By Richard Slotkin

A biographical novel depicting an intimate portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

By Seth Grahame–Smith

“Grahame-Smith inserts a grandiose and gratuitous struggle with vampires into Abraham Lincoln’s life. Lincoln learns at an early age that his mother was killed by a supernatural predator. This provokes his bloody but curiously undocumented lifelong vendetta against vampires and their slave-owning allies (From Publishers Weekly).”

Became the movie: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

By Anne Perry
Series William Monk Novels

When a murdered body is discovered in the Thames, clues lead to a heinous child-pornography case that police superintendent William Monk thought he had left behind, in an investigation that threatens his friend Oliver Rathbone and forces Monk to consider painful sacrifices.

By Fiona Davis
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

Interior designer Bailey Camdenis leaps at a chance to renovate her heiress cousin's lavish apartment at The Dakota, and learns the scandalous history of a distant ancestor's connection to the murder of the building's architect a century earlier.

By Sena Jeter Naslund

Sena Jeter Naslund has created an enthralling and compellingly readable saga, spanning a rich, eventful, and dramatic life. At once a family drama, a romantic adventure, and a portrait of a real and loving marriage. Ahab’s Wife gives new perspective on the American experience.

By Caleb Carr
Series Laszlo Kreizler and John Schuyler Moore Novels

When a madman begins stalking victims on the streets of 1896 New York, a team of investigators is forced to apply radical and untested techniques that include fingerprinting and the controversial science of psychology.

By Dara Horn

Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army, struggles with difficult moral questions when he is ordered to murder his own uncle, who has been plotting an assassination attempt against President Lincoln.

By Stephanie Dray

A carefully researched tale based on thousands of original sources imagines the experiences of third American President's daughter Patsy, who while accompanying her father to Paris struggles with his past affair with a slave and falls in love with his protégé against a backdrop of a growing revolution.

By Tessa Harris
Series Dr. Thomas Silkstone Mysteries

In 18th-century England, when Lady Farrell's husband becomes the prime suspect in the murder of Sir Edward Crick, she enlists the help of Dr. Thomas Silkstone, an anatomist and pioneering forensic detective to solve the murder and prove his innocence.

By Wallace Stegner

“This long, thoughtful novel about a retired historian who researches and writes about his pioneer grandparents garnered Stegner a Pulitzer Prize (Publishers Weekly).”

By Julian Barnes

Chronicles the lives of two boys - one who is forgotten by history, and one who becomes the creator of the world's most famous detective - as they pursue their separate destinies until they meet in a remarkable alliance.

By Emma Donoghue

A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana. 

By Tracy Chevalier

Settling in the swamps of early 19th-century northwest Ohio, the Goodenough family works relentlessly to establish an apple orchard that reflects respective dreams before their youngest child heads to Gold Rush California to collect seeds for a naturalist.

By Ernest J. Gaines

An elderly woman recalls her struggle against bigotry and racial injustice from her childhood during the Civil War to her participation in the twentieth-century civil rights demonstrations.

By Melanie Benjamin

Never growing beyond two feet and eight inches, Mercy Lavinia "Vinnie" Bump spent much of her life in seclusion. However, when she impressed legendary showman P.T. Barnum, she suddenly became the world's most unlikely celebrity. In this fictional autobiography, Vinnie recounts her life, her travels with Barnum, and her wedding to co-worker and fellow tiny superstar, General Tom Thumb.

By Annie Proulx

Working as woodcutters under a feudal lord in 17th-century New France, two impoverished young Frenchmen follow separate journeys, one of extraordinary hardship, the other of wealth and craftiness, that shape their families throughout three centuries.

By Laurie R. King
Series Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mysteries
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

When Mary Russell meets famous detective Sherlock Holmes, she discovers that he is also a beekeeper. Soon she finds herself on the trail of kidnappers and discovers a plot to kill both Holmes and herself.

By Karen Joy Fowler
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Jenn Jordan, Library Aide

Describes the multiple scandals, family triumphs and disasters that took their toll on the 10 children of celebrated Shakespearean actor Junius Booth as the North and the South reached a boiling point and the Civil War broke out.

By Diana Gabaldon
Series Outlander Novels
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

In 1772, on the eve of the American Revolution, Jamie Fraser is asked by the governor to help protect the colonies for the King and Crown, but, thanks to his time-traveling twentieth-century wife, Claire, Jamie is aware of the ultimate result of the rebellion, a situation complicated by his discovery of an obituary, dated four years hence, that reports his own death.

By Robert B.Parker
Series Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch track down the woman who stole Virgil's heart, they find a dispirited prostitute rather than the innocent beauty she once was. Now they must save her, even if murder is the price of redemption.

By Anne Perry
Series Thomas and Charlotte Pitt Mysteries
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

“With a cast of wonderful characters, among them the gentle Princess of Wales, and a twisting plot that takes us into the hidden world of the royal family, Anne Perry probes deeply the hearts of men and women ensnared by their emotions (From the Publisher).”

By Geraldine Brooks

Forging a deep friendship with a Wampanoag chieftain's son on the Great Harbor settlement where her minister father is working to convert the tribe, Bethia follows his subsequent ivy league education and efforts to bridge cultures among the colonial elite.

