoramic novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West; literary saga beginning in 1848)
John O’Connell, Baskerville, Atria (friendship, rivalry, and ambition during the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Victoria Owens, Drawn to Perfection, Hookline (set in the Welsh Marches during the 1750s, a story of double dealing in life, love and civil engineering)
S.J. Parris, Treachery, HarperCollins (latest in historical thriller series featuring Giordano Bruno, heretic, philosopher and spy)
Nick Rennison, Carver’s Quest, Atlantic (Victorian archaeologist turns detective to solve a mystery that involves the lost treasure of Philip of Macedon)
Michael Ridpath, Traitor’s Gate, Head of Zeus (story of the first plot to kill Hitler, ignited on the eve of WWII)
Lucinda Riley, The Lavender Garden, Atria (love, duty, and desire, spanning Nazi-occupied Paris and the glamorous Cote d’Azur)
Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist, Fig Tree (a female typist at a New York police station in the Roaring Twenties becomes obsessed with the new woman in the typing pool)
Andrew Rosenheim, The Informant, Hutchinson (literary thriller involving investigation into Russian spies infiltrating USA government in the 1940s)
Eugen Ruge, In Times of Fading Light, Faber (story of one family over fifty years and four generations in East Germany)
Alex Rutherford, Empires of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne, St. Martin’s (fourth installment in the internationally bestselling historical adventure series set in the Moghul Empire)
Edward Rutherfurd, Paris, Hodder & Stoughton (fictionalised story of 1000 years of history of Paris)
Caroline Sandon, Burnt Norton, Head of Zeus (beginning in 1731, the story of the destruction of a dynasty by a man overwhelmed by obsession)
Simon Scarrow, The Gladiator, Overlook (novel of the Roman Legion, latest in his Macro/Cato series)
Gary Schanbacher, Crossing Purgatory, Pegasus (in 1858, in the wake of family tragedy, Indiana farmer Thompson Grey takes to the Santa Fe Trail)
Natasha Solomons, The Gallery of Vanished Husbands, Sceptre (after her husband vanishes, Julie joins the post-WWII art scene, falls for a reclusive artist but can’t rest until she’s found her husband – and made a surprising discovery)
Diana Wallis Taylor, Claudia, Wife of Pontius Pilate, Revell (inspirational fiction about a shadowy figure from the Gospels)
Julie Thomas, The Keeper of Secrets, Morrow (dual-period fiction set in prewar Berlin and the present, centered on a stolen violin)
Cindy Thomson, Grace’s Pictures, Tyndale House (faith, courage, and forgiveness in the story of an Irish immigrant in turn-of-the-20th-century New York whose interest in photography leads her into danger)
Henry Venmore-Rowland, The Sword and the Throne (working title), Transworld (second in series about a Roman aristocrat embroiled in the politics and war of AD69, the Year of the Four Emperors)
Kent Wascom, The Blood of Heaven, Grove (literary fiction spanning early 19th-c America)
Kerry Young, Gloria, Bloomsbury (story of love and redemption set in Jamaica, 1938)
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July 2013
E. C. Ambrose, Elisha Barber, DAW (historical fantasy set in 14th c England; a barber surgeon learns diabolical magic to defeat an unjust king, but the cost may be more than his soul)
Michael Arnold, Assassin’s Reign, John Murray (4th in military series set in English Civil War)
Radwa Ashour, Blue Lorries, Bloomsbury (story of the daughter of a political detainee in Egypt later becomes an activist, 1950s-1970s)
Gillian Bagwell, Venus in Winter, Berkley (based on the first 40 years of the life of Bess of Hardwick, 1527-1608, the formidable four-times widowed Tudor dynast)
Lily Baxter, The Shopkeeper’s Daughter, Century (saga set in 1944 London when shopgirl falls for American soldier who turns out to have a fiancée at home)
Benjamin Black, Holy Orders, Mantle (latest in crime series featuring pathologist Quirke set in 1950s Dublin)
Chris Bohjalian, The Light in the Ruins, Doubleday (a noble family secludes themselves in WWII-era Tuscany, and the murderous aftermath set 10 years later)
John Boyne, This House is Haunted, Transworld (ghost story set in Victorian Norfolk involving a young governess and her two young charges who seem to live alone in a remote house)
Diana Bretherick, City of Devils, Orion (no sooner has a Scottish scientist arrived in 1890s Turin to study under a famous criminologist than a murder happens)
Jessica Brockmole, Letters from Skye, Ballantine US & Hutchinson UK (an epistolary love story spanning two world wars, beginning when an American college student sends a fan letter to a reclusive Scottish poet)
Nick Brown, The Far Shore, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Agent of Rome military adventure series)
Ruth A. Casie, The Guardian’s Witch, Carina (historical romance set in 13th-century England, featuring a woman rumored to be a witch)
John Henry Clay, The Lion and the Lamb, Hodder & Stoughton (4th-C Britain: young Romano-Briton flees his family after scandal and finds himself in the Roman army just as there is a barbarian invasion from the North)
Elizabeth Cooke, Rutherford Park, Berkley (novel about a stately monument to English history
and aristocracy—and the secrets of the family that resides there)
Caitlin Davies, The Babysitter, Hutchinson (what binds together a young woman on her first day as a live-in nanny, a bewildered, lonely little girl called Muriel in Kent in the 1950s and a figure in a 19th century painting?)
