Plot summary (from the publisher): It is the early 19th century, when European traders and adventurers first began to penetrate the forbidding Chinese mainland. And it is in this exciting time and exotic place that a giant of an Englishman, Dirk Struan, sets out to turn the desolate island of Hong Kong into an impregnable [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Told from the point of view of 23-year-old medical student Daniel Connor, the main story takes place in the post-Napoleonic Paris of 1815. Young Daniel is on his way from Edinburgh to assume a research position at the Jardin des Plantes under renowned scientist Georges Cuvier, carrying in his possession some [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): In December 1893, Sherlock Holmes-adoring Londoners eagerly opened their Strand magazines, anticipating the detective’s next adventure, only to find the unthinkable: his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, had killed their hero off. London spiraled into mourning — crowds sported black armbands in grief — and railed against Conan Doyle as his [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): “Tis a small canvas, this Boston,” muses Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter who, having fled his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on America’s far shores. Eager to begin anew in this new world, he advertises for an apprentice, but the lad who comes knocking is no lad at [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher): A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley. Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she [...]
Synopsis (from the publisher): A Cambridge historian, Elizabeth Vogelsang, is found drowned, clutching a glass prism in her hand. The book she was writing about Isaac Newton’s involvement with alchemy–the culmination of her lifelong obsession with the seventeenth century–remains unfinished. When her son, Cameron, asks his former lover, Lydia Brooke, to ghostwrite the missing final [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Before rising to literary fame, Charlotte Brontë lived the life of a poor curate’s daughter in the English countryside. She had seen some of the world thanks to a few years spent studying abroad in Belgium, but she returned to Haworth after a failed love affair with one of her professors. [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Set in England in the 1890s, the novel is told from the point of view of 18-year-old Nancy Astley. She comes from a working class family whose entire lives revolve around the oyster trade. They run a restaurant in a small town called Whitsable, and Nancy is forever shucking the delicacies [...]
Plot summary (from the publisher:) “In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A. Michener guides us across Alaska’s fierce terrain, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling technological present, as his characters struggle for survival. The exciting high points of Alaska’s story, from its brutal prehistory, through the nineteenth century and the [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Drood by Dan Simmons is a work of historical fiction that gives readers a look at what might have happened during the last few years of Charles Dickens’s life. Told from the point of view of fellow novelist and friend Wilkie Collins, the narrative opens in June of 1865, when Dickens [...]