By David Ebershoff

Intertwining tale of a 20th–century murder mystery in Utah and a women 18th century attempts to rid America of polygamy.

By Amanda Hodgkinson

“Leaving Poland for England at the end of World War II, Silvana is accompanied by eight-year-old, near-feral Aurek, with whom she shares traumatic wartime memories that set them apart from her husband, who has remade himself as an Englishman to forget the past (From the Publisher).”

By Frank Miller

An emperor amasses an army of hundreds of thousands, drawn from two continents, to invade a third continent and conquer a tiny, divided nation. Only a few hundred warriors stand against them. Yet the tiny nation is saved. It sounds like the plot of a preposterous fantasy novel. It is historical fact. In 481–480 B.C., King Xerxes of Persia raised forces in Asia and Africa and invaded Greece with an army so huge that it "drank rivers dry." Then they entered the mountain pass of Thermopylae and encountered 300 determined soldiers from Sparta.

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 Morgan Llywelyn

Remaining on the virtually abandoned island of Britannia after centuries of Roman rule, two cousins pursue very different efforts to unite disparate tribes and factions, including throne-seeking Dinas and reluctant leader Cadogan.

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 Karen Hesse

An Aleutian Islander recounts her suffering during World War II in American internment camps designed to "protect" the population from the invading Japanese.

By Melanie Benjamin
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Octogenarian Alice, who as a child inspired Lewis Carroll’s famous Wonderland character, looks back on a life marked by an implacable mother, her halcyon days in Oxford and the sons who went off to war.

By Kate Quinn
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

When pregnant American student Charlie St. Clair is banished to Europe by her family to have her baby, she takes the opportunity to head for London to find her missing French cousin and teams up with Eve, a former spy from the Alice Network, to solve the mystery.

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 Erich Maria Remarque
With Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian, Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, July 8, 2014. 7:30 PM.

The testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I, illuminates the savagery and futility of war.

By Darragh McKeon
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Follows the lives of several people on the eve of the Chernobyl disaster, including a nine-year-old piano prodigy, a leading surgeon with a failing marriage, and a young Ukrainian villager who wakes to find his cattle bleeding from their ears.

By Nancu Kricorian

After surviving the genocide in their homeland, Maral Pegorian and her family arrive in Paris to start a new life, but they soon realize that the Nazi Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured.

By Anthony Doerr
Recommended By Sue Ann R., Head of Children's Services, Rosalia White, Library Clerk

A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.

By Adriana Trigiani

Reimagines the career of actress Loretta Young, tracing the decades she shared with her assistant Alda, a former nun, as they face successes, scandals, and obstacles that threatened their bond.

By Fannie Flagg
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

“A novel spanning decades, generations and America in the 1940s and today, centers around five women who worked in a Phillips 66 gas station during the WWII years (From the Publisher).”

By Mark Mills

It is 1947 and GI Conrad Labarde has returned to his east end Long Island home. One day he finds the body of a beautiful young millionairess tangled in his fishing nets.  Initially appearing as a drowning, the autopsy raises the possibility of murder, with Lebarde as a main suspect.  Taut and engrossing.

By Anne Tyler

Marrying quickly during World War II after falling in love at first sight, a mismatched couple discovers that their very different personalities and approaches to life are taking a toll on their lives, their relationship, and their family, in a compelling novel spanning three generations. Genres: Domestic Fiction; Family Saga; Historical Fiction; Modern Era

By Michael Chabon

In 1939 New York City, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Hitler's Prague, joins forces with his Brooklyn-born cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic-book superheroes inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams.

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 Daisy Goodwin

Presents the story of vivacious Cora Cash, whose early twentieth-century marriage to England’s most eligible duke is overshadowed by his secretive nature and the traps and betrayals of London’s social scene.

By Ward S. Just

Harry Sanders is a young foreign service officer in 1960s Indochina when a dangerous and clandestine meeting with insurgents—ending in quiet disaster—and a brief but passionate encounter with Sieglinde, a young German woman, alter the course of his life.

By Scott Snyder
Series American Vampire Series
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

This volume of the critically-acclaimed AMERICAN VAMPIRE follows the star of AV Volumes 1 and 2, Pearl, and her husband Henry, as he is recruited by a mysterious group of vampire hunters, off to World War II Japan to find a new breed of blood sucker. But what does the notorious vampire Skinner Sweet have to do with it?