Ursula DeYoung, Shorecliff, Little Brown (a 1920s New England family and the secrets revealed when they reunite over one long summer)
Sarah Dunant, Blood and Beauty, Virago (literary fiction about the Borgia family)
Nicole Galland, Godiva, Morrow (novel of Lady Godiva, set in Anglo-Saxon England)
Robert Goddard, The Ways Of The World, Transworld (espionage story set in Paris after the First World War, full of double crosses and triple twists)
C.W. Gortner, The Tudor Conspiracy, St. Martin’s Griffin (historical thriller set in Elizabethan England, 2nd in series)
Andrew Sean Greer, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, Ecco (fantastical tale of a woman who undergoes electroshock therapy and finds herself transported to the “other lives” she might have lived, in 1918 and 1941)
Philippa Gregory, The White Princess, Touchstone (novel of Elizabeth of York, future wife of Henry VII)
Kate Griffin, Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders, Faber (crime novel set in Limehouse, London, 1880s)
Jonathan Grimwood, The Last Banquet, Canongate (a man’s search for the perfect taste before and during the French Revolution)
Sarah Harrison, A Flower That’s Free, Orion (reissue of novel about a young woman returning to Britain just before WWII)
James Heneage, The Walls of Byzantium, Heron Books, (quest for hidden treasure in 15th-C Europe and Near East by feuding families; first in series)
Daisy Hildyard, Hunters In The Snow, Jonathan Cape (after his death, a young woman finds the book her grandfather left unfinished when he died. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men)
James Holland, The Devil’s Pact, Transworld (latest WWII adventure of Jack Tanner set during the invasion of Sicily in 1943)
Conn Iggulden, The Blood of Gods, Delacorte (novel about the pursuit of Caesar’s killers and the rise to power of Octavian-Caesar Augustus)
Michael Irwin, The Skull and the Nightingale, Morrow (chilling and deliciously dark tale of manipulation, sex and seduction, set in eighteenth century England)
Kate Kerrigan, City of Hope, Morrow (2nd in Ellis Island trilogy, about early immigration to to the US from Ireland)
Bruce Macbain, The Bull Slayer, Head of Zeus (second in Roman mystery series featuring Pliny the Younger, now Governor of Bithynia)
Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman, Freud’s Mistress, Amy Einhorn/Putnam (imagines an affair between Freud and his sister-in-law)
Alison MacLeod, Unexploded, Hamish Hamilton (In May 1940 a family in Brighton waits for the enemy to land on its beaches)
Henning Mankel, A Treacherous Paradise, Knopf (a poor Swedish emigrant becomes a bordello owner in Mozambique in 1905)
William Napier, [untitled], Orion (3rd in Clash of Empires series about Europe and Turkey, c. 1570s)
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Siege, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (murder mystery set in 1811 Cadiz during Spain’s struggle for freedom from France)
Brandy Purdy, The Queen’s Rivals, Kensington (dramatization of the life of Lady Jane Grey and her sisters)
David Rakoff, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, Doubleday (novel in verse set at various points in 20th-century America)
Hallie Rubenhold, The French Lesson, Transworld (the adventures of an English courtesan in Paris during the French Revolution)
Goliarda Sapienza, The Art of Joy, FSG (fictionalized autobiography about a Sicilian’s woman’s life in the 20th century)
Harry Sidebottom, The Amber Road, Michael Joseph (latest in Warrior of Rome series set in the Roman Empire in 3rd c AD)
J.M. Sidorova, The Age of Ice, Scribner (a lovelorn eighteenth-century Russian noble, cursed with longevity and an immunity to cold, searches for the truth behind his condition over two centuries)
Dan Smith, Red Winter, Orion (thriller set in the Russian Civil War, 1920s)
J. Courtney Sullivan, The Engagements, Virago (novel about love, marriage, commitment and betrayal from Harvard in the 1920s to Paris in 2003)
Kathleen Tessaro, The Perfume Collector, Harper (a female mathematician receives an unexpected inheritance; moving from New York in the 1920s to mid-century Monte Carlo, Paris and London)
Stephanie Thornton, The Secret History: A Novel of Empress Theodora, NAL (biographical fiction set in the Byzantine Empire)
David Thomas, Ostland, Quercus (detective in WWII Berlin becomes serial killer in 1950s after experiences on the Russian Front)
Peter Tremayne, Atonement Of Blood, Headline (latest in Sister Fidelma mystery series set in Ireland in the AD670s)
Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness, Harper (based on a true story of how one man’s act of mercy during WWII changed the lives of others)
Wendy Wallace, The Sacred River, simon & Schuster (Victorian invalid travels to Egypt with aunt and mother whose past catches up with her as Egypt erupts in revolt)
James Wilde, Hereward: End Of Days, Transworld (latest in adventure series about Hereward The Wake)
Katherine Webb, The Misbegotten, Orion (the intertwining lives of a foundling girl and a woman trapped in a violent marriage, set in 1820 Bath)
Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version, Sceptre (a black maid knows who blew up a Missouri dance hall in 1929 – and why. But only decades later does the story come out)
Mingmei Yip, The Nine Fold Heaven, Kensington (espionage and gangsters as a woman tries to reclaim her lost child; sequel to Skeleton Women, set in a dangerous 1930s Shanghai)
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August 2013
