Book picks similar to
Oh, Kentucky! by Betty Layman Receveur
historical-fiction
romance
fiction
kentucky
The Fort
Bernard Cornwell - 2010
But Massachusetts was determined to expel the British, and they sent a fleet to 'captivate, kill and destroy' the enemy. Told from both sides of the battle, this story features real figures from history.
Giant
Edna Ferber - 1952
But for Leslie, falling in love with a Texan was a lot simpler than falling in love with Texas. Upon their arrival at Bick's ranch, Leslie is confronted not only with the oppressive heat and vastness of Texas but also by the disturbing inequity between runaway riches and the poverty and racism suffered by the Mexican workers on the ranch. Leslie and Bick's loving union endures against all odds, but a reckoning is coming and a price will have to be paid.A sensational and enthralling saga, Ferber masterfully captures the essence of Texas with all its wealth and excess, cruelty and prejudice, pride and violence.
Tempest At Dawn
James D. Best - 2009
The military has been reduced to near extinction, economic turmoil saps hope, and anarchy threatens, as world powers hover like vultures, eager to devour the remains. In a desperate move, a few powerful men call a secret meeting to plot the overthrow of the government. Fifty-five men came to Philadelphia May of 1787with a congressional charter to revise the Articles of Confederation. Instead they founded the longest lasting republic in world history. Tempest at Dawn tells their story.
Push Not the River
James Conroyd Martin - 2000
It is then, at the young and vulnerable age of seventeen, when Lady Anna Maria Berezowska loses both of her parents and must leave the only home she has ever known. With Empress Catherine's Russian armies streaming in to take their spoils, Anna is quickly thrust into a world of love and hate, loyalty and deceit, patriotism and treason, life and death. Even kind Aunt Stella, Anna's new guardian who soon comes to personify Poland's courage and spirit, can't protect Anna from the uncertain future of the country. Anna, a child no longer, turns to love and comfort in the form of Jan, a brave patriot and architect of democracy, unaware that her beautiful and enigmatic cousin Zofia has already set her sights on the handsome young fighter. Thus Anna walks unwittingly into Zofia's jealous wrath and darkly sinister intentions. Forced to survive several tragic events, many of them orchestrated by the crafty Zofia, a strengthened Anna begins to learn to place herself in the way of destiny--for love and for country. Heeding the proud spirit of her late father, Anna becomes a major player in the fight against the countries who come to partition her beloved Poland. PUSH NOT THE RIVER is based on the true eighteenth century diary of Anna Maria Berezowska, a Polish countess who lived through the rise and fall of the historic Third of May Constitution. Vivid, romantic, and thrillingly paced, it paints the emotional and unforgettable story of the metamorphosis of a nation--and of a proud and resilient young woman.
Shadow Country
Peter Matthiessen - 2008
In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."
Crystal Passion
Jo Goodman - 1985
Ashley is drugged by her evil guardian, the Duke of Linfield, and offered as a prostitute to Captain Salem McClellan, who then feels obligated to rescue her.
Shiloh
Shelby Foote - 1952
This fictional re-creation of the battle of Shiloh in April 1862 fulfills the standard set by his monumental history, conveying both the bloody choreography of two armies and the movements of the combatants' hearts and minds.
O Pioneers!
Willa Cather - 1913
No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.
Mistress of Marymoor
Anna Jacobs - 2002
So when a handsome stranger named Matthew Pascoe appears bearing a summons from a long-lost wealthy relative, Deborah agrees to return to Marymoor House with Matthew. On arrival, Deborah is told she shall inherit the estate on one condition: that she immediately marry Matthew. With no hope of a future otherwise, Deborah consents and soon after becomes owner of the estate when her benefactor dies.Despite the unconventional circumstances of their marriage, Deborah and Matthew are surprised at the degree of affection that develops between them. But trouble soon befalls the couple in the form of Anthony Elkin, who claims that the Marymoor estate rightly belongs to him. The marriage of Deborah and Matthew secures their ownership, but they don't anticipate just how far Elkin will go to see the pair parted.Can Deborah and Matthew outwit Elkin and find happiness against all odds?
From the bestselling and much-loved Anna Jacobs, this involving and uplifting saga is perfect for fans of Kitty Neale, Ellie Dean and Margaret Dickinson.
Before the Scarlet Dawn
Rita Gerlach - 2012
Her dark beauty and spirited ways are not enough to win him, due to her station in life. Circumstances throw Eliza in Hayward's path, and they flee to America to escape the family conflicts. But as war looms, it's a temporary reprieve. Hayward joins the revolutionary forces and what follows is a struggle for survival, a test of faith, and the quest to find lasting love in an unforgiving wilderness.
Charlotte
J.S. Anthony - 2020
She was to wait for Ellis Gray and the wagon train he was leading. Charlotte understood that her father was paying Ellis Gray to see her to Fort Randall where she would meet her uncle and go to live out in the desert with a new husband. That she didn’t want a new husband didn’t matter. They were going to hang you, her father said. She knew this was true.Charlotte joined the wagon train at the back where they meant for her to stay. She made molasses bread in her tin oven at night and passed it out to the small hands that reached for it. She befriended Ada, the wild-haired barefoot girl too young for the burdens placed on her, and Fiona, whose husband Charlotte knew just by looking at his hard face.Then members of the tribes appeared along the ridge, a line of them sitting astride their horses, wrapped in blankets, looking old and sad. Charlotte’s fate was sealed when Ellis rode out to meet them.Because one of them was neither old or sad.
Heiress
Susan May Warren - 2011
But what if they want only to be loved--without an enormous price tag attached? When one daughter pursues a desirable marriage, she secures for herself a comfortable and glamorous life. But among the duties of privilege, will she also find the happily-ever-after she seeks? Her sister rejects the trappings of wealth, choosing instead to build a new life on the still-untamed frontier. Will she find happiness in independence or discover that she's left her heart behind in New York's glittering society? Set in the opulent world of the Gilded Age, each woman discovers that being an heiress just might cost her everything--including the chance for true love.
Bellewether
Susanna Kearsley - 2018
The times are complicated, as are the loyalties of many New York merchants who have secretly been trading with the French for years, defying Britain’s colonial laws in a game growing ever more treacherous.When captured French officers are brought to Long Island to be billeted in private homes on their parole of honour, it upends the lives of the Wilde family—deeply involved in the treasonous trade and already divided by war.Lydia Wilde, struggling to keep the peace in her fracturing family following her mother’s death, has little time or kindness to spare for her unwanted guests. French-Canadian lieutenant Jean-Philippe de Sabran has little desire to be there. But by the war’s end they’ll both learn love, honour, and duty can form tangled bonds that are not broken easily.Their doomed romance becomes a local legend, told and re-told through the years until the present day, when conflict of a different kind brings Charley Van Hoek to Long Island to be the new curator of the Wilde House Museum.Charley doesn’t believe in ghosts. But as she starts to delve into the history of Lydia and her French officer, it becomes clear that the Wilde House holds more than just secrets, and Charley discovers the legend might not have been telling the whole story...or the whole truth.
Cold Sassy Tree
Olive Ann Burns - 1984
Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. He is barely three weeks a widower, and she is only half his age and a Yankee to boot. As their marriage inspires a whirlwind of local gossip, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a family scandal, and that’s where his adventures begin.Cold Sassy Tree is the undeniably entertaining and extraordinarily moving account of small-town Southern life in a bygone era. Brimming with characters who are wise and loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Olive Ann Burns’s classic bestseller is a timeless, funny, and resplendent treasure.
The Big Sky
A.B. Guthrie Jr. - 1947
B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love.