Historical Fiction

Abruptly placed in a boy's boarding school in Maine after his mother's death at the end of World War II, Kansas youth Jack Baker befriends Early Auden, an unusual boy with whom Jack embarks on a quest along the Appalachian Trail in search of a legendary great black bear. By the Newbery Medal-winning author of Moon Over Manifest.

A tale spanning 150 years and two continents re-imagines the peace efforts of democracy champion Frederick Douglass, Sen. George Mitchell and World War I airmen John Alcock and Teddy Brown through the experiences of four generations of women.

This epic tale is told through several generations of the McCullough family, beginning with Eli McCullough, the first male child born in the Republic of Texas. At 13, Eli is kidnapped by the Comanche, who kill his mother and his siblings. He lives with the Comanche for years, becoming a respected member of the tribe until the community is decimated by armed Americans.

With their husbands away fighting in the war in January 1943, Rita Vincenzo and Glory Whitehall have only their cross-country correspondence to keep them going.

In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.

At the Battle of Leuctra, the Thebans — led by Epaminondas — defeated the Spartans in one of the most stunning military victories of all time. Historian Victor Davis Hanson told the story of that victory in 1999's The Soul of Battle. Now, Hanson reimagines that battle in a novel about a farmer who leaves his home to serve under Epaminondas and, against his better judgment, gets swept up in the fervor to bring democracy to regions oppressed by the Spartans.

During Prohibition, Joe Coughlin defies his strict, law-and-order upbringing by climbing a ladder of organized crime. Starting as a petty thief in Boston, he travels south and eventually becomes the Gulf Coast's most successful rumrunner. In Tampa, Fla., and in Cuba, he encounters a dangerous cast of characters who are all fighting for their piece of the American dream.

In Nazi-occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow passes as the wife of a Polish officer, until an informer spots her and drags her off to the Gestapo to await her fate

The spark has gone out of Henry VIII's second marriage. When his roving eye leaves Anne Boleyn and begins to settle on Jane Seymour, another woman at court, the monarch turns to his chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell, for help. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies is the second book in a planned trilogy about Cromwell.

Convinced that he is cursed after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, twenty-year-old Robert Chatham, who is constantly followed by trouble, finally shakes his demons. But then he is forced to make an impossible choice.

Obsessed by a belief that highly evolved beings exist on Mars, a turn-of-the-century British astronomer gets support for a massive project to build a signal, which is undermined by malaria-stricken Egyptian laborers and two women who understand the astronomer more than he realizes.