James Aitcheson, Sworn Sword, Sourcebooks (11th c England: a fearless knight seeks to avenge his lord as he stumbles upon a plot that could alter history)
Lindsay Ashford, The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen, Sourcebooks (account of Austen’s unforeseen and mysterious death)
Jo Baker, Longbourn, Transworld (intrigue, romance and drama amongst the servants of Jane Austen’s Bennet household from Pride and Prejudice)
Lori Baker, The Glass Ocean, Penguin Press/Virago (love, art, and obsession in Victorian England)
Benjamin Black, Holy Orders, Holt (latest in Quirke forensic mystery series set in 1950s Dublin)
Rhys Bowen, Heirs and Graces, Berkley Prime Crime (a Royal Spyness mystery in which Georgie Rannoch, distant cousin to Her Majesty, investigates the death of a duke)
T.J. Brown, Summerset Abbey: Spring Awakening, Gallery (following two sisters and their maid as they navigate an uncertain world in the midst of World War I; 3rd in series)
Christian Cameron, The Ill-Made Knight, Orion (chivalry and betrayal during the Hundred Years’ War)
Kenneth Cameron, Winter at Death’s Hotel, Sourcebooks (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife hunts down a serial killer in 1890s New York)
Yangsze Choo, The Ghost Bride, Morrow (ghost novel mixed with Chinese folklore and romantic intrigue, set in colonial Malaysia)
Janice Clark, The Rathbones, Doubleday (literary fiction set in New England that chronicles one hundred years of a once prosperous seafaring dynasty)
Mark Dapin, Spirit House, Atlantic (story of the fall of Singapore and the bridge over the River Kwai, of old men living with their past, and a young boy trying to bridge the gap between generations)
Angus Donald, Grail Knight, Sphere (Robin Hood enters the lair of a band of renegade Templars, on the trail of the most precious object in the world: the Holy Grail)
Patrick Easter, The Rising Tide, Quercus (latest in 18th-C crime series set in London featuring Tom Pascoe of the River Police)
Elizabeth Fremantle, Queen’s Gambit, Simon & Schuster (novel of Katherine Parr)
David Gilman, Master of War, Head of Zeus (1346: condemned for a murder he didn’t commit, Thomas Blackstone joins Edward III’s army as an archer in the Hundred Years’ War)
Adrian Goldsworthy, All In Scarlet Uniform, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (latest in series set in the Napoleonic Wars)
Andrew Greig, Fair Helen, Quercus (adventure and romance in the Scottish Borderlands, 1590s, based on ballad of same name)
Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars, Atria (two sisters from Australia, both trained nurses, whose lives are transformed by the cataclysm of the first World War)
Douglas Jackson, Sword Of Rome, Transworld (latest in Roman army series finds our hero in Rome on the death of Nero, AD68)
Hannah Kent, Burial Rites, Picador (Iceland 1829: whilst a convicted murderess awaits death penalty living with a family, a priest discovers that all was not as it seemed)
Andrey Kurkov, The Gardener from Ochakov, Harvill Secker (dressed up in a Soviet policeman’s uniform for a party, Igor finds himself transported back to the Kiev in 1957)
Douglas Lain, Billy Moon, Tor (imagines the adult life of Christopher Robin Milne, from the Winnie the Pooh books, as during the student riots in 1968 Paris)
Mary Rose MacColl, In Falling Snow, Penguin (literary fiction, a heart-wrenching novel of WWI interwoven with 1970s Australia)
James McBride, The Good Lord Bird, Riverhead (story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive)
Sarah Emily Miano, Van Rijn, Picador (novel about Rembrandt; reissue)
Robert Morgan, The Road from Gap Creek, Algonquin (sequel to Gap Creek, following Hank and Julie Richards and their children through the Depression and WWII)
Charles O’Brien, Death of a Robber Baron, Kensington (Gilded Age mystery, 1st in series; novice PI Pamela Thompson is hired by Lydia Jennings to investigate mismanagement at her palatial “cottage” Broadmore Hall in the Berkshires)
Richard North Patterson, Loss of Innocence, Quercus (privileged 1960s American family’s life turned upside down with arrival of poor, ambitious newcomer)
David Peace, Red or Dead, Faber (rise of Liverpool Footbal Club and Bill Shankly, 1959-74)
Kate Quinn, The Serpent and the Pearl, Berkley (a novel of the Borgia family, and an innocent girl who gets drawn into their web)
Anthony Riches, Eagles’ Vengeance, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Roman military adventure series finds our heroes back on Hadrian’s Wall)
Joan Sales, Uncertain Glory, Maclehose Press (story of Spanish Civil War from Catalan side)
Simon Scarrow & T.J. Andrews, Arena, Headline (champion gladiator becomes a pawn in games of the powerful and ambitious)
Tim Severin, Saxon: The Emperor’s Elephant, Macmillan (second in adventure series set in Saxon times: our hero is sent to N Europe in search of exotic animals as gifts for the Caliph of Baghdad)
Zaruya Shalev, The Remains of Love, Bloomsbury (dying woman looks back on her life in pioneering modern Israel and its effects on her children)
William Shaw, A Song from Dead Lips, Quercus (crime novel set in 60s London against a backdrop of idealism and police corruption)
Lynn Shepherd, The Solitary House, Delacorte (literary historical suspense set in Victorian London)
Natasha Solomons, The Gallery of Vanished Husbands, Plume (story of one woman’s life through the portraits she inspired; set in 1960s London)
Linda Spalding, The Purchase, Pantheon (in the early 1800s, a Quaker family moves from Pennsylvania to the Virginia frontier, where their values will be tested by owning a slave)
