JEF - Historical Fiction - Adults

On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, including Washington D.C. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space, and requires a much larger share of humanity to take part in the process. Elma York's experience...

"Based on a true story, Pino Lella is forced to enlist as a German soldier and recruited to become the personal driver for Hitler's left hand in Italy. With the opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by fighting in secret"--

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation,...

George Washington Black, or "Wash," an eleven-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is terrified to be chosen by his master's brother as his manservant. To his surprise, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning--and...

"Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written in 1831, at a time when the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was falling into disrepair. This epic novel helped spark a preservationist movement that led to the cathedral being restored to its full glory. Set in 1482, the story tells of how four men--the hunchbacked bell-ringer, Quasimodo; the archdeacon of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo; the dashing soldier Phoebus de Chateaupers; and the poet Pierre...

Women who have become successful and sometimes independent in the wake of the Black Death come under harsh scrutiny by a handful of men who fear these women are a bad influence and will throw society into chaos. As the mens' misogyny gains ground, a line is drawn and the community has to decide whether to embrace change or persecute women who are thriving on their own terms.

"Boston, mid-17th century: Hester Prynne, dignified and silent, is led through prison doors to her public shaming by her censorious Puritan neighbors. Holding her illegitimate child to her breast and bearing a bright scarlet letter 'A' embroidered on her bodice, Hester must now struggle to create a new life for herself and her child in this harsh and unforgiving community. When her missing spouse reappears and takes up residence in town under an assumed...

From Pevear and Volokhonsky, the bestselling, award-winning translators of "Anna Karenina" and "The Brothers Karamazov," comes a brilliant, engaging, and eminently readable translation of Tolstoy's master epic.

In 1751 in Scotland, cheated out of his inheritance by a greedy uncle who has him kidnapped and put on a ship to the Carolinas, seventeen-year-old David Balfour escapes to the Highlands with the help of the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart and there encounters further danger and intrigue as he attempts to clear his name and regain his property.

"Travel back to Regency England and the Industrial Revolution with Sarah Ladd as she weaves the tale of a woman torn between her father's stubborn hold on the past and her dreams for the fast-approaching future ... Kate Hathaway comes from a long line of handloom weavers. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, Yorkshire's textile industry is changing, but Kate's father, a successful but feared clothier, rejects technological advances. With...