The Pirate Queen
by Ariel Lawhon
Grace O'Malley was born to be at sea. Raised alongside her brother by their father, chief of the name of clan O'Malley, Grace learns early that her dreams of the open water are not compatible with the life she's expected to lead as the daughter of a noble family. And when her father marries her to the wrong man, a neighboring chief named Donhal, Grace's world shifts for the worse.
Undaunted, Grace raises a family without abandoning her passion, aiding her hot-tempered husband in his campaigns against rival tribes. Eventually ousted from her husband's land in the wake of his death, Grace returns to her childhood home and begins her career as a pirate in earnest, claiming new territories and finding deeper love, only to see her livelihood threatened by English incursions into Ireland, and her family endangered in an attempt to check her power.
Time Period: 16th century
Primary Location: Western Ireland
Royal Witch
by Philippa Gregory
1420. Eleanor Cobham arrives at the court of Henry V. Pretty but not highborn, she hopes for nothing more than to marry well.
It is a golden age for England, its royal family’s dynasty stretching across Europe. But chaos waits in the shadows. Betrayals and shifts of power change the flourishing world Eleanor has stepped into.
Working in the household of a Countess who commands her own army, Eleanor begins to see for the first time what a woman is capable of…what men’s promises are truly worth.
As the safe, comfortable future she’d envisioned begins to shift, Eleanor changes with it. Now she must use her wits to survive – and to rise. Her newfound ambition will to carry her further than any woman before has dared. But if she is to rule England itself, she will need to turn to darker arts.
Time Period: 1420s–1440s
Primary Location: England
Agrippa: A Novel of Ancient Rome's Descent into Dictatorship by Robert Harris
He was born feet first, a dangerous way to enter the world. His mother did not survive, and the nickname, Agrippa—mother killer—stuck. But the schoolyard taunting only served to harden his resolve and hone his predilection for aggression. In time, the name lost its sting and became instead a mark of his invincibility. It came to shape his destiny.
Agrippa was a mere commoner, a plebeian, his father a humble Stoic, but he earned the respect and fear of his peers. He defended a bullied young boy, Octavius, who turned out to be the nephew of Caesar himself, a chance encounter that would change the trajectory of his life. He eventually joined the ranks of the legionnaires and marched against their enemies. His prowess on the battlefield spoke for itself, and Caesar relied on him to protect his favored nephew. When Caesar was murdered in the Senate, Octavius inherited the empire in name only. To assume the mantle he would have to fight for it, and Agrippa, forever by his side, would be his closest advisor and the merciless agent of his military will.
Time Period: 1st century BCE
Primary Location: Rome and the Roman Mediterranean
Mestra
by Madeline Miller
A cursed father, a gifted daughter
Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: The ability to transform herself into any being she can imagine.
Her father, on the other hand, is cursed. As punishment for disrespecting the goddess Demeter, he is in possession of an unnatural, insatiable hunger. Devoted Mestra suggests using her new gift to help her father. But if his hunger is bottomless, how much will he take from her? Soon she must decide: Will she keep helping her father survive or finally break free?
Time Period: Mythological antiquity
Primary Location: Thessaly, Greece
The Unfinished Work: A Novel of Abraham Lincoln by Jeff Shaara
The Unfinished Work follows Abraham Lincoln as he enters the presidency while the United States fractures into Civil War. Told through the perspectives of Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, Secretary of State William Seward, and General George McClellan, the novel explores the pressures of war, slavery and emancipation, political rivalry, personal tragedy, and Lincoln's struggle to preserve the Union, culminating in the Gettysburg Address.
Time Period: 1860–1863
Primary Location: Washington, D.C. and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
A Time of Witches
by Madeline Martin
Lilith Legare’s life is unraveling. Since her mother’s death, strange things have been happening - plants turn toward her touch, animals linger in her path, and the birthmark on her arm has started tingling. Worse still is her recurring nightmare of being burned alive at the stake.
