Historical Fiction

Thirteen-year-old Matthew is miserable. His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved in his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother to ride out the pandemic, adding to his stress and isolation.

But when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor – the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.

Inspired by Marsh’s own family history.

Get ready for an action-packed, inventive, and powerful take on the attack on Pearl Harbor, as only Alan Gratz can tell it. December 6, 1941: Best friends Frank and Stanley have it good. Their dads are Navy pilots stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and the boys get a front-row view of the huge battleships and the sparkling water. Yes, World War II is raging in Europe and in Asia, but the US isn't involved in the war, and the boys are free to dream about becoming comic book creators. 

December 7th, 1941: Everything explodes. That morning, Frank and Stanley are aboard the battleship the USS Utah when Japanese planes zoom overhead and begin dropping bombs on the ships below. Frank and Stanley realize Japan is attacking America! As the boys fight to make their way home amidst the carnage, it's clear that everything has changed. Stanley's mother is Japanese American and he is suddenly facing a terrible prejudice that he's never known before--he's now seen as the "enemy," and Frank, who's white, cannot begin to understand what Stanley will now face. Can their friendship--and their dreams--survive this watershed moment in history? 

In ALL YOU HAVE TO DO, two Black young men attend prestigious schools nearly thirty years apart, and yet both navigate similar forms of insidious racism.

In April 1968, in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Kevin joins a protest that shuts down his Ivy League campus...

In September 1995, amidst controversy over the Million Man March, Gibran challenges the “See No Color” hypocrisy of his prestigious New England prep school...

As the two students, whose lives overlap in powerful ways, risk losing the opportunities their parents worked hard to provide, they move closer to discovering who they want to be instead of accepting as fact who society and family tell them they are.

Berlin, 1961. Rudi Möser-Fleischmann is an aspiring photographer with dreams of greatness, but he can't hold a candle to his talented, charismatic twin brother Peter, an ambitious actor. 

With the sudden divorce of their parents, the brothers find themselves living in different sectors of a divided Berlin; the postwar partition strangely mirroring their broken family. But one night, as the city sleeps, the Berlin Wall is hurriedly built, dividing society further, and Rudi and Peter are forced to choose between playing by the rules and taking their dreams underground. 

That is, until the truth about their family history and the growing cracks in their relationship threaten to split them apart for good.