Sarah Stovell, The Night Flower, Tindal Street (governess caught stealing and Romany girl transported to Tasmania, 19thC)
Andrew Swanston, The King’s Exile, Transworld (second in Civil War series about Charles I’s cryptographer, deported to Barbados in 1648)
Nicola Upson, The Death of Lucy Kyte, Faber (Josephine Tey investigates a murder when she inherits a country cottage)
Laura Wilson, The Riot, Quercus (detectives investigating murder in 1958 Notting Hill amidst racial tension, greed and scandal)
Hanya Yanagihara, The People In The Trees, Atlantic (1950s anthropologist brings back secret of longevity from a primitive tribe with dire consequences)
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September 2013
Susan Wittig Albert, The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star, Berkley (cozy mystery set in Depression-era Texas)
Marlen Supaya Bodden, The Wedding Gift, St. Martin’s Press (explores the powerful bonds between a slave girl, her mother, the slave master’s wife, and her daughter)
Niamh Boyce, The Herbalist, Penguin (1930s Ireland when women paid a high price for pregnancy out of wedlock)
Paula Brackston, The White Witch, Corsair (dark forces at work as witch marries Welsh farmer)
Lily Brett, Lola Bensky, Counterpoint (an Australian rock journalist hits the London music scene in 1967)
Rhidian Brook, The Aftermath, Knopf (tensions arising when a British and and a German family live in the same house in Hamburg in 1946 during the de-Nazification of Germany)
Siân Busby, A Commonplace Killing, Atria (in post-WWII London, psychological thriller unravels the double life of a seemingly proper middle-class woman found strangled to death)
Jillian Cantor, Margot, Riverhead (alternate history/literary fiction imagining Anne Frank’s sister’s experience in postwar America)
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, Granta (literary ghost story and mystery set in the New Zealand goldfields in the 1860s)
Elizabeth Chadwick, The Outlaw Knight, Sourcebooks (medieval epic; When Fulke’s dreams are dashed by longtime rival King John, he must choose between loyalty and his heart’s desires; reissue of Lords of the White Castle)
Diane Chamberlain, Necessary Lies, St. Martin’s (on a small North Carolina tobacco farm 50 years ago, long-held family secrets begin to erupt)
Jonathan Coe, Expo 58, Viking (Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in 1950s Europe in Jonathan Coe’s brilliant comic novel)
Bernard Cornwell, The Pagan Lord, HarperCollins (7th in series about Saxon hero in Alfred the Great era)
Lynn Cullen, Mrs. Poe, Gallery (on Frances Osgood’s affair with the famed writer)
Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen, HarperCollins (2nd in Accursed Kings series set in medieval France)
Maurice Druon, The Poisoned Crown, HarperCollins (3rd in Accursed Kings series set in medieval France)
Kate Emerson, Royal Inheritance, Gallery (about a tailor’s daughter who suspects she is an illegitimate offspring of King Henry VIII)
Robert Fabbri, Rome’s Fallen Eagle, Corvus (latest in series about Vespasian, 1st-C Rome)
Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost, Ballantine (set in Depression-era Seattle, a mother and son story about love, hope, and the power of forgiveness)
Tom Franklin & Beth Ann Fennelly, The Tilted World, Mantle (a tale of love and survival in 1927 New Orleans as it is about to be flooded by the Mississippi River)
David Gibbins, Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage, Macmillan (war novel based on the Total War Rome computer game)
Jo Graham, The Emperor’s Agent, Crossroad (2nd in series about Elza Ringeling, courtesan/actress/medium/spy in Napoleonic Europe, based on a true story)
Alex Grecian, The Black Country, Michael Joseph (crime thriller set in Victorian London)
Ann Hite, The Storycatcher, Gallery (gothic novel set in the Depression-era South about two young women who form an unlikely alliance when the spirit of a dead woman takes up residence in their home)
Anna Lee Huber, Mortal Arts, Berkley (Lady Kiera Darby mystery set in Scotland in 1830)
Claude Izner, Strangled in Paris, Minotaur (mystery surrounding the death of a seamstress in Belle Epoque Paris)
D.E. Johnson, Detroit Shuffle, Minotaur (mystery set in 1910 Detroit; Will Anderson and Elizabeth Hume get caught up in the political turmoil over women’s suffrage)
Daniel Kalla, Rising Sun, Falling Shadow, Forge (sequel to The Far Side of the Sky, about German Jewish refugees in WWII-era Shanghai)
M.R.C. Kasasian, The Mangle Street Murders, Head of Zeus (first in Victorian crime series with a young woman and her curmudgeonly guardian as sleuths)
Hannah Kent, Burial Rites, Little Brown (literary fiction set in 19th-c Iceland, based on a real murder case; the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution)
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland, Bloomsbury (brothers in Calcutta during Vietnam war era become radicalised)
Joe R. Lansdale, Deadman’s Road, Mulholland (thriller set in 1900s Texas)
K.B. Laugheed, The Spirit Keeper, Plume (a young Irish pioneer woman falls in love with her Native American captor on an epic journey through18th-century America)
Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens, Doubleday (an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals)
Anna Loan-Wilsey, Anything But Civil, Kensington (2nd in historical mystery series about Hattie Davish, a Victorian traveling secretary)
Alison MacLeod, Unexploded, Hamish Hamilton (discontented woman meets German POW from WWII internment camp where her husband works)
Kate Manning, My Notorious Life, Scribner (novel inspired by a controversial figure, a midwife from late 19th-century New York City)
