Best of
Historical-Fiction

1971

The Winds of War


Herman Wouk - 1971
    Like no other masterpiece of historical fiction, Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II is the great novel of America's Greatest Generation.Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events, as well as all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II, as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.The Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance stand as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers.

Kane & Abel


Jeffrey Archer - 1971
    These two men -- ambitious, powerful, ruthless -- are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fuelled by their all-consuming hatred. Over 60 years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the success and triumph that only one man can have.

Angle of Repose


Wallace Stegner - 1971
    But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman


Ernest J. Gaines - 1971
    She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.

Penmarric


Susan Howatch - 1971
    At the center of the novel is the great mansion called Penmarric. It is to Penmarric that Mark Castallack, a proud, strange, and sensitive man, brings his bride Janna--the first act in a tempestuous drama that was to span three generations....

The Dwelling Place


Catherine Cookson - 1971
    Although desperately poor, the strong-willed Cissie determines to build a new home for the Brodies. It is only a rough stone shelter, but to Cissie and her family it is enough to keep them from the workhouse.They have friends, but charity cannot always spare them the harsh reality of their struggle and the bitterness of those who wish them harm. But can love, when it arrives, teach Cissie not to fear the world beyond the dwelling place?Set in the 1830's, The Dwelling Place is the powerful tale of a tenacious family's battle to overcome the odds.

Lighthouse


Eugenia Price - 1971
    Simons Island in Georgia after much hardship and success.

Paper Moon


Joe David Brown - 1971
    Set in the darkest days of the Great Depression, this is the timeless story of an 11-year-old orphan’s rollicking journey through the Deep South with a con man who just might be her father. Brimming with humor, pathos, and an irresistible narrative energy, this is American storytelling at its finest. Paper Moon is tough, vibrant, and ripe for rediscovery.

Feathers in the Fire


Catherine Cookson - 1971
    Thus it was with the Master of Cock Shield Farm, Angus McBain, a man too easily tempted to sin, and those in and around his household.

Chronicle in Stone


Ismail Kadare - 1971
    Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy's eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty as well as the simple pleasures of life. Evacuating to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Woven between the chapters of the boy's story are tantalizing fragments of the city's history. As the devastation mounts, the fragments lose coherence, and we perceive firsthand how the violence of war destroys more than just buildings and bridges.

The Drifters


James A. Michener - 1971
    With the sure touch of a master, Michener pulls us into the dark center of their private world, whether it's in Spain, Marrakech, or Mozambique, and exposes the naked nerve ends with shocking candor and infinite compassion."A superior, picaresque novel...and a revealing mirror held up to contemporary society."JOHN BARKHAM REVIEWS

The Passions of the Mind


Irving Stone - 1971
    It was in that brilliant city that Sigmund Freud began his long struggle to free people everywhere from the blindfolds & chains of their unknown natures. The Passions of the Mind is the story of an extraordinary man who proved that some of the most exciting challenges aren't met on the battlefield or on mountain peaks, but inside the hearts & minds of individuals. The story is told with great attention to accuracy. His research is recounted as meticulously as in a biography, tho it's fictionalized to allow readers understanding of feelings & thought processes. Freud was one of Vienna's most distinguished neurologists. He gave up a life of respectable affluence to become a daring researcher of uncharted seas in an effort to change forever our understanding of human motivations. He was a pioneer explorer of the dark frontiers of the sexual nature of humans, for which he was made a pariah. Includes Glossary & Bibliography. "This book involved six years of uninterrupted research & writing, yet the road was lighted at every turn, by the kindness & the generosity of almost everyone who had known Sigmund Freud or worked with him."-- Irving Stone.

Goshawk Squadron


Derek Robinson - 1971
    But for Stanley Woolley, commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron, the romance of chivalry in the clouds is just a myth. There are two types of men up there: victims and murderers, and the code he drums into his men bans any notion of sport or fair play. This produces better killers but, even so, Wolley believes the whole squadron will be dead within three months. Derek Robinson quietly builds the day-to-day details of these mens lives and deaths into a powerful indictment of war. But this classic of war literature is also very funny, often painfully so; Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this is Derek Robinson's masterly novel of the war in the air over the Western Front in 1918.

