The Spy’s Song, book three of Giovanna Siniscalchi's The Swans of Paris series, is set in 1815, when London ballerina Louise Bonnechoix conceals that she is Napoleon Bonaparte’s daughter. As Napoleon returns to power in France, British intelligence discovers her identity. Rodrick de Montfort, a...

Tim Schooley’s novel, The Wool Translator, is an interwoven coming-of-age story of two young savants and their forbidden romance, set in the chaos of war in Europe and England of the 1480s. The story includes fictional characters as well as reimagined historical figures with fictional...

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...

Some dreams are harder to reach when others have already chosen your future. In The Last Gypsy Queen by Linda Paul, ninety-year-old Marisol Mazaria returns to Buckeye Lake, Ohio, where memories of her youth begin to surface. More than seventy years earlier, she’s a young...

In Pete Thomas’s The Christmas Will, John Roberts Jenkins has spent his life believing his father died in World War I. Then James Thompson, a Missouri attorney, finds proof that his father was John Roberts, the late owner of JR’s Department Store in Poplar Bluff....

The Laboratory Assistant by Natalia Loya introduces us to the Solokova sisters, Mariya, Sophia, and Darya. Former aristocrats, they have fallen on hard times after the death of their father. Consumption is running high in the city, and their mother is a victim. In a...

What happens when duty forces two strangers together? In The Gamble by Karen Black, readers are taken to Texas in 1895, where Emily chooses to honor her father by agreeing to an arranged marriage, hoping to save his struggling ranch. She’s spent years working like...

In The Library: Victorian Virtues Book 3 by Edwina Kiernan, Irene uses books to escape the fear she experiences at home. It’s the 1850s in England, and news spreads across the village of Lindenfell that they may soon get their own public library. Irene clings...

The Raven and the Rose by Adra Mayfield and Leanne Blakemore is a tightly written and well-plotted historical romance set in 1840 in Northumberland, England. Lady Rosalind Englebright is a spirited woman who prefers breeches to ballgowns. She is fierce and untamed. Her father is...

Love sometimes appears in the most mysterious places. In The Stranger I Love by Anneka R. Walker, Estelle Lowry makes the bold decision to leave home. Set in England in the 1850s, her choice becomes clear after her brother arranges a marriage for her to...