Andrew Martin, Night Train to Jamalpur, Faber (latest in Jim Stringer Steam Detective takes him to India in 1923)
Sharyn McCrumb, King’s Mountain, St. Martin’s Press (Ballad Novel set during the American Revolution, the story of the Carolina Overmountain Men and their victory against the Tories in 1780)
Mary Miley, The Impersonator, Minotaur (in 1924, a young vaudeville actress takes on the role of a lifetime when she impersonates a missing heiress)
Jojo Moyes, The Girl You Left Behind, Viking/Pamela Dorman (love story of two women separated by a century but united in their determination to fight for what they love most; set in 1916 and today)
Alberto Mussa, The Mystery of Rio, Europa (a criminal investigation centered on a brothel in 1913 Rio)
Sena Jeter Naslund, The Fountain of St. James Court, Or, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Woman, Morrow (historical novel that explores the artistic process and lives of creative women)
Naomi Ragen, The Sisters Weiss, St. Martin’s (novel about Orthodox Jewish sisters, identity, loyalty and finding true love in 1950s Brooklyn)
Alyson Richman, The Mask Carver’s Son, Berkley (a son takes a different path from his father; literary fiction set in 1890 Japan)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaman, Orbit (a young man’s coming of age and a tale of prehistoric life 30,000 years ago)
Andrew Rosenheim, The Little Tokyo Informant, Overlook (WWII thriller set just before Pearl Harbor)
Laura Joh Rowland, The Shogun’s Daughter, Minotaur (Sano Ichiro mystery set in 1704 Japan; the murder of the Shogun’s daughter has serious consequences for the regime)
Anne Rutherford, The Scottish Play Murder, Berkley (historical mystery set in the Restoration-era theatre, 2nd in series)
Jane Sanderson, Eden Falls, Sphere (tale set in Jamaica and England in 1909, involving hotel owners, aristocrats, suffragettes and a Labour MP)
Kim Vogel Sawyer, What Once Was Lost, WaterBrook (story of Christina Willems, a young woman from Kansas in 1884, who is determined to reopen the poor farm she manages after a fire devastates the property)
Pamela Schoenewaldt, Swimming in the Moon, Morrow (the deep, shifting ties between a determined daughter and her gifted, wounded mother in the early 1900s)
A.D. Scott, North Sea Requiem, Atria (mystery set in the 1950s Scottish Highlands)
K.N. Shields, The Devil’s Revenge, Sphere (Victorian detectives in a maze of death, deceit and revenge as they try to prevent a devious murderer from unlocking an ancient and lethal power)
Alan Spence, Night Boat, Canongate (story of great Zen teacher in 18th-C Japan)
David O. Stewart, The Lincoln Deception, Kensington (mystery exploring the dark forces behind the John Wilkes Booth conspiracy)
D.J. Taylor, The Windsor Faction, Chatto & Windus (Autumn 1939: a parallel world where Edward VIII never abdicated and the WWII might have taken a very different course)
Charles Todd, A Question of Honor, Morrow (mystery set in the 1920s; nurse Bess Crawford investigates an old murder that occurred during her childhood in India)
C.J. Underwood, An Army of Judiths, Knox Robinson (Kenau Hasselaar, shipbuilder, mother and noblewoman, gathers an army of 300 women to fight the Spaniards on the walls of Haarlem, 1572-3)
Larry Watson, Let Him Go, Milkweed (literary fiction set in 1952 North Dakota; a retired sheriff and his wife go after their missing grandson)
Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version, Little Brown (drama surrounding an explosion at a Missouri dance hall in 1929; suspicions, secrets, and triumphs)
Hanya Yanigihara, The People in the Trees, Doubleday (anthropological adventure and its tragic aftereffects as cultures clash in 1950s Micronesia)
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October 2013
Peter Ackroyd, Three Brothers, Chatto & Windus (young men from a Camden Town council estate making their way in London in the 1960s, involved with criminal gangs, big business, crooked landlords and newspaper magnates)
Carlos Acosta, Pig’s Foot, Bloomsbury (seeking the meaning of an amulet takes the narrator through Cuba’s history from slavery to dictatorship)
James Aitcheson, Knights Of The Hawk, Preface (latest in adventures of a Norman knight after the Conquest finds him fighting rebels in the Fens)
Tasha Alexander, Behind the Shattered Glass, Minotaur (Lady Emily mystery set in Victorian England, surrounding a ruined abbey on a beautiful estate in Darbyshire, a murdered peer, and a most unlikely romance)
Jo Baker, Longbourn, Knopf (revisits the setting of Pride & Prejudice, this time from the servants’ viewpoint)
Ronald H. Balson, Once We Were Brothers, St. Martin’s (love and coming-of-age story as two boys and their family struggle to survive in war-torn Poland)
Charles Belfoure, The Paris Architect, Sourcebooks (a gifted a7rchitect and his secret life devising ingenious hiding places for Jews in Nazi-occupied Pari)
Joanne Bischof, My Hope Is Found, Multnomah (inspirational romance set in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the late 19th century, 3rd in series)
Kenneth Bonert, The Lion Seeker, HMH (literary; Lithuanian immigrants in South Africa’s Jewish community in the post-WWII years)
Mirko Bonne, The Ice-Cold Heaven, Duckworth (story of stowaway on Shackleton’s Endeavour expedition to Antarctica, 1914)
Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul, Mysterious Press (historical mystery set during WWI; Aboard the passenger liner Lusitania, war correspondent and American spy Kit Cobb has been assigned to shadow a German intellectual believed to have information vital to the war effort)