Her search for answers brings her from Savannah to England, to the decaying Brackenmere Manor where the past blurs with the present. There, Lilith discovers a legacy she never asked for and along with it, the threat of peril. History must be rewritten, or she too will die.
In 1645 Suffolk, Sybil Brantham stands accused as a witch. An educated, wealthy widow, she is branded a threat by men who fear her independence. As arrests begin and suspicion abounds, Sybil must protect her younger sister, even as betrayal takes root within her household.
Across centuries, Lilith and Sybil are bound by blood and by danger. To save themselves, and each other, they must confront the silence that has stolen women’s power for generations—and dare to claim their voices before it’s too late.
Time Period: 1645 and contemporary era
Primary Location: Suffolk, England
The Birthing Tree
by Amanda Peters
Born under the shadow of a birthing tree sacred to generations of Mi’kmaq women, Aliet Paul grows up outside a small Nova Scotia town with her fierce, loving grandmother Kiju. Her mother died bringing Aliet into the world under that very tree; her father remains a mystery no one will name. Aliet’s childhood is shaped by seasonal apple pickers, the medicinal wisdom of the old ways, and the quiet, steadfast presence of John, a boy who becomes her anchor.
But the world beyond their community is changing. Traditional midwifery is condemned, prejudice deepens, and when the wrong person witnesses a birth, the consequences are disastrous. As Aliet comes of age, she navigates love, loss, and a personal tragedy that veers her from the path her grandmother wanted for her. She becomes a nurse trained in modern medicine, yet she carries Kiju’s teachings close, tucked beside memories of the tree that once welcomed new life.
Years later, when the call comes that Kiju has died, Aliet returns home to a crumbling house, a community scattered, and a past she thought she’d outrun. As Aliet restores the house room by room, something inside her stirs awake: the threads of her lineage, the old ways of her grandmother, and the mystery of her own bloodline.
As Aliet digs to uncover who her family really is, each revelation pulls her deeper into a web of long-guarded silences, dangerous loyalties, and generational wounds that refuse to stay buried: Someone knew the truth about her mother’s final moments. Someone knew what happened in the orchard all those years ago. And someone wants the past to remain undisturbed.
Spanning decades of loss and reclamation, this sweeping yet intimate novel follows one woman’s journey to protect the land, the traditions, and the memory of the women who came before her—and to decide which parts of her inheritance she will carry into the future.
Time Period: 1955–later 20th century
Primary Location: Nova Scotia, Canada
Hawk & Sparrow
by Ayana Gray
Vesper Evans has always resented Basalton’s high society, and the sorcery that provides them with a luxurious life unimaginable to most. Orphaned as a child and rescued by the editor of The Basalton Globe, Vesper is now an ambitious reporter determined to keep her newspaper afloat.
While covering a lavish society gala, Vesper happens upon a shocking scene: the murdered body of a man she had spoken with just minutes before. Several of the powerful magical elite may want the man dead, but the prime suspect is wealthy industrialist Maximilian Kite.
Max soon makes Vesper a tempting offer: Find the culprit and restore his reputation in exchange for a substantial fee. Despite her distaste for Max’s world, Vesper agrees―the money would save the Globe, and the story would be the scoop of a lifetime. There’s only one catch: In order for her to infiltrate society, the two must pose as a courting couple.
Their investigation takes them from the highest echelons of privilege to the seediest backstreets of Basalton. As they unearth the city’s secrets and scandals, Vesper finds herself in grave danger―while falling for one of the most infuriating, arrogant, handsome men she has ever met...
Time Period: 1898-inspired Gilded Age
Primary Location: Basalton, fictional city
Sunrise
by Téa Obreht
In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.
In 2003, local golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?
These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.