By Jonathan Rabb

After surviving the Holocaust, Yitzhak Goldah arrives in Savannah, Georgia, to live with his only remaining relatives, Abe and Pearl Jesler, but discovers a fractured world where Reform and Conservative Jews live separately.

By Jacqueline Winspear
Series Maisie Dobbs Novels
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“…An intriguing psychological mystery about the damage war inflicts on a person's soul, as well as a thought-provoking look at the lengths to which the hopeless and mentally unstable might go to be heard (Library Journal Review).”

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 Lauren Belfer

A tale inspired by historical events traces the experiences of two women, one European and one American, whose lives are transformed by a mysterious Johann Sebastian Bach choral masterpiece.

By Kiersten White
Series Conquerors Saga

WEver since Lada Dragwlya and her brother, Radu, were wrenched from their homeland of Wallachia and abandoned by their father to be raised in the Ottoman courts, Lada has known that being ruthless is the key to survival, and when she meets Mehmed, the heir to the very empire that Lada has sworn to fight against, complications arise as Lada, Radu and Mehmed form a toxic triangle that strains the bonds of love and loyalty to the breaking point.

By Elise Hooper
Recommended By Lisa V., Library Clerk

An American Army nurse serving in Manila in 1941 is captured as a prisoner of war by the Japanese Army and teams up with a Filipina university student and resistance member to fight back and save lives.

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 Alison Weir
Series Six Tudor Queens
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Henry VIII risks his marriage and the political strategies of Cardinal Wolsey in his obsession with Anne Boleyn, who does not welcome the king's advances and loathes the cardinal for breaking her betrothal to Harry Percy.

By Jacqueline Woodson
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, November 14, 2017. 7:30 PM

Torn between the fantasies of her youth and the realities of a life marked by violence and abandonment, August reunites with a beloved old friend who challenges her to reconcile her past and come to terms with the difficulties that forced her to grow up too quickly.

By Sally Koslow

Reimagines the affair between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his longtime lover, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, detailing how she helped revitalize Fitzgerald's career in the years before his tragic death.

By Lauren Groff
Recommended By Isabel Zinman, Readers' Services Librarian

“In a haunting story of the American dream, Bit, born in a back-to-nature commune in 1970s New York State, must come to grips with the outside world when the commune eventually fails (From the Publisher).”

By Robert Harris

In Moscow, American history professor Fluke Kelso learns from secret papers that Stalin had a son. A momentous discovery that could revolutionize Russia by bringing back Stalinism. But first he has to find him and that could get Kelso killed.

Became the movie: Archangel.

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 Susan Meissner
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

A tale set in 1918 Philadelphia during the Spanish flu epidemic traces the experiences of a family reeling from the losses of loved ones and changes in their adopted city, a situation that is further shaped by their decision to take in an orphaned infant.

By Elizabeth Poliner
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Enjoying summertime weeks of freedom at a popular Jewish beach with their children, beautiful Ada thrives when away from her strict husband, while chef Vivie develops diplomatic skills and unmarried Bec is forced to choose between family beliefs and her passion for a married man.

By Lauren Willig

Feeling unfulfilled in the face of an imminent legal partnership and a broken engagement, Manhattan lawyer Clementine Evans learns of a long-buried family secret that leads her to the inner circles of World War I British society and the red hills of Kenya.

By Helen MacInnes

A British officer pretending to be French tries to find the Nazi plans for resisting invasion off the coast of France during World War II.

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 Jamie O'Neill

In a story set against the backdrop of Dublin in 1915, two boys who meet at the local swimming hole plan to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter, but their plans coincide with the Easter uprising--a historic rebellion that changes their lives.

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 Alice McDermott

The bittersweet, lovable, human story of an Irish-Catholic family on Long Island as seen through the eyes of two sisters and a brother.

By Ian McEwan

In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution.

Became the movie: Atonement

By Margaret George

The life and times of English monarch Henry VIII are revealed in a fictitious autobiographical memoir that is interspersed with the irreverent commentary of his court jester and confidant, Will Somers.