Much to my sister’s dismay, I was the unusual child who would ask her parents to stop at historical destinations on vacation. I loved visiting old buildings, houses, and battlefields that had stories to tell from the past. I also found my love of historical fiction early on through Eugenia Price’s works. Then writers Allison Weir and David McCullough introduced me to a whole new world of engaging nonfiction. If it is a good story with true history and passion, I can’t put it down!
Step on board the fateful Lusitania on its last voyage to Europe from New York City in May of 1915. Set sail with the confident Captain William Thomas Turner, rare book collector Charles Lauriat, actress Rita Jolivet, the affluent Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, and many others from all walks of life. You will also board Walther Schweiger’s U-20 and discover the harsh conditions of living on a submarine. I found Larson’s non-fiction book to be a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at a horrific event often only known by name in history.
On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover,…
This work of historical fiction takes readers to France during World War II. I have read lots of accounts of the United States and England during World War II, but this was my first book that took me to France during that time period. It opened my eyes to another part of the world during the war. I loved reliving the time period with two strong sisters who took two very different paths to survive a German-occupied country and help defy Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Soon to be a major motion picture, The Nightingale is a multi-million copy bestseller across the world. It is a heart-breakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the endurance of women.
This story is about what it was like to be a woman during World War II when women's stories were all too often forgotten or overlooked . . . Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac are two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals and passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path towards survival, love and freedom in war-torn France.
This nonfiction book is truly a story of survival and the human spirit being tested to the limit. Take a journey with Louis Zamperini to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a runner and then on to World War II as a bombardier. Relive his plane crash into the Pacific Ocean in 1943, being lost at sea, and his unbelievable time as a Japanese prisoner of war. Zamperini’s story is also one of post-war struggle and eventually faith. This book was a recommendation from my father and is easily one of the best books I have ever read!
From the author of the bestselling and much-loved Seabiscuit, an unforgettable story of one man's journey into extremity. On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War. The lieutenant's name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood,…
Don’t let the name and number of pages daunt you! This endearing classic will take you to one of the most interesting places and times in history. Join a myriad of complex characters in the early 1800s before and after Napoleon invades Russia. You will be swept away in a story of betrayal, patriotism, love, and transformation. This novel is so good that I have read it twice!
From the award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov comes this magnificent new translation of Tolstoy's masterwork.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
War and Peacebroadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both…
Travel back in time to the late 1500s and early 1600s in England and relive the life of perhaps the strongest and most fascinating woman in history. Elizabeth I was intelligent, cunning, and intriguing. Follow her unexpected rise to the crown, her tangled courtships, her tempestuous relationship with her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, and her fight to survive as queen in a ruthless political system of power mixed with religion. This is the book that solidified my love of nonfiction works!
Elizabeth the Queen begins as the young Elizabeth ascends the throne in the wake of her sister Mary's disastrous reign - both a woman and a queen, Elizabeth's story is an extraordinary phenomenon in a patriarchal age.
From Elizabeth's intriguing, long-standing affair with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to her dealings - sometimes comical, sometimes poignant - with her many suitors, her rivalry with Mary, Queen of Scots, and her bizarre relationship with the Earl of Essex, thirty years her junior, here, in rich, vivid and colourful detail, Alison Weir helps us comes as close as we shall ever get…
World War II has gripped the nation, including the Stilwell family. While James Stilwell fights in Europe, his pregnant wife is alone and his brother ministers to and befriends German POWs in Alabama. Rationing, bomb drills, patriotism, and a changing south barrage their way of life. In the midst of these times, Ava Stilwell and her cousin Rosemary find love with two soldiers. But is one really who he seems to be? Can the family endure as the war changes the world around them?
Songbirdis an inspirational, historical fiction novel, dealing with family, faith, strong women, and the American home front during World War II. The novel is the first book in The War Song series.
My book is fantastical historical fiction about two characters who're wrestling with the monstrosity of their grief.
It takes you into London high society, where Ambrose tries to forget about how much he misses Bennett and how much he dreads becoming as cold as their Grandfather. It takes you to the family's country manor house, where Mattie isolates and old ghosts start to come out of the woodwork.
It's a story about loss and depression; it's a story about friends who don't let you walk through the valley of death alone.
Ambrose Bancroft returns to London society with his younger sister, hoping they'll leave ghosts of memory behind. They have only each other left. While Ambrose attempts to draw Mattie out, dragging her to balls and threatening to seek suitors for her, his sister recoils from his meddling. Finally, when Ambrose compels her to attend art class before she's ready, Mattie paints something horrific enough to banish them from society in public disgrace.
At Linwood Manor, Mattie and Ambrose aren't as alone as they think. Taking advantage of Mattie's desperate need to find freedom, a vanishing room lures Ambrose's sister into…