By James Michener
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

The story of Centennial, Colorado, begins when the earth formed the area and ends in the 1970s with human disregard for its benefits and beauties, and also tells the history of relations between the white settlers and Native Americans.

By Jeff Shaara

Presents a first installment in a trilogy inspired by the Siege of Vicksburg that follows Ulysses S. Grant's successful crossing of the Mississippi in May 1863 and his reluctant decision to surround Confederate soldiers and citizens in a ring of Federal entrenchments to starve them into surrendering.

By Laurie Halse Anderson

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

By Melanie Benjamin

Draws on oral histories of the Great Plains blizzard of 1888 to depict the experiences of two teachers, a servant, and a reporter who risk everything to protect the children of immigrant homesteaders.

By Franny Billingsley

In the early twentieth century in Swampsea, seventeen-year-old Briony, who can see the spirits that haunt the marshes around their town, feels responsible for her twin sister's horrible injury until a young man enters their lives and exposes secrets that even Briony does not know about.

By Beverly Swerling
Series City of Four

The early history of Manhattan is chronicled through six generations of a remarkable clan of surgeons, physicians, and apothecaries.

By Beverly Swerling
Series City of Four

This sequel to City of Dreams continues tracing the physical, social, and moral development of Manhattan through the stories of the fictional Turner and Devrey families.

By Beverly Swerling
Series City of Four

The third in the historical series (after City of Glory) about the Turner and Devrey families and the growth of New York City takes place in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

By Susan Vreeland

Hoping to honor his father and the family business with innovative glass designs, Louis Comfort Tiffany launches the iconic Tiffany lamp as designed by women's division head Clara Driscoll, who struggles with the mass production of her creations.

By Charles Frazier

After Inman escapes from a war hospital in 1864 and starts walking to Cold Mountain, Ada struggles to save her mountain farm with the help of Ruby, an illiterate but efficient farmer.

Became the movie: Cold Mountain.

By Lisa Kleypas
Series The Ravenels

When the death of his cousin, an earl, lands him with responsibility for an estate riddled with debt and the late earl's three sisters, Devon Ravenel finds himself drawn to his cousin's widow and committed to restoring the estate.

By Ken Follett
Series Kingsbridge Series

A half–century love affair between a man in service to Elizabeth I and a woman on the opposing side of England's religious divide is challenged by violent ideological power shifts, torn loyalties and the queen's circle of spies.

By Sara Collins

A servant and former slave enduring a sensational trial for her employers' murders reflects on her Jamaican childhood and her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist whose questionable ethics set the stage for a forbidden affair.

By William Styron

Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations - and hopes - which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.

By Afia Atakora

A midwife and conjurer of curses reflects on her life before and after the Civil War, her relationships with the families she serves and the secrets she has learned about a plantation owner’s daughter.

By Sharon M. Draper

Two fifteen– year–old girls–one a slave and the other an indentured servant–escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves.

By Arthur Miller
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

As a wave of anti-communist investigations swept across American society during the 1950s, Miller exposed the horror of such witch-hunts by retelling the story of the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692.

By Deanna Raybourn
Series Veronica Speedwell Mysteries

Attending a party in remote Cornwall as a favor to a colleague, Victorian adventuress Veronica Speedwell races to uncover her host's true agenda when suspicious accidents plague the guests.

By Matthew Pearl

In 1865, the preparations of the Dante Club - led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes - to release the first translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy" are threatened by a series of murders that re-create episodes from "Inferno."

By P.D. James
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Pemberly is thrown into chaos after Elizabeth Bennett’s disgraced sister Lydia arrives and announces that her husband has been murdered.

By Antonia Hodgson
Series Tom Hawkins Novels

Set in the darkest debtor’s prison in Georgian London, this gripping historical thriller follows Tom Hawkins as he, due to his penchant for wine, women and cards, ends up in Marshalsea where murder runs rampant and no one is as they seem.

By Elizabeth Macneal

1850s London beautiful young aspiring artist Iris is asked to model for Pre–Raphaelite artist Louis Frost, whose dark obsession may destroy her world forever.

By Diana Gabaldon
Series Outlander Novels
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

In eighteenth-century Scotland, Claire Randall and her raven-haired daughter, Brianna, return to the majestic hills where Claire recalls the love of her life—gallant warrior James Fraser.

By Justina Ireland

When families go missing in Baltimore County, Jane McKeene, who is studying to become an Attendant, finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that has her fighting for her life against powerful enemies.

By Elizabeth Berg

A tale based on the controversial life of mid-nineteenth-century French novelist George Sand follows her separation from her husband and vibrant life in Paris, where she wore men's clothing and shared love affairs and friendships with famous intimates.

By Danielle Steel
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

A tale set in early 19th-century England, Paris and New York follows the endeavors of a noble orphan who, after being thrown out of her ancestral home by a vicious half-sibling, makes her way to Paris, where she takes in abused streetwalkers and transforms them into upper-crust courtesans in an exclusive bordello.

By Christopher Nicholson

Appointed the guardian of a pair of ailing elephants who have been brought to eighteenth-century England from India, sensitive twelve-year-old Tom nurses the duo back to health.

By Barbara Hambly

A touching portrait of Mary Todd, a brilliant but troubled young woman in Kentucky, when she meets Abraham Lincoln in 1839.