Time Period: 20th–21st centuries across multiple timelines
Primary Location: Sunrise, Wyoming
What the Trees Remember
by Abigail Cutter
Dora Minor, a quirky and fiercely courageous girl, grows up in a remote Virginia mountain community in a family of outliers, thanks to their Quaker beliefs that all people are born equal. After her mother’s death, her indomitable, pipe-smoking grandmother Alma—a revolutionary in her own right—becomes her primary caregiver and protector. With a fierce moral compass, Alma helps shape Dora’s worldview and guides her to question the status quo.
When Dora’s father partners with formerly enslaved Ginny Dudley to open a school for Black children in a place where none would otherwise exist, it sparks a violent backlash. After her father’s death and then a lynching, Dora, with Alma at her side, are forced to look at their community in a new light. Alongside Ginny’s husband Randolph and her closest friend Watcher James, a preacher guided by Nature spirits, Dora confronts hard truths about her neighbors, her father’s death, and, finally, the mysteries of her mother’s life—all of which ultimately leads to healing.
Time Period: Late 19th century, Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era
Primary Location: Virginia Appalachia, USA
Dear Missing Friend
by Susan McGuirk
Three hearts. Love lost. One impossible choice.
A character-driven historical saga featuring the love triangle of a seaman, a governess and a wealthy speculator. Told through letters, the sweep of 19th century events like the gold rush, whaling voyages, and the streets of Manhattan unfold.
At the height of the 1840s whaling era, Catherine McGuirk arrives in Sag Harbor, New York. She has already spurned a marriage proposal from Patrick Lynch on her passage from Ireland and is confident she will find work as a governess, or at least a teacher. The local schoolmaster dismisses her with a smirk. Settling for hotel work has its upside when Cath meets a handsome seaman, Michael Heffernan. Just as she falls in love, he is off on a whaling voyage.
Spending her romance alone spurs Cath to continue her correspondence with Patrick. His ascent as a successful businessman in New York is swift, while Michael promises to give up the sea for marriage to Cath. Yet, when the Gold rush calls, he cannot resist. A brokenhearted Cath moves to New York to revive her dream of becoming a governess. Once in Manhattan, she continues to be torn between her own ambition, her missing husband, and her former beau.
Time Period: 1840s–19th century
Primary Location: Sag Harbor and New York City, New York
Swallowing the Sun
by Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri
Through the eyes of its feisty young heroine, Malati, the novel recreates one of the most tumultuous periods in modern Indian history—the struggle for Independence. Malati’s steeliness and fearlessness enable her to defy the constricting patriarchal traditions of her time and take on all those who try to cow her down. As a young girl, Malati fights and defeats the school bully of her village school in Maharashtra.
From then onwards, backed by her progressive father, she and her sister Kamala push the boundaries constantly. After an eventful girlhood, the sisters become the first women in their family to go to college. They end up in Bombay, a hotbed of political ferment, where, even as she is whirled along by the irresistible current and excitement of the battle for Independence, she negotiates the small and big aspects of everyday life—love, loss, failure, and compromise.
Time Period: Early–mid 20th century
Primary Location: Maharashtra and Bombay, India
Bargains of Fate
by Sharon Virts
Though the twisted scars on his arm still tell the tale, Jack McCarty has worked hard to put his duel with Armistead Mason in the past. He’s one of Virginia’s brightest young lawyers, married to the love of his life, and poised once again for political stardom—an opportunity he thought he’d lost when forced to face Armistead on the field of honor.
Lucinda Lee has also moved forward, closing the door on the betrayal that almost ended her courtship with Jack. But even as she and Jack begin to build a seemingly charmed life, Lucinda watches the women who fawn over him with suspicion—and bristles at the brazenness of her sister Fanny, a hopeless flirt.
When a horrible tragedy binds Fanny and Lucinda together in ways they never imagined and Jack falls prey to a disastrous lapse in judgment, the family struggles to keep scandal at bay. As Jack is swept up in dramatic court cases and festering disputes, he once again finds himself at the wrong end of a dueling pistol. Is the man he has worked so hard to become slipping out of his reach?
