Book picks similar to
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Leah's Children


Gloria Goldreich - 1985
    From the courageous struggle of the Hungarian revolution, to the dramatic strife of the civil rights movement in Mississippi…from Israel’s heroic fight for freedom, to the eve of the Six-Day War…Leah’s children confronted their own convictions and desires in an ever-changing world fraught with danger, idealism, and betrayal. Their uncompromising search for love and fulfillment carried them into dangerous emotional territory—where only the strength, courage, and imagination inherited from their mother could lead them to their own triumphant destinies.

The Boston Girl


Anita Diamant - 2014
    Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine - a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love.Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her "How did you get to be the woman you are today?" She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with compassion for the naïve girl she was and a wicked sense of humor.Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Anita Diamant's previous novels bestsellers, The Boston Girl is a moving portrait of one woman’s complicated life in twentieth-century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world.

Cordelia's Journey


Hazel Hart - 2015
    Afraid her mother will die in childbirth, Cordelia runs away, heading for Westport, Missouri, and her aunt, the only person who might be able to save her mother. Disguising herself as a boy, she sets out on foot to make the 150-mile trip down the Kansas River. She hitches rides with a variety of travelers going east, facing setbacks along the way while learning lessons about the world and her place in it.Cordelia's Journey is the first book in the Pierce Family Saga, a series of historical novels that follow Cordelia and her family through the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Chimera


Vivek Ahuja - 2012
    A violent uprising has been instigated all across Tibet as Beijing moves to establish control while the Dalai Lama’s health deteriorates further and questions on the future of the Tibetan leadership are raised. As Beijing pursues the rebels and their benefactors within India, both nations are plunged into a spiraling descent to war. Now each side must navigate their widely different paths to victory as vast armies on both sides wage all-out war in their bid to become the dominant power in Asia… Book Edition: II

Misfortune's Daughters


Joan Collins - 2005
    Beginning in the Golden Era of Hollywood, the beautiful and talented actress Laura Marlowe meets the young, dashing, and rich shipping magnate Nicholas Stephanopolis. After a whirlwind courtship, the two marry and move to the private Stephanopolis Island in the south of Greece. Yet heartache and tragedy soon find them and extend into the lives of their two very different but willful and ambitious daughters, Venetia and Atlanta. One is a beautiful and favored daughter who's bent on self-destruction; the other is a wallflower who buries herself in books and shies away from her privileged world. But both must confront the legacy and tragedy of the lives of their parents.Sweeping across almost 60 years and jetting from New York to Paris, Los Angeles, and Greece, Misfortune's Daughters is an irresistible, page-turning tale that reveals the glittering life of show business and the grittiness of the journalistic profession. Drawing on her own knowledge and experience, Collins takes the reader deep inside the exclusive gates of wealth and luxury, exposing dark secrets and forbidden desires as two young women vie to break free from their family's shadow and become independent women in their own right.

Blue Poppies


Jonathan Falla - 2000
    Jamie Wilson, a young Scottish wireless operator and veteran of the war, has just arrived in the remote Tibetan village of Jyeko. He has come on business--to establish a radio outpost--but his journey will resonate much more deeply. Like those who have traveled to this place before him, Jamie, the Ying-gi-li, is mesmerized by the majestic mountain ranges and enigmatic people, but he will also find an uncommon refuge in its unyielding beauty and in the arms of the willful Puton, a young widow cast out by the people of Jyeko. Inexorably drawn together by a shared loneliness, Jamie and Puton discover a rare passion and the promise of reconnection and belonging--until the voice of Radio Peking crackles over the airwaves, announcing the imminent advance of the Chinese army. Amid the ensuing violence and tumult, Jamie and Puton must embrace their fate and that of the remarkable land that has brought them together. What lies before them and the people of Jyeko is a harrowing journey across a breathtaking landscape...and an extraordinary tale of pride and loyalty, survival and awakening.

The Angel of Auschwitz: [Extended Version]


S.A. Falconi - 2014
    I vow to you and to the leaders that you set for me, absolute allegiance until death. So help me God!”The SS Oath of Loyalty – words that became the very death sentence for millions of Jews and Germans alike. Six decades later, we still ask ourselves why and how did it happen? "The Angel of Auschwitz", a tragic epic of historical fiction, explores these inquiries through the eyes of an unlikely antagonist-turned-protagonist – the Nazi soldier."The Angel of Auschwitz" chronicles the life of Wolfgang Bremmer, an adolescent boy from the hills of Hamburg during the Nazi occupation of Germany. As a Hitler Youth, Wolfgang is captivated by the prowess of the Nazis and thrust into the ideologies of Adolf Hitler. With an adoration for the new Fűhrer and the Third Reich, Wolfgang enlists as a young man in the SS-Death’s Head Division, the gatekeepers of the regime’s most lethal concentration camp, Dachau. It is here he is introduced to Theodor Eicke’s “School of Violence” and becomes one of the most ruthless guards the SS has ever seen. After joining Hitler’s Mobile Killing Units, he participates in the invasion of Poland and the evacuation and extermination of its Jewish inhabitants. Wolfgang is the ideal Nazi warrior: vicious, ruthless, and entirely intolerant.But evil erodes even the hardest of hearts and Wolfgang grows weary in the midst of all the death and destruction. His conscience begins to return and with that a gnawing guilt for what he and his fellow Germans have done and are about to do. But with the fear of punishment for treason, Wolfgang is trapped in the cyclone of violence. That is, until he is promoted as a guard at the Reich’s most sophisticated concentration camp, Auschwitz. In the belly of such a beast as Auschwitz, Wolfgang discovers a secret that will not only save his own life and salvation, but the lives of so many prisoners as well.