Amanda Carmack, Murder at Hatfield House, Signet (first in new Elizabethan mystery series featuring Kate Haywood, a simple musician in the employ of a princess in 1558)
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, Little Brown (an odd assortment of coincidental events during the gold rush in 1866 New Zealand)
Jennifer Chiaverini, The Spymistress, Dutton (biographical fiction about Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union spy working in the heart of the Confederacy)
Sam Christer, The Camelot Code, Sphere (investigator finds herself drawn into a mystery that reaches from the heart of the modern US government back to a man who has been dismissed as myth: King Arthur)
Sandra Dallas, Fallen Women, St. Martin’s (woman’s search for information surrounding the death of her estranged sister, set in Gilded Age Denver)
Michelle Diener, Banquet of Lies, Gallery (in the 19th century, a young noblewoman flees to London and poses as a servant to evade a murderer)
Angus Donald, King’s Man, St. Martin’s Griffin (novel of Robin Hood)
Carolly Erickson, The Spanish Queen, St. Martin’s (historical entertainment about Catherine of Aragon)
Martin Fletcher, Jacob’s Oath, Thomas Dunne (literary thriller about Holocaust survivors’ return home, the husband determined to avenge his brother’s murder)
James Forrester, The Final Sacrament, Sourcebooks (3rd in Clarenceux trilogy of Elizabethan thrillers)
Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, The Tilted World, Morrow (against the backdrop of the historic 1927 Mississippi Flood, a story of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, dynamite and deluge, and unexpected love)
Kate Furnivall, Shadows on the Nile, Berkley (story of courage, adventure, romance, and betrayal set in 1932 London and in the Egyptian desert)
Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things, Viking/Bloomsbury UK (sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, set in 18th and 19th-c America)
Laurie Graham, The Liar’s Daughter, Quercus (woman investigates her female sailor mother’s claim to have been Lord Nelson’s lover)
Jonathan Grimwood, The Last Banquet, Europa (one man’s quest to learn the flavors of the world; set during the Enlightenment)
Robert Harris, An Officer And A Spy, Hutchinson (French army officer regrets his part in the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus as a German spy)
Pamela Hartshorne, The Memory of Midnight, Macmillan (two women bound by time and place, one in Elizabethan York, one in modern York)
Conn Iggulden, Stormbird, Michael Joseph (first in new series set in The Wars of the Roses)
Janette Jenkins, Firefly, Europa (literary fiction about the twilight years of Noel Coward’s life)
Kathleen Kent, The Outcasts, Little, Brown (adventure story about buried treasure, a manhunt, and a woman determined to make a new life for herself in the old West, set on the Gulf Coast in the 19th century)
Jennifer Laam, The Secret Daughter of the Tsar, St. Martin’s Griffin (alternate history of the Romanovs)
Mary Larkin, Shades of Deceit, Sphere (love and family ties in 1920s Belfast)
David Leavitt, The Two Hotel Francforts, Bloomsbury USA (two couples meet in Lisbon, Portugal, as they await passage across the Atlantic in the summer of 1940)
Jim Lehrer, Top Down, Random House (what would have happened if the top of JFK’s car had been left up on the day of his assassination in 1963?)
Eoin McNamee, Blue Is The Night, Faber (last in trilogy has Lance Curran investigating a 1949 murder)
Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Odysseus: The Oath, Macmillan (first in series about Odysseus)
Dennis McFarland, Nostalgia, Pantheon (literary historical fiction set during the Civil War; the journey of a nineteen-year-old private abandoned by his comrades in the Wilderness)
Michael Nethercott, The Seance Society, Minotaur (mystery with a paranormal twist when the leader of a ghostly club dies while talking with spirits; set in 1956)
Shona Patel, Teatime for the Firefly, Mira (tale of unexpected romance in traditional Indian society in the 1940s)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Quiet Dell, Scribner (literary crime novel about a Depression-era con man that preyed on widows, based on a true story)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Marina, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (mystery set in post-war Barcelona)
Diane Setterfield, Bellman & Black, Orion (Victorian tale of man whose childhood cruelty catches up with him in the form of a man in black and a strange bargain is struck)
Dan Simmons, The Abominable, Little Brown/Sphere (supernatural adventure, set on the snowy peaks of Mount Everest in 1926)
Neil Spring, The Ghost Hunters, Quercus (novel about 1930s ghost hunter Harry Price at Borley Rectory, based on his assistant’s notes)
Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Melody of Secrets, Thomas Dunne (epic love story set against the 1960s U.S. space program, where deeply-buried secrets could threaten not just a marriage, but a country)
Julian Stockwin, Caribbee, Hodder & Stoughton (latest in Kydd series of naval adventures set in the Napoleonic Wars)
Indu Sundaresan, The Mountain of Light, Atria (epic novel about diamond hunters in Victorian India)
Deborah Swift, A Divided Inheritance, Pan Macmillan (sweeping tale of family and ambition set in Jacobean London and 17th-c Spain)
Patrick Taylor, Fingal O’Reilly, Irish Doctor, Forge (part of the Irish Country series, set across the span of 20th-century America)