Time Period: 1822–1825
Primary Location: Leesburg, Virginia
Fields of Asphodel
by Callie Rowland
In this lush reimagining of Greek mythology, the daughter of Hades and Persephone defies the gods of the underworld to forge her own life amid war, curses, and unexpected romance.
For Asphodel, the free-spirited daughter of Hades and Persephone, being cursed to never fall in love with a god is a blessing.
Determined not to be trapped in a union like her mother, Del spends her life blissfully on the Isle of Flowers, far from her family in the underworld. But when Del’s parents ordain her marriage to Thanatos, the god of death, the freedom she’s long since guarded is at risk of being stolen for eternity. So Del takes fate into her own hands: She kidnaps her groom-to-be and traps him on her Isle.
But defying the gods comes with a price. Without Thanatos to send mortals off to peaceful rest in the underworld, death will devolve into brutality and violence. The realms will be consumed by chaos. With time running out and her freedom on the line, Del must restore the balance she upended―even as she finds herself irrevocably drawn to the ever-charming and bashful Thanatos, who offers another way of saving the worlds by breaking her curse. Only then can Del choose to marry him.
Time Period: Mythological antiquity
Primary Location: Mythological Greece and the Underworld
Black Moon
by Stephen Wright
Meeks is a poor Irish orphan whose energy, wit, and native sensitivity to the “main chance” take her to the unlikeliest of places. She marries into the aristocracy and follows her war-besotted husband into the latest of England and France’s seemingly endless scrapes where her husband is killed and she, on her way home, is taken prisoner by pirates, resulting in a tryst with the pirate captain that sets in motion an unlikely turn of events, leading her to join his crew. Upon the open sea, her ambition and cunning become her greatest assets as she reinvents herself anew.
From Irish reformatories to the battlefields of Europe to the swashbuckling high seas, Black Moon introduces a character you’ll never forget in an adventurous world you’ll never want to leave. Throughout Meeks’ globe-spanning narrative, we come to know a heroine of unconquerable ambition, boundless intelligence, and insatiable appetite―and to recognize a lawless, brutal, and bounteous world much like our own.
Time Period: 18th century
Primary Location: Ireland and the Atlantic world
The Stargazer of Nantucket
by Julie Gerstenblatt
Massachusetts, 1851
Winifred Starbuck wants only one thing: to join her parents on their final merchant voyage—from Nantucket Island to bustling San Francisco, then across the glittering Pacific to the distant ports of China. Yet renowned trade captains Nell and Peter Starbuck have forbidden their daughter from coming aboard on the adventure of a lifetime. So Winnie does what any strong-willed eighteen-year-old would do: she stows away.
Once the ship sets sail, Winnie is plunged into turbulent waters, treachery, and the thrill of life on the high seas. As she drifts farther from shore, and closer to fabled Canton port, she uncovers a long-buried secret—one that reveals the truth behind her parents’ desperate fear. And as she continues to chart her own course, she’ll have to plumb the depths of her courage to take on a world far bigger—and more dangerous—than she ever imagined.
Time Period: 1851
Primary Location: Nantucket, Massachusetts; Pacific Ocean; China
Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor by Sara McDougall
In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival.
Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.
Time Period: 1472
Primary Location: Dijon, France
Hocus Pocus
by Brinda Charry
A young magician travels across the world seeking fame and fortune all the while hiding a secret, in a novel based on the renowned, real-life Indian stage magicians performing in the United States in the 1800s.
Samuel Thomas, a man of uncertain parentage, is a young magician convinced that he is destined for greatness in a far-off land. Seeking honor and acclaim, he journeys across the globe—from India to London to the fog-shrouded streets of Boston in 1816, the infamous Year Without a Summer. In this season of unrelenting cold, Samuel arrives in a city alive with ambition, contradiction, and tension.
Enter Walter Mepham: in some ways a world away from Samuel, hailing from the upper echelons of Boston society, but also nursing a problem of his own. Proprietor of the New Boston Museum which is on the brink of bankruptcy, Walter is desperate to find ways to keep it open—and Samuel is the ideal fit for the first live addition to the collection.
