As the grandson of immigrants who fled persecution in Germany and Austria-Hungary and came to America during the early 1900s, the early history of our country and the rise of the middle-class have always held a fascination for me. The dramatic depiction of fictional characters placed in actual events brings alive the harsh times and adversity of the people who sought freedom and a better way of life and demonstrates that only a little over one hundred years have passed to bring us to where we are today. Researching and writing historical fiction is a way to learn more about myself and my origins and the social, political, and economic influences related to my generation.
Historical literary fiction at its finest, the novel merges humor, a sharply defined cast of colorful characters, and amazing scenes that capture the 1922 world of an exiled aristocratic Russian count imprisoned in the grand Hotel Metropol in Moscow. The tension-filled story relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of himself in the tumultuous political upheaval happening around him.
The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and…
One of the most powerful novels I’ve ever read, Schindler’s List depicts how a courageous man saved Jews from extermination during World War II. The novel is a moving and masterful work that captures one man’s heroic resistance to the horrors and human degradation imposed by the Nazis.
The basis for the Oscar-winning Spielberg movie, this novel recreates the story of Oskar Schindler, an Aryan who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Germany 1938. Herman watches in horror as his cousin is arrested. As a Jew, he realizes he must flee Germany, a decision that catapults him into a life changed forever by the gathering storm of world events.
Part coming-of-age fiction, part immigrant tale, part military adventure, Immigrant Soldier follows Herman’s…
This American saga is an amazing story of four orphans who escape from an abusive orphanage on an epic odyssey down the Mississippi River in 1932. Their journey through a beautifully described American landscape connects them with others who are displaced and adrift in search of solace and redemption.
1932, Minnesota-the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will fly into the unknown and cross paths with others…
Set in the Jim Crow South, Mudbound is an eloquently written bitter portrait of a poor young white man and a Black man returning to post-World War II Mississippi and the family relationship between the Black sharecroppers and the white landowner. Through clear, alternating character voices that leap off the page, the novel explores the depth of racist hate and discrimination in that time and place and the struggle for reconciliation.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CAREY MULLIGAN, GARRETT HEDLUND & MARY J. BLIGE
When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud.
Winter Journeys is a story of music, memory, and imagination.
At summer’s end, Ilona Miller loses her job. Instead of adjusting her attitude and sending out resumes, she retreats into grief and paranoid imaginings by day and wanders the streets at night. A long-dormant alter ego awakes and prompts a…
The Goldfinch is among my favorite novels that set the standard for character-driven historical fiction. The beautifully crafted narration plunges the reader into the labyrinth of high society and the art world through the life of a motherless young boy caught up in a mysterious web of crime by his possession of a missing painting.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the…
Two different families escape from the political tyranny of their respective homelands, the Josephsons from Sweden and Matias and Kurt Bauman, brothers from Germany and Austria Hungary, with the aid of a Viennese opera diva, Sophie Augusta Rose, and Jean Guenoc, a former Jesuit priest, family friend and protector and partisan of the French underground.
Pursued by a bounty hunter assassin, their journey brings them to America in the throes of the industrial revolution during the 1890s and early 1900s. Ingrid and Olaf Josephson settle on a small wheat farm in North Central Minnesota to raise their children, Newt and Julie. In search of a secret list of insurgent social democrats, a bounty hunter assassin, Luther Baggot, tracks his victims to the American heartland.
In the years following his graduation from college, Cole Chen has been back and forth between the U.S. and China, struggling to navigate his transition into adulthood. Estranged from his parents, he returns to Hunan province to work for his friends, while also attempting to write a memoir based on…
In The Raffle Baby, Ruth Talbot spins a luminous tale of three Depression-era orphans—Teeny, Sonny Boy, and Vic—riding the rails, chasing harvests, and stealing when they must.
Survival is their only destination, yet Teeny’s fantastical stories, told by firelight in hobo jungles and migrant camps, keep hope alive—including the…