Not Regina


Christmas Carol Kauffman - 1971
    Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door in Germany, exploding a powder keg of unrest that seethed for decades. Against this background Regina Strahm found herself caught between two religious factions in Switzerland."

The Winds of War Part 3 of 3


Herman Wouk - 1971
    

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit


Judith Kerr - 1971
    Suppose that without your noticing, it became dangerous for some people to live in Germany any longer. Suppose you found, to your complete surprise, that your own father was one of those people.That is what happened to Anna in 1933. She was nine years old when it began, too busy with her schoolwork and toboganning to take much notice of political posters, but out of them glared the face of Adolf Hitler, the man who would soon change the whole of Europe – starting with her own small life.Anna suddenly found things moving too fast for her to understand. One day, her father was unaccountably missing. Then she herself and her brother Max were being rushed by their mother, in alarming secrecy, away from everything they knew – home and schoolmates and well-loved toys – right out of Germany…

We Speak No Treason


Rosemary Hawley Jarman - 1971
    Among the characters in this historical novel who witness a lean Richard in the buff is a gently reared lass attached to the Woodville household; she bears him a daughter and loves him her life long. Her narratives carry the bulk of the tale. But two other intimate portraits are provided by a court fool and a soldier who served Richard as Duke and King. It is the fool who discovers Warwick's distraught daughter Anne who will become Richard's devoted wife; and the soldier is privy to Richard's royal anguish in the last years of personal loss, treason, and his death on the field. Throughout Richard is fair, courageous, loyal and attractive. One may wink at his thunderstruck reception of the "news" of the young Princes' "illegitimacy" which enabled him to take the throne after Edward's death (no word on complicity here). But in this version, the tower murder charge doesn't stick.This edition of the book shares the same ISBN with "The King's Grey Mare" ISBN #0965005429, both from the same author and issued by the Book of the Month Club in 2000.

The Maude Reed Tale


Norah Lofts - 1971
    I want to be a wool merchant."           In those two sentences young Maude Reed expresses her most burning desire. But in fifteenth-century England, girls of good family do not go into business.          Instead, they are often sent to live in one of the great castles, where they do needlework, play the lute, and are taught the complicated customs and manners of that age of knighthood.          At Beauclaire Castle, Maude meets two people who are to have a lasting influence on her - the beautiful Melusine, who serves Lady Astallon, and Henry Rancon, destined one day for knighthood.          Nevertheless, the moment comes when she can face life there no longer, and on Christmas day she mounts her pony, steals over the drawbridge and starts on the long perilous journey home.Then her real adventures begin ...

The White Dawn: An Eskimo Saga


James A. Houston - 1971
    In return, the foreigners introduce to the villagers the spirit of competitiveness that rules the white man's world. Map and drawings by the Author.

Another Place Another Spring


Adrienne Jones - 1971
    Marya's journey into Siberian exile turns into a dash for freedom in the arms of strong and silent Boris Branov — ostensibly an agent of the Tsar's secret police, actually an unreconstructed Decembrist devoted to rescuing political prisoners.

The Judas Goat


John Whitlatch - 1971
    World War II army, they were a unique company. Twelve men led by a lieutenant, as able as he was arrogant, and a sharp, seasoned sergeant who was militantly silent about his past. Twelve fighters. among them an ugly man, a black man, an old World War I scout, a southern redneck, and a mountain climber. They were a strange assortment, but they had several things in common: They were tough and tenacious—AND THEY DIDN'T CARE TOO MUCH ABOUT LIVING.To the General they were the army's answer to the marines. To the Colonel they were a crack team...the best he could assemble. To the lieutenant they were "animals." And by the time their brutal training had ended they were KILLERS!

Green Centuries


Caroline Gordon - 1971
    Southern Classics Series.

The Eagle and The Nightingale


Juliette Benzoni - 1971
    

The Tamarack Tree


Betty Underwood - 1971
    She befriends Miriam, a student at Prudence Crandall's school for black girls, but the community destroys the school.