In William Amos’s The Seed of Joy, American Peace Corps volunteer Paul Harkin arrives in South Korea in 1979, where he falls in love with Han Mi Jin, an English teacher involved in the democracy movement. Their relationship comes under pressure when Mi Jin’s parents...

In Not in This World by Jane Scott Stuart, with Elaine Flowers, Paul Carew is a Black boy growing up in 1930s Kentucky, where his preacher father punishes him for wearing his mother’s clothes. After Paul begins working for the Jackson family, Emma Gordon entrusts...

William Schutmaat’s The Imagined Kingdom opens in 1822 London, where Scottish soldier Gregor MacGregor presents members of White’s Club with a map of Poyais, a Central American country he claims to rule as Cacique. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, MacGregor enters military service before joining...

Echoes from the River by Kathryn Lane follows Francesca Morales de la Garza, an eighteen-year-old bride from Mexico, who is thrust into an arranged marriage and moves to a remote part of Australia in the 1970s. What begins as the story of a young bride...

Tara Lynn Masih’s The Silent Women is set during World War II, when sixteen-year-old Song Holloway lives with her widowed mother in Andover, Massachusetts, after the Dust Bowl drove them east from Oklahoma. As local farming moves toward civilian wartime labor, Song takes a job...

Sherry Christie’s Amber Road is set along Rome’s Danube frontier during Caligula’s reign. Marcus Licinius Carinna is living as Marcus Aquilo in the provincial town of Carnuntum after his father’s attack on the emperor changes his standing in Rome. Marcus is waiting for Aurima, a...

Our Hands Are Pale as Milk by Sara Kay Rupnik tells the story of three sisters and their obsession with the poet Percy Shelley. He is cunning and sly, but all the sisters see is charismatic charm. Hiding behind a mask of compassion, the poet’s...

Janet Wertman’s What Love E’er Meant opens in 1558 as Elizabeth Tudor waits at Hatfield House, her residence, for proof that her half-sister Queen Mary I has died. The message places the twenty-five-year-old princess on England’s throne, where choosing how the kingdom will worship affects...

Rachel Elwiss Joyce’s Lady of the Castle is set in late 12th-century England, where Nicola de la Haye is Lincoln Castle's hereditary constable while raising a household formed through two marriages. When an earthquake destroys part of Lincoln Cathedral and kills her young son Tommy,...

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...