A mix of eras, stories, settings and characters in these historical novels chosen by our librarians. (Updated January 2024)
All We Were Promised
A former enslaved housekeeper escapes to 1837 Philadelphia where she plays servant to her white-passing father and befriends a young abolitionist, ultimately risking everything to help another former slave, brought to the city by her plantation mistress.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View All We Were Promised
North Woods
Exploring the many ways we're connected to our environment and to one another across time, language and space, this sweeping collection of stories about a single house in the woods of New England is told through the lives of an extraordinary succession of inhabitants.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View North Woods
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
When a skeleton is unearthed in the small, close-knit community of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1972, an unforgettable cast of characters, living on the margins of white, Christian America closely guard a secret, especially when the truth is revealed about what happened and the part the town's white establishment played in it.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
Wandering Stars
Traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Red Feather's shooting in There There.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Wandering Stars
A Council of Dolls
Details the story of three women from different generations, told through the stories of the dolls they carried in 1888, 1925 and 1961 bringing to light the damage done to indigenous people through history.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View A Council of Dolls
The American Daughters
When Ady, who is enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, is separated from her mother, she meets Lenore, a free Black woman who invites her to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters, setting her on a journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View The American Daughters
Lady Tan's Circle of Women
Sent into an arranged marriage, Tan Yunxian, forbidden to continue her work as a midwife-in-training as well as see her forever friend Meiling, is ordered to act like proper wife and seeks a way to continue treating women and girls from every level of society in 15th-century China.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Lady Tan's Circle of Women
There Are Rivers in the Sky
Sweeping across centuries, and stretching from Mesopotamia to London, this stunning novel follows a trio of characters living in the shadows of one of the greatest epic poems of all time - Nineveh and its Remains, as they become entwined by a single drop of water.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
View There Are Rivers in the Sky
The House of Doors
Broke, floundering creatively, and miserable in a marriage of convenience meant to hide his homosexuality, Somerset Maugham traveled to Malaya after World War I, where he met Lesley Hamlyn and her lawyer husband, Robert. Tan takes this real-life event and stitches together a narrative featuring Maugham's bonding with Lesley and a secret she shares about events during the Chinese Revolution.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View The House of Doors
A Thousand Times Before
A heartrending family saga following three generations of women connected by a fantastic tapestry through which they inherit the experiences of those that lived before them, sweeping readers from Partition-era India to modern day Brooklyn.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View A Thousand Times Before