Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, Geraldine Brooks In 1666, a young woman comes of age during an extraordinary year of love and death. Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a "plague village" in the rugged hill country of England, "Year of Wonders" is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. (from Powells.com)
Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence (publisher description).
Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel If you were captivated by the intrigue and adventure that filled the first of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, this second novel will be hard to put down. The fall of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell’s part in her arrest, trial and execution are the central elements of this whirlwind of a novel that takes place during the tumultuous events of one year. You need not have read Wolf Hall to appreciate the novel although some strands of the narrative and Cromwell’s character are more fully fleshed out if you have.
The Septembers of Shiraz, Dalia Sofer In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known. As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is now acting as an informer. And as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realizes that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger. (from Powells.com)
Dragonfly in Amber, Diana Gabaldon
An engaging time-travel romance, the second of a trilogy (after Outlander, 1991), that animates the people and politics of a pivotal period in history--while turning up the heat between an appealing modern heroine and a magnetic romantic hero. It's now 1968, and Claire Beauchamp Randall has returned to Inverness, Scotland, with her daughter, Brianna. This is Claire's first visit back since she and husband Frank visited 22 years before--when she walked through a Druid stone circle into the middle of the 18th century. Now, Frank is dead, and Claire hopes to learn what happened to the second great love of her life--gallant Jamie Fraser, laird of Lallybroch whom she married during her journey into the past. (from Kirkus Review)
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Set in 1962, this first novel by Stockett weaves together multiple narratives and narrative voices. When Skeeter Phelan returns home to Jackson, Mississippi after college, she begins to question the treatment of the African-American help that are the backbone of her and her friends’ way of life. Her desire to write finds its voice in the nascent Civil Rights movement when she begins to collect the stories of the black women who work as cooks, nannies, and maids in her community. With the aid of two black women, Skeeter writes a book that upsets the privileged world from which she comes and forces her to question her own past. The beauty of the novel is the strength of the individual voices, both black and white, that Stockett is able to create.
Killer Angels, Michael Shaara This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book, however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose 20th Maine regiment of volunteers held the Union's left flank on the second day of the battle. This unit's bravery at Little Round Top helped turned the tide of the war against the rebels. There are also plenty of maps, which convey a complete sense of what happened July 1-3, 1863. Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages.(Amazon.com)
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (2009 Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award) Recommended by Michele: "Although Henry VIII is a character in this historical novel, his personality cannot match the wit, the cleverness, the erudition and the depth of one of his chancellors, Thomas Cromwell. The rise of this remarkable man from the mud of London to the bedrooms of queens is told in an engaging first person narrative that is both compelling and--for those lovers of history--packed with the Machiavellian intrigue of 16th century Europe."
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks In Sarajevo, a city rich in ethnic, cultural and religious diversity and now torn apart by war, an old Hebrew manuscript is found. Australian rare book conservator, Hannah Heath is brought to the city with the task of conserving what remains. Through each artifact she discovers in its pages, the story of its survival is revealed.
A Mercy, Toni Morrison In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root. This is the story of Florens, a young slave girl, who, abandoned by her mother, seeks love in those who remain around her.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows "As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey — a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island." (Powells)
The Plague of Doves: A Novel, Louise Erdrich The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann (2009 National Book Award) Set in New York City in the summer of 1974, this novel weaves together the stories of a Catholic priest, a group of mothers whose sons have died in Vietnam, two prostitutes, and a man who walks a tightrope between the Twin Towers.