While the perfect solution to each other’s problems, the relationship between the two men quickly becomes complicated as Walter grows more and more fascinated, and even obsessed, with the young foreigner. As Samuel becomes subsumed within the museum and dependent on Walter, he must reckon with just how much he’s willing to give up to achieve success. Richly detailed and vividly conjured, Hocus Pocus is a story about art, ambition, and desire, and captures the crackling energy and wonder of a bygone era through the eyes of a young performer.
Time Period: 1816
Primary Location: Boston, Massachusetts
The Ladies Hall
by Vanessa Miller
1880s, Ohio. When Mary and Anna enter the Bachelor of Arts program, also known as the "gentlemen's course" of study, at Oberlin College, they have little in common other than the color of their skin and their passion for education.
While Mary was raised in luxury, attending presidential inaugurations with her wealthy father, Anna is a schoolteacher, likely the daughter of her enslaved mother's former owner, and works a second job to pay for her room and board. But despite their differences, both women share strength, ambition, and a deep yearning for change. If they can bridge the gaps between them, they just might build a lasting legacy.
From its earliest days in the 1830s, Oberlin College admitted men and women, white and Black students. Though the doors are officially open, school policy cannot change the hearts of classmates who refuse to see a woman, and especially a Black woman, excel. Despite constantly being forced to prove themselves, the women triumphantly overcome every obstacle and push through their pain. And as the world evolves around them, Mary and Anna persevere to build a legacy of success and excellence.
Time Period: 1880s
Primary Location: Oberlin, Ohio
Those Coming Back
by Alanna R. Clutter
Those Coming Back is a fictional tale of four generations of a nineteenth century American family. In 1869, Walter and Fannie Monroe travel by train from Ohio to the family farm in Iowa with their six children.
The story is primarily voiced by the eldest daughter, Catherine, via the letters and journal entries that track her personal successes and profound misfortunes. Her deep relationships with parents, four grandparents, and two very special friends form the heart of the narrative. On the heels of The Golden Spike’s linkage of far-flung parts of America, Catherine, her family, and friends embark upon journeys that reflect the emerging mobility of its people. When Catherine marries, she and her husband travel by train from Iowa to take advantage of a wonderful opportunity in Oregon. Their dream of a farming partnership unexpectedly falls apart in 1884, and the two trek back to Iowa with their young daughter in a covered wagon, documenting their travels and adventures along the Oregon Trail.
The personal story of their trip is informed by a unique handwritten journal from real life family artifacts that detail a similar adventure. The author has meticulously respected the authenticity, simplicity, and essence of the original journal entries, making adjustments and additions only as needed to align with the fictional narrative.
Time Period: 19th century
Primary Location: United States
Bones and Clay: A Novel from Ancient Rome and Modern America by Danny R. Evatt
Rome, 260 AD. Marcus is a baker who watches his world collapse one coin at a time. The silver that once bought a sack of wheat now buys nothing. The emperor debases the currency. Prices rise. The legions grow restless. And Marcus does what ordinary people have always done in extraordinary times: he works, he loves, and he tries to survive.
Seventeen centuries later, archaeologist Elias Harrington spends his last savings on one final dig in the Italian countryside. What he uncovers is Marcus's story—and a warning that arrives too late. Because the patterns Elias finds in the ancient ruins are the same ones unfolding around him: a currency losing its value, a government spending beyond its means, and ordinary people paying the price.
Time Period: 260 CE and modern era
Primary Location: Italy and United States
Henry Tudor Must Die
by Jillian Laine
One queen exiled. Another headed for the gallows. Both hungry for revenge. England’s most infamous queens unite in vengeance against Henry VIII.
Anne Boleyn is going to die, and neither her cleverness nor her witchery can save her. So when her late rival, Catalina de Aragón, miraculously appears in her cell at the Tower of London on the eve of her execution, very much alive and offering a daring escape plan, no one is more surprised than Anne.
