The best books about Colonial America

My novel Hester is a bewitched and bewitching update on The Scarlet Letter. It asks the questions, Who was the real Hester Prynne, and what if she could tell her own story? The answer, as you will discover in chapter one, comes in the form of 19-year-old Isobel Gamble, a newly married and mysteriously talented young Scottish needleworker who arrives in Salem in 1829, just as young Nathaniel Hawthorne is struggling to launch his writing career.

Witchcraft, secrets, and the mysterious magic of desire and creativity are integral to Hester and to Hawthorne’s personal history. When the writer meets young Isobel, and learns she is descended from Scotland’s so-called Queen of Witches, their tangled secrets fuel creation, deception, desire, and consequences you will not soon forget.

Humanity evolved in an Ice Age in which glaciers covered much of the world. But starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to climb. Civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, the era known as the Holocene-the long summer of the human species. In The Long Summer, Brian Fagan brings us the first detailed record of climate change during these 15,000 years of warming and shows how this climate change gave rise to civilization. A thousand-year chill led people in the Near East to take up the cultivation of plant foods; a catastrophic flood drove settlers to inhabit Europe; the drying of the Sahara forced its inhabitants to live along the banks of the Nile, and increased rainfall in East Africa provoked the bubonic plague.

The Long Summer illuminates for the first time the centuries-long pattern of human adaptation to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing climate-challenges that are still with us today.

Either she and her children would emerge from that wilderness together, or none of them would... In 1774, the Ohio-Kentucky frontier pulses with rising tension and brutal conflicts as Colonists push westward and encroach upon Native American territories. The young Inglesby family is making the perilous journey west when an accident sends Philip back to Redstone Fort for help, forcing him to leave his pregnant wife Clare and their four-year-old son Jacob on a remote mountain trail.

When Philip does not return and Jacob disappears from the wagon under the cover of darkness, Clare awakens the next morning to find herself utterly alone, in labor and wondering how she can to recover her son...especially when her second child is moments away from being born.

Filled with incident, discovery, and revelation, Dutch Light is a vivid account of Christiaan Huygens’s remarkable life and career, but it is also nothing less than the story of the birth of modern science as we know it.

Europe’s greatest scientist during the latter half of the seventeenth century, Christiaan Huygens was a true polymath. A towering figure in the fields of astronomy, optics, mechanics, and mathematics, many of his innovations in methodology, optics and timekeeping remain in use to this day. Among his many achievements, he developed the theory of light travelling as a wave, invented the mechanism for the pendulum clock, and discovered the rings of Saturn – via a telescope that he had also invented.

The Hawking Sequence continues the time travel adventures of Skypilot and Zachary after their historic inaugural mission to England in the year 1766 in Ticking: A Tale of Two Time Travellers.

Sky’s Aunt Beatrice developed time travel. Now, she reveals to her friend and colleague, Alim, that she has sent two people back in time and that a young woman, Helena Harrison, was brought to Fraserdale from 1766. The story unfolds at the theme wedding of Sky and Helena, two young lovers who traversed through time to be together. Invited to witness their vows is family friend Sam Richter, a CSIS agent, who is not in town just for the wedding; he has been directed to investigate the work of the scientist, Beatrice Westover. What wonders will they see? What characters will they meet? 

Quaker’s War is the first thrilling episode of Jason Born’s latest series, The Long Fuse, which pits the fate of empire against the hearts of men. He breathes fresh life into familiar characters while introducing a host of new actors, both dear and detested.

Warwick “War” Pike is the captain and leader of a crew of modern pirates who operate on the Great Lakes and work for the Italian mob in Chicago. War doesn’t have rules for his crew—lie, maim, steal, do whatever it takes. Except take hostages. When the crew tries to take a cargo vessel on Lake Michigan, he ends up on the wrong end of a shotgun held by the beautiful and feisty redheaded captain—Grace Albright. When War realizes Grace has alerted the Coast Guard, he’s forced to take her with them. Now that Grace is deep in their lair, she’s starting to realize all is not as it appears. Warwick isn’t just a barbaric criminal; there’s something more underneath the surface. Now, her life isn’t the only thing in danger. So is her heart.

My book is about a passionate girl who grows from a headstrong child into a woman against the backdrop of pre-Revolutionary South Carolina. Having been spoiled by everyone around her to believe that she can have whatever she wants, she’s determined to have Robbie and will do whatever she must to be with him. Robbie sees her as a tag-along pest of their childhood and is much more concerned with defending the backcountry against outlaws. As unrest builds in the colonies, Jessie learns that the world is bigger than youthful desire and that choices made impetuously are followed inevitably by consequences—some of which are irreparable.

For more than 200 years, my family’s credo, “Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president,” has served as a source of inspiration and pride, but, for me, it resounds with the abuses of slavery, including the sexual violation of my five-greats-grandmother Mandy and her daughter Coreen. In this deeply personal memoir I reveal the obstacles, internal and external, I confronted while becoming my family’s oral historian, one determined to tell the whole story.

Swindler Sachem tells the story of an ingenious and complicated 17th century Native American man--John Wompas. Wompas's life upends common wisdom about Native Americans in the colonial era. He was a Harvard-educated scholar who became a sailor; he called the Nipmuc village of Hassanamesit his home but spent his adult life living among the English of Boston and London; he cheated his kin by selling their lands, then bequeathed all of Hassanamesit to them in his will; he secured an audience with the king of England, who called him his "loyal subject," and he was denounced by Massachusetts officials, who threatened him with foreign slavery.

In Swindler Sachem, Pulsipher uses the life of John Wompas to examine Indian-English struggles over Native land and sovereignty during an era of political turmoil in the English empire and reveals how one remarkable man navigated those perilous waters for the benefit of himself and his people.