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...

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...

In Caryn Green’s Better Angel, a sixty-six-year-old Chicago journalist sets out in 2017 to cross America by train while researching a story about the Transcontinental Railroad. Lost in Washington, DC, she meets a lanky thirty-one-year-old man who claims to be Abraham Lincoln, physically returned from...

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...

Pat Wahler’s Beyond the Sky’s Edge begins in 1912 St. Louis, when eighteen-year-old Livvie Newcomb returns home from boarding school after discovering that aviation offers a future far different from the marriage her parents expect her to accept with wealthy family friend Leonard Wyatt. Determined...