Chiew-Siah Tei, The Mouse Deer Kingdom, Picador (1905: Chai Mingzhi, an immigrant fleeing poverty in China, arrives in Malacca and meets Engi, a young boy from the jungle. Engi takes on the shape of the legendary mouse deer, and sets out to unravel the mystery surrounding Chai’s past and the tragedy that destroyed him)
Lavie Tidhar, The Violent Country, Hodder & Stoughton (For 70 years they’d guarded the British Empire, until a night in Berlin in the aftermath ofWWII, and a secret that tore them apart)
Carrie Turansky, The Governess of Highland Hall, Multnomah (inspirational Edwardian romance/drama about a spirited young woman and former missionary who takes a job as governess)
Jeri Westerson, Shadow of the Alchemist, Minotaur (Crispin Guest mystery set in 14th-c England, in which Crispin is asked to find the missing wife and apprentice of alchemist Nicholas Flamel)
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November 2013
Alai, The Song of King Gesar, Canongate (retelling of the founding myth of Tibet with modern resonances)
Rolf Bauerdick, The Madonna on the Moon, Atlantic (strange goings-on in 1957 in an E European village claimed by the Soviet Union during the Space-Race era)
Jenny Barden, The Lost Duchess, Ebury (swashbuckling historical adventure with a touch of romance, set against the backdrop of the Lost Colony of Roanoke)
Stewart Binns, Lionheart, Michael Joseph (historical adventure about Richard I)
Christian Cameron, The Great King, Orion (latest in Log War series set in ancient Greece)
Anne Cleeland, Daughter of the God-King, Sourcebooks (Regency historical adventure novel, set in Egypt)
Dilly Court, A Loving Family, Century (period saga of London girl in service in country house tries to find out what has happened to her family)
Maurizio di Giovanni, Everyone In Their Place, Europa (noir detective fiction set in 1931 Naples, 3rd in series)
Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby, Canongate (a special baby whose life affects the lives and loves of those around her through the decades)
Angus Donald, Warlord, St. Martin’s (reimagines the life of Robin Hood)
Robert Drewe, Montebello, Hamish Hamilton (local nuclear bomb testing changes the lives of people in 1950s Australia)
P.S. Duffy, The Cartographer of No-Man’s Land, Liveright (from a hardscrabble village in Nova Scotia to the collapsing trenches of France, debut novel about a family divided by WWI)
Charles Finch, An Old Betrayal, Minotaur (Victorian mystery in which Charles Lenox investigates a murderer that threatens to strike at the monarchy)
Essie Fox, The Goddess and the Thief, Orion (girl gets involved in plot to steal the Koh-i-Noor Diamond which begins to exert its power in Victorian England)
Julia Franck, Back To Back, Harvill Secker (story of a brother and sister and their unsympathetic mother trapped behind the Berlin Wall in E Germany during the Cold War)
Ronald Frame, Havisham, Picador USA (a prelude to Dickens’ classic Great Expectations)
Kimberley Freeman, Lighthouse Bay, Quercus (woman with a secret past returns to Australia to find herself investigating the secret past of a woman in 1901)
Diana Gabaldon, Written In My Own Heart’s Blood, Orion (latest in Outlander series set in American War of Independence)
Daisy Goodwin, The Last Empress, Headline (wife of Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph has reckless affair with British army officer, 19th-C)
Nicola Griffith, Hild, FSG (novel about the girl who will become Hilda of Whitby, a powerful woman of the early Middle Ages; set in 7th-century Britain)
Elizabeth Jane Howard, All Change, Mantle (the 5th in the Cazalet Chronicles follows the fortunes of the Cazalet family in the 1950s)
CC Humphreys, The Blooding of Jack Absolute, Sourcebooks (swashbuckling adventure set in 1770s London and the New World)
Raphael Jerusalmy, Saving Mozart, Europa (a music critic suffering from TB fights back against the Nazis’ use of Mozart for a fascist event)
Ken Kalfus, Equilateral, Bloomsbury (1900s astronomer excavates mysterious triangle in Egyptian desert, from which to send a signal to Mars where he believes humans live)
Gabrielle Kimm, The Girl with the Painted Face, Sphere (A homeless seamstress rises to become a talented actress, in this dangerously sensual story of first love set in 16th-c Italy)
Catherine King, A Sister’s Courage, Sphere (girl joins two suffragettes from Yorkshire on campaign in London until her romance causes a rift with them)
Sarah Jio, Morning Glory, Plume (multi-period novel set in a Seattle houseboat community today and in 1959)
David Leavitt, The Two Hotel Francforts, Bloomsbury (two American couples meet in Portugal and their lives are changed as they wait to flee WWII Europe)
James Long, The Balloonist, Quercus (story of a balloon observer over enemy lines in WWI)
Paul Lynch, Red Sky in Morning, Little Brown (thriller; in 1832, Coll Coyle has killed the wrong man, and the man’s father is out for revenge)
Maria McCann, Ace, King, Knave, Faber (two women in 1760s London, one with an unsettling marriage, the other a gambler living with a grave robber)
Ali McNamara, Step Back in Time, Sphere (single career girl gets hit by a car and awakes to find herself in 1964. The fashion, the music, her job, even her romantic life: everything is different. And then it happens three more times, and Jo-Jo finds herself living a completely new life in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s)
Leila Meacham, Somerset, Grand Central (epic family saga of Texas, covering 150 years of history)
Catriona McPherson, Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses, Minotaur (mystery set in 1920s Scotland in which Dandy investigates the disappearance of a childhood friend)
