Rob Samborn’s The Swordsman of Venice is set in 1589, when Angelo Mascari, a gifted Venetian swordsman from humble origins, flees the city after the Ancient Order of the Seventh Sun destroys the woman he loves. Isabella Scalfini, a nobleman’s daughter, has been used in...

Raymond Hackney’s A Plea for Freedom follows Daniel Asbury, a fifteen-year-old farm boy in Bedford County, Virginia, as the Revolution reaches his family in 1777. After Judge Charles Lynch punishes two captured Tories beneath the walnut tree in New London, Daniel’s desire for liberty becomes...

Rozsa Gaston’s Queen of Diamonds, book three of The Anne Boleyn Chronicles, follows young Anne Boleyn in France after she joins Queen Claude’s court in 1515. Anne is no longer the English girl learning manners abroad; she is watching powerful women build authority in rooms...

Not every history-making hero becomes a household name. Round the World: A Life of Jeanne Baret: Odyssey by C.R. Hurst details how Jeanne Baret became the first woman to sail around the world. It begins in France in the 1760s, where she’s working alongside botanist...

Every family has a story of courage somewhere in its past. For the Swarts, theirs begins in 1912 in the Netherlands. Inspired by the experiences of the author's own ancestors, eight-year-old Helena Swart is at the center of it all in Penny S. Ledbetter's De...

Brenda Murphy’s Kindling of a Firebrand is set in Boston, where Fran Sweeney grows from a Charlestown dockworker’s daughter into a Catholic woman drawn toward labor politics during the Depression. After illness damages her heart, her parents send her to Mount St. Joseph Academy, where...

Hypatia by Lukman Clark begins in fourth-century Egypt, where a girl named Tuya lives beside the Nile with her Kushite mother and Macedonian soldier father. After her father disappears, a catastrophic sea surge tears Tuya away from home, family, and the name she was born...

Janell Strube’s Adélaïde: Painter of the Revolution is set in eighteenth-century Paris. Adélaïde Labille dreams of becoming a professional painter despite laws and artistic institutions that reserve this arena for men. Encouraged by her father while facing relentless pressure from her mother to secure a...

In Irene Latham’s Some Starry Night, in 1886, struggling painter Vincent van Gogh arrives in Paris, hoping the city can finally give him the artistic future that has escaped him for years. At the same time, Emily Dickinson secretly leaves Amherst after learning that Bright’s...

In Richard J. Reese's Thutmose, Soldier Pharaoh, born into the royal court of ancient Egypt, Prince Thutmose grows up under the watch of Queen Hatshepsut while receiving military training beside secret lessons in hypnosis, religion, and politics from High Priest Ptahmose. As he prepares for...