Lina doesn’t have Anne’s magic—but she has just as much hate for England’s wretched king. Severed from her daughter and stripped of all her influence, Lina breathes only for the Hellebore Sisterhood, a clandestine and powerful society with a vested interest in keeping both queens alive . . . and using their particular skills to advance womankind.
Anne and Lina’s old rivalries pale in comparison to a common enemy. And they're not alone. Anna von Kleve, Kat Howard, and even Catherine Parr all have their own bones to pick with the king. One by one, they capture their pawns, infiltrating the court and eliminating the men who plotted against them. Always inching closer to their true target...
Time Period: 15th century
Primary Location: England
An Uncharted World: A 16th Century Adventure Based On a Real African Woman and Explorer Francis Drake by Susan Storer Clark
When curious young Morayo slips away to glimpse the strange pale men repairing their ship along the West African coast, she cannot imagine the price of her curiosity. In an instant, she is stolen from her Yorùbá homeland and swept into the brutal machinery of the sixteenth-century slave trade. Renamed Maria, she is carried across oceans and empires—from Brazil to Peru, from Spanish courts to the dangerous voyage of English privateer Francis Drake.
But Morayo refuses to surrender the knowledge of who she is. While priests, aristocrats, sailors, enslavers, and explorers struggle for power in an expanding world driven by greed and conquest, she watches, learns, and waits for her chance to survive.
Traveling beside her is Èṣù, the Yorùbá trickster spirit who walks unseen through the human world—wry, observant, and sometimes powerless against the tides of empire. Through magical realism and richly layered perspectives, An Uncharted World transforms a forgotten historical footnote into an emotionally immersive resilience, identity, faith, and freedom.
Sweeping across three continents and three oceans, this is historical fiction at its most intimate, lyrical, and unforgettable.
Time Period: 1574–late 16th century
Primary Location: West Africa, Brazil, Peru, Macau, and the world's oceans
Brideen: The Journeys of a Famine Daughter by Kathleen McDonnell
County Mayo, Ireland, 1847. The potato crop has failed two years in a row. People are in the throes of starvation, and young Bridget Sweeney must witness things that no nine-year-old should have to bear: Whole families stricken with fever, corpses littering the roadsides, and her own family forcibly evicted in the dead of night. Through a mix of dogged determination, sheer luck, perhaps even divine grace, they join the historic Irish diaspora, making their way to England and ultimately to North America. In Brideen author Kathleen McDonnell draws on fragmentary family records, centuries-old newspaper articles, even lyrics from traditional ballads to ensure that her ancestor’s gripping story of survival will not be lost to history.
Kathleen McDonnell has published eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, and her plays have been produced across Canada and the United States. She’s a longtime resident of Ward’s Island, a ten-minute ferry ride from downtown Toronto, where she and her spouse raised their two daughters.
Time Period: 1847 and aftermath
Primary Location: County Mayo, Ireland; England; North America
Defying the Black Eagle and Then There's the Irish by Doc Ray
The end of Queen Victoria's reign and the Edwardian period that followed witnessed some of the greatest social and political upheavals the world had ever seen.
Patriarchal aristocratic dominance was gradually being replaced by the educated middle classes. In Great Britain, the House of Lords had lost its power of veto, and for the first time, a Liberal government had been voted into power. The fight for Irish independence was growing stronger by the year, as were the suffragettes, who had replaced peaceful demonstrations with violence and illegal tactics. Spies were everywhere, or so the public believed, and as war with Germany came closer, the modern British Secret Service was formed. This novel is about one woman's involvement in all of the above, ably assisted by a few Irish folk she chanced to meet along the way.
Time Period: Late Victorian–Edwardian era
Primary Location: Great Britain and Ireland
Of Princes and Patriots
by Laura Lee Dooley
The night the stars fell over Siam, one boy's life changed forever.