B.B. Oak, Thoreau at Devil’s Perch, Kensington (mystery involving a young Henry David Thoreau, who must solve a mystery before returning to Walden Pond)
Peter Quinn, Dry Bones, Overlook (literary thriller; story of an ill-fated OSS mission into the heart of the Eastern front and its consequences more than a decade after the war’s end)
Judith Rock, The Whispering of Bones, Berkley (historical mystery set in 1687 Paris, featuring Jesuit ex-soldier Charles du Luc)
Renee Rosen, Dollface, NAL (a woman leaves her gritty home life behind to become a flapper in 1920s Chicago)
Jean-Christophe Rufin, The Dream Maker, Europa (literary biographical fiction about Jacques Coeur, legendary banker of the Middle Ages)
Andrea Maria Schenkel, Finsterau, Quercus (murder of a pregnant, unmarried woman in WWII Germany)
Anita Shreve, Stella Bain, Little Brown (epic story, set against the backdrop of World War I London, featuring a shell-shocked American woman taken in by a surgeon and his wife)
Elizabeth Speller, The First of July (US) / At Break Of Day (UK), Pegasus/Virago (novel of the Battle of the Somme, as seen by four different men)
Amy Tan, The Valley of Amazement, Ecco (multigenerational epic of women’s intertwined fates and their search for identity)
Antoinette Van Heugten, The Tulip Eaters, Mira (thirty years after WWII in the Netherlands, a child’s life hangs in the balance)
Martyn Waites, The Woman In Black: Angel Of Death, Hammer (authorised sequel to Susan Hill’s famous story. Set in 1940 when London children sent to the country for safety find themselves in spooky Eel Marsh House)
Kent Wascom, The Blood Of Heaven, Grove Press (dying Confederate soldier looks back on his life in the deep South during the troubles of newly-idependent America)
Fay Weldon, The New Countess, Head of Zeus (last of trilogy about an aristocratic family in the early years of the 20th-C)
James Wilde, The Winter Warrior, Pegasus (novel of Hereward the Wake in 11th-c England)
Elizabeth Wilson, The Girl in Berlin, Serpent’s Tail (Summer, 1951: Two suspected spies, Burgess and Maclean, have disappeared, and the nation is obsessed with their whereabouts)
Barbara Wood, The Serpent and the Staff, Turner (love, betrayal, and one family’s faith in Syria of 1450 BC)
Val Wood, His Brother’s Wife, Transworld (orphaned town girl marries cruel farmer but finds forbidden solace with his brother, not knowing that her marriage is the result of a bet with that brother)
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December 2013
Belinda Alexandra, Tuscan Rose, Gallery (passion, longing, witchcraft, and magic set in Italy during World War II)
Laura Andersen, The Boleyn Deceit, Ballantine (2nd in alternate history series imagining that Anne Boleyn bore a son who grew up to be king)
Stephanie Dray, Daughters of the Nile, Berkley (final volume in trilogy based on the life of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Queen of Mauritania)
Carola Dunn, Heirs of the Body, Minotaur (Daisy Dalrymple mystery set in 1920s England; one of four potential claimants to the title of Lord Dalrymple dies a sudden, nasty death)
Michèle Forbes, Ghost Moth, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (the results of choosing between two young man in 1949 N Ireland reverberate in 1969)
Emma Fraser, When The Dawn Breaks, Sphere (a nurse and a doctor’s daughter meet again during WWI, bound by the secret of a disappearance in 1903)
Diana Gabaldon, Written In My Own Heart’s Blood, Delacorte (romance, time-travel, and adventure set in Revolutionary Philadelphia)
Mark Keating, Cross of Fire, Hodder & Stoughton (pirate and Naval adventure)
John Lawton, When We Take Berlin, Grove Press (thriller set in the London WWII Blitz and post-war Berlin)
Catherine Lloyd, Death Comes to the Village, Kensington (Regency-set historical mystery, first in new series)
Pat McIntosh, The King’s Corrodian, Soho Constable (historical mystery set in medieval Glasgow)
Rosemary McLoughlin, Tyringham Park, Atria (dramatic family saga set in early 20th-c Ireland)
Kristina McMorris, The Pieces We Keep, Kensington (interweaves past and present in the story of a young boy’s dreams and a past life during WWII)
Pamela Mingle, The Pursuit of Mary Bennet, Morrow (Austen sequel featuring the reserved and awkward Mary Bennet)
Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, The Spook Lights Affair, Forge (a young debutante commits suicide – or was it murder? – in 1895 San Francisco; historical mystery)
Barbara Mutch, The Housemaid’s Daughter, St. Martin’s (love and duty collide on the arid plains of South Africa in 1919)
Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs, FSG (novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940)
Kate Parker, The Vanishing Thief, Berkley (1st in new mystery series featuring a Victorian antiquarian bookseller)
Nicky Penttila, An Untitled Lady, Musa Publishing (An orphaned lady and a self-made man must negotiate the minefield of marriage as society changes around them in Manchester 1819)
Priscilla Royal, Covenant with Hell, Poisoned Pen (Prioress Eleanor goes on a pilgrimage in the spring of 1277 to a famous East Anglian shrine and must uncover a royal assassin)
Jill Paton Walsh, The Late Scholar, Hodder & Stoughton (Lord Peter Wimsey mystery set in Oxford in the 1950s)
Fay Weldon, The New Countess, St. Martin’s (3rd in trilogy about masters and servants at a grand estate in 1903 England)
Victoria Wilcox, Inheritance, Knox Robinson (1st in series about Doc Holliday)
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