ದಂಗೆಯ ದಿನಗಳು [Dangeya Dinagalu]


Ravi Belagere - 1972
    Translated in Kannada by: Ravi BelagereOne of the best pieces of historical fiction. A very existential novel about the revolt of 1857 in British India.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe


Fannie Flagg - 1987
    Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women-of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.

Meet Me in Monaco


Hazel Gaynor - 2019
    When struggling perfumer Sophie Duval shelters Miss Kelly in her boutique, fending off a persistent British press photographer, James Henderson, a bond is forged between the two women and sets in motion a chain of events that stretches across thirty years of friendship, love, and tragedy.James Henderson cannot forget his brief encounter with Sophie Duval. Despite his guilt at being away from his daughter, he takes an assignment to cover the wedding of the century, sailing with Grace Kelly’s wedding party on the SS Constitution from New York. In Monaco, as wedding fever soars and passions and tempers escalate, James and Sophie—like Princess Grace—must ultimately decide what they are prepared to give up for love.

I'll Be Seeing You


Suzanne Hayes - 2013
    Filled with unforgettable characters and grace, it is a timeless celebration of friendship and the strength and solidarity of women."I hope this letter gets to you quickly. We are always waiting, aren't we? Perhaps the greatest gift this war has given us is the anticipation…" It's January 1943 when Rita Vincenzo receives her first letter from Glory Whitehall. Glory is an effervescent young mother, impulsive and free as a bird. Rita is a sensible professor's wife with a love of gardening and a generous, old soul. Glory comes from New England society; Rita lives in Iowa, trying to make ends meet. They have nothing in common except one powerful bond: the men they love are fighting in a war a world away from home. Brought together by an unlikely twist of fate, Glory and Rita begin a remarkable correspondence. The friendship forged by their letters allows them to survive the loneliness and uncertainty of waiting on the home front, and gives them the courage to face the battles raging in their very own backyards. Connected across the country by the lifeline of the written word, each woman finds her life profoundly altered by the other's unwavering support. A collaboration of two authors whose own beautiful story mirrors that on the page, I'll Be Seeing You is a deeply moving union of style and charm. Filled with unforgettable characters and grace, it is a timeless celebration of friendship and the strength and solidarity of women.

Necessary Lies


Diane Chamberlain - 2013
    Bestselling author Diane Chamberlain delivers a breakout book about a small southern town fifty years ago, and the darkest—and most hopeful—places in the human heartAfter losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew as tenants on a small tobacco farm.  As she struggles with her grandmother’s aging, her sister’s mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County’s newest social worker, she doesn’t realize just how much her help is needed.  She quickly becomes emotionally invested in her clients' lives, causing tension with her boss and her new husband.  But as Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm—secrets much darker than she would have guessed.  Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing the battle against everything she believes is wrong.Set in rural Grace County, North Carolina in a time of state-mandated sterilizations and racial tension, Necessary Lies tells the story of these two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy.  Jane and Ivy are thrown together and must ask themselves: how can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it’s wrong?

Betrothed


Elsa Holland - 2019
    Fourteen years later the Petroski brothers arrived in London setting it alight with their breathtaking presence, bone melting accents and heart fluttering masculinity; eligible women were all interested in their availability. And yet the Prince’s betrothed, Miss Georgina Franklin, was yet to receive a visit.

Bittersweet


Colleen McCullough - 2013
    The four Latimer sisters, famous throughout New South Wales for their beauty, wit and ambition, have always been close; always happy. But then they left home to train as nurses, swapping the feather beds of their father's townhouse for the spartan bunks of hospital accommodation. And now, as the Depression casts its shadow across Australia, they are bound by their own secret desires as the world changes around them. Will they find the independence they crave? Or is life - like love - always bittersweet? 'As clever, compelling and as down-to-earth as its four heroines' Australian Women's Weekly

Polsinney Harbour: A heartwarming family saga set in Victorian era Cornwall


Mary E. Pearce - 1983
    A heartwarming family saga set in Victorian era Cornwall. When Maggie arrives in Polsinney Harbour she finds work on Rachel Tallack's farm, where Rachel's fisherman son, Brice, starts to take an interest in the young woman. Maggie's hopes for the future are dashed when Rachel discovers her well-kept secret. Faced with disapproval from her neighbours, and Brice, Maggie finds herself all alone once more. But then a proposal that could solve all of her problems comes from a very unexpected source. Can Maggie find love and acceptance in Polsinney Harbour, and will the dangers of a cruel sea threaten her lasting happiness? A heartwarming and gripping tale of courage and love in Victorian times, from the bestselling author of the much-loved Apple Tree Saga and Cast a Long Shadow.