In the dark of night, a sick young boy named Chanchai gathers remnants from a sugarcane field when the ground explodes and glittering translucent tendrils appear. Afterward, Chanchai has the uneasy sense that something about him is different, even if he cannot explain why.
The years pass, and Chanchai grows into youthful longevity and extraordinary healing as he quietly moves through a world undergoing profound change. From the final years of Siam's royal era through revolutions, global war, and the birth of modern Thailand, he witnesses the ambitions of princes, the sacrifices of patriots, and the political struggles that shape a nation's future. From temples and royal courts to university halls and battlefields, he experiences times of unrest and transformation, finding himself present at many of the turning points that define his country's history.
And on a distant battlefield during the Korean War, a single encounter transforms Chanchai, forcing him to confront the questions that have shadowed his life since that night beneath the falling stars.
Blending historical drama with speculative intrigue, "Of Princes and Patriots" is a sweeping story of identity, loyalty, and belonging―exploring how individual lives intersect with history and how ordinary people can shape the destiny of nations.
Time Period: 19th–20th century historical backdrop
Primary Location: Siam and Thailand
Of Roses, Blood & Stone: The Occupation of Florida by Leia K. Kay
For generations, St. Augustine has told the same story: two lovers were found entombed within the walls of the Castillo de San Marcos.
No one asks why.
And no one is prepared for the truth.
The legend is polished. Romantic. Safe.
It is also a lie.
In 1839, Dolores Martí arrives in St. Augustine as the young wife of Colonel García Martí, a man determined to force the Seminole people from their homeland. Within the coquina walls of the Castillo, prisoners suffer while soldiers speak of order and progress.
Dolores sees something else.
She sees injustice.
And she begins to act.
Aided by Manuel Abela, her husband’s trusted aide, her quiet rebellion sets into motion a chain of events that will not end in love, but in silence.
Nearly two centuries later, social media manager Janice Dalton travels to St. Augustine with her historian boyfriend, Gabriel Martinez, hoping for a quiet escape after finishing her breakout novel.
Instead, they find inconsistencies in the official records.
A sealed chamber hidden within the fortress walls.
And a truth that was never meant to be uncovered.
As past and present collide, Janice and Gabe must decide what to do with a discovery powerful enough to fracture a town’s identity.
Because once the stone gives up its secrets, the myth cannot be rebuilt.
Of Roses, Blood & Stone is a dual timeline historical novel steeped in gothic suspense, exploring occupation, resistance, and the dangerous beauty of the stories people choose to believe.
Time Period: 1839
Primary Location: St. Augustine, Florida
The Third Traveler
by Stephen L. Graf
Winner of the 2024 International Impact Book Award in historical fiction, and a Finalist for Best Debut Novel of 2024 from the American Writing Awards (AWA), The Third Traveler is a riveting, emotionally-gripping historical novel that sweeps the reader away on an epic journey spanning three continents and four decades, depicting the triumphs and defeats of three generations of an Irish family.
Time Period: 19th–20th century historical setting
Primary Location: Ireland and multiple international locations
The Curious Trial of Josiah Wren: An Honest Deception from Carroway Island by Robert Gill Jr.
On the marsh island of Carroway, people notice things—and once they do, nothing stays small for long.
Josiah Wren is a quiet craftsman who spends his days shaping wooden belaying pins in a shed behind his home. Useful work. Careful work. The kind of work that is not supposed to attract attention.
But when a hidden sack of his handcrafted pins is discovered in a cupboard, the island begins doing what it does best: it starts talking.
What begins as curiosity quickly turns into interpretation, then certainty. Rumors move through church pews, ferry docks, kitchens, and front porches, growing more convincing with each retelling—until no one can quite remember where the story started, or what it was originally supposed to mean.
As Carroway Island quietly reorganizes itself around a shared misunderstanding, Josiah remains silent. The story does not.
Time Period: Contemporary with historical and maritime atmosphere
Primary Location: Carroway Island, Chesapeake Bay, Virginia
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