US History in Fiction

"Set during the Great Depression, Sarah Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier is a novel about one woman-and a nation-struggling to be reborn from the ashes. July 3. 1932. Shivering and in shock, Evie Grace Devlin watches the Starlite Palace burn into the sea and wonders how she became a person who would cause a man to kill himself. She'd come to Galveston to escape a dark past in vaudeville and become a good person, a nurse. When that dream is...

"Spanning multiple generations and nearly 80 years, this emotional tour de force follows one American family, during the radical movement of the 1968 against Big Oil, as they are forced to reckon with the consequences of the resources that built their fortune and fueled their greatest tragedy"-- Provided by publisher.

"The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America. In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed...

Forging a life together after being abandoned by their parents, half sisters Eva and Iris share decades in and out of the spotlight in golden-era Hollywood and mid-twentieth-century Long Island.

"In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of a road in Central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting the migrant laborers who have taken to America's farms in search of work. Few personal details are exchanged and neither woman has any way of knowing that they have produced one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. In present day, Walker Dodge, a professor of cultural history, stumbles upon a family secret...

"The epic story of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton-a revolutionary woman who, like her new nation, struggled to define herself in the wake of war, betrayal, and tragedy. In this haunting, moving, and beautifully written novel, Dray and Kamoie used thousands of letters and original sources to tell Eliza's story as it's never been told before-not just as the wronged wife at the center of a political sex scandal-but also as a founding mother who shaped an American...

"In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers...

Bestseller Alan Brennert's spellbinding story about a family of dreamers and their lives within the legendary Palisades Amusement Park Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey-especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade...

Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a novel destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American dream. Rockwell "Rocky" Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved...

"Award-winning novelist Mary Morris weaves together an unsolved family mystery, a poignant coming of age story, and a little-known corner of World War II history in this lyrical novel of family, art, and love. Thirty years ago, Laura's mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her jewelery, her strangely compelling paintings, and her insulin. Viola never returned, and her family never recovered. Decades later, at a crossroads in her...