Historical

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life....

Young Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a strange letter arrives summoning him away from his family. He is to begin an apprenticeship as a bookbinder - a vocation that arouses fear, superstition, and prejudice among their small community....

Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide....

The 1850s are a time of discovery, and London is ablaze with the latest scientific theories and debates, especially when a spectacular new exhibition of dinosaur sculptures opens at the Crystal Palace.

In 1963, in a Siberian prison, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive....

Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school....

In a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic, is eager to join the crusade against Communism....

With contacts on the docks and in the railroad, and with a buyers' market funneling product their way, Alma Rosales and her opium-smuggling crew are making a fortune. They spend their days moving product and their nights at the Monte Carlo, the center of Tacoma's queer scene.

It is 1903 in the English countryside when Robbie, a shy young art student, meets the twenty-nine-year-old Anton who is running from memories of his brutal childhood and failed marriage. Within months, they begin a love affair that will never let them go....

In the summer of 1894, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin writing a book arguing that homosexuality, which is a crime at the time, is a natural, harmless variation of human sexuality....

In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there....

Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But she insists on listening to truths of her own heart....

Once a young woman uncovers a dark secret about her neighbor and his mysterious new wife, she’ll have to fight to keep herself—and the woman she loves—safe in this stunning queer reimagining of the classic folktale....

In apartheid South Africa, free-spirited young Amina has broken all the rules of her own conventional community by running a café....

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below....

A scoundrel who lives in the shadows. A soldier untarnished by vice. Two men meant only for each other....

This novel centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich....

Originally published in 1982 as the first of Edmund White's trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story became an instant classic for its pioneering portrayal of homosexuality....

From the best-selling author of The Little Stranger, an enthralling novel about a widow and her daughter who take a young couple into their home in 1920s London....

A young engineer working for Gustave Eiffel caught is in a web of deceit that could destroy both him and the famous tower....

In the shadowy world of 1940s New York City, a sultry spy falls for the one woman she shouldn't. When reporter Jenny Ryan’s father is murdered, her burning need for justice drives her to take on a ruthless tycoon....

“Luke” Hamilton has always been sure she’d never marry. She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man....

Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end....

Set against Nantucket’s Great Fire of 1846, this sweeping, emotional novel brings together three courageous women battling to save everything they hold dear....

follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor....

Paris, 1866. When Baroness Sylvie Devereux receives a house call from Charlotte Mothe, the sister she disowned, she fears her shady past as a spirit medium has caught up with her. But with their father ill and Charlotte unable to pay his bills, Sylvie is persuaded into one last con. Their marks are the de Jacquinots: dysfunctional aristocrats who believe they are haunted by their great aunt, brutally murdered during the French Revolution. The scheme underway, the sisters deploy every trick to terrify the family out of their gold.

Pregnant at fifteen after gleefully losing her virginity to pansexual neighborhood strongman Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, she is robbed of her baby by a pack of nefarious nuns and her embittered papa has her sterilized without her consent (legal in 1935). With the help of a besotted Francis and her top-secret meatball recipe, a devastated Bella embarks on a riotous quest through Depression-era Coney Island sideshows, the tawdry world of peek-a-boo striptease routines, a queer mob marriage, and a tasty collection of wisdom-filled recipes to find her lost child, herself, and maybe even true love.

Nantucket in 1846 is an island set apart not just by its geography but by its unique circumstances. With their menfolk away at sea, often for years at a time, women here know a rare independence—and the challenges that go with it. Eliza Macy is struggling to conceal her financial trouble as she waits for her whaling captain husband to return from a voyage. In desperation, she turns against her progressive ideals and targets Meg Wright, a pregnant free Black woman trying to relocate her store to Main Street.

Paris, 1866. When Baroness Sylvie Devereux receives a house-call from Charlotte Mothe, the sister she disowned, she fears her shady past as a spirit medium has caught up with her. But with their father ill and Charlotte unable to pay his bills, Sylvie is persuaded into one last con. Their marks are the de Jacquinots: dysfunctional aristocrats who believe they are haunted by their great aunt, brutally murdered during the French Revolution. Sylvie and Charlotte will need to deploy every trick to terrify the family out of their gold – until they experience inexplicable horrors themselves.

Curiosities opens with a present-day amateur historian, Anne, who describes her unexpected discovery of five seventeenth-century manuscripts that, astonishingly, tell the same strange story from vastly different points of view. The five manuscripts spin this tale: after the Plague descends upon a village in England, two small children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors.

When a sharp cry wakes Jean in the middle of the night during a terrible tempest, she’s convinced it must have been a dream. But when the cry comes again, Jean ventures outside and is shocked by what she discovers—a young woman in labor, drenched to the bone in the bitter cold and able to speak barely a word of English.

Cana, Massachusetts: a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language. As the bond between these two men grows more and more passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments which threaten to destroy them in this world and the next.

At the beginning of Virginia Woolf's fantastical and satirical 1928 novel, Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan, England. At the age of 30, Orlando awakens to have found he's now a woman. Moving through the following centuries, the novel stretches over 300 years, during which time Orlando meets several key figures of English literary history.

Andrea Leonard believes that television is where great actors go to die. A star of stage and screen, she fervently objects when her agent wants her to take the lead role in a television series. Don Champp's life is in neutral. He isn't sure what he wants to do with his future, or what he wants to be... or who. When an agent tells him they have the perfect role for him, he takes the card and tries out for the part without any expectation of it turning into something more. Both Andrea and Don's attitudes change when they start working on the show. The scripts work. The chemistry works. They ...

Homespun Buck may have been who Liam’s adoptive family told stories about, but this is what really happened . . . Homespun Buck I just can’t chance going back. Since I’ve been sent away, I’m going to leave home for good and make my way to my people, the men they say are gathering in San Francisco as if it’s home to only us. I’m going to build a life there and find me a man to settle down with. If only I hadn’t met him at the JM ranch first. And then completely blown it with him before I even got my horse. Now I’m on my own without a hope of finding the right man for me. Wild...