historical

9d

📚 An Echo in Time by: Boo Walker

Unable to catch a break in life or love as she approaches thirty, Charli Thurman sees red lights at every crossroads. And given the Thurman family's tumultuous history, she knows things will only get worse, unless she can break the cycle and figure out where and when it all went wrong.

Charl...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #romance #historical #generalfiction #womenfiction

Unable to catch a break in life or love as she approaches thirty, Charli Thurman sees red lights at every crossroads. And given the Thurman family's tumultuous history, she knows things will only get worse, unless she can break the cycle and figure out where and when it all went wrong.

Charli is skeptical when her best friend introduces her to a "soul reader" who specializes in generational trauma. But during family constellation therapy with the guru, Charli experiences an inexplicable memory of terrible violence. Whatever happened in the past, it created an imbalance that's still in the Thurman blood.

When Charli's research leads her to Winchester, England, she meets a charming pub owner named Noah, whose own family history is similarly twisted. As the mystery deepens around a damaged inheritance and a tragic death, Charli is resolved to find the truth--and create the fresh start she has been hoping for her whole life.

- A woman delves into a centuries-old murder to find the truth behind her self-destructive behavior in a powerful novel about love, loss, and healing by the bestselling author of An Unfinished Story and The Stars Don't Lie -

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95d

📚 Circle of Days by: Ken Follett

A FLINT MINER WITH A GIFT

Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Fair, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family lives in prosperity and offer Seft an escape...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sagasfiction #historical #ancient

A FLINT MINER WITH A GIFT

Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Fair, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family lives in prosperity and offer Seft an escape from his brutish father and brothers within their herder community.

A PRIESTESS WHO BELIEVES THE IMPOSSIBLE

Joia, Neen's sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world. But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain.

A MONUMENT THAT WILL DEFINE A CIVILIZATION

Joia's vision of a great stone circle, assembled by the divided tribes of the Plain, will inspire Seft and become their life's work. But as drought ravages the earth, mistrust grows between the herders, farmers and woodlanders--and an act of savage violence leads to open warfare . . .

Edited 95d ago

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84d

You know how you move into a place & it has rules, like no pets, no smoking etc?

Next level, you buy a home that’s designated a #historical #landmark & in the deed it stipulates renovations are limited to interior & have to conform to a specific era.

Now imagine you’re a renter, or better yet, a house guest.

Cuz that’s what #Trump is. A FUCKING HOUSEGUEST! And he is literally demolishing a #HistoricLandmark.

THE historic landmark.
Fuck this guy.

#WhiteHouse #Ballroom
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/watch-live-demolition-crews-tear-down-white-houses-east-wing-trumps-ballroom-2025-10-21/

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80d

📚 The Reformatory by: Tananarive Due

Gracetown, Florida.

June 1950.

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of th...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #historical #generalfiction #horrorfiction

Gracetown, Florida.

June 1950.

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules, but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a “hallucinatory, haunting, terrifying, and moving” (S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed) work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.

*Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner * New York Times Notable Book * Locus Award Finalist * Winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the Shir

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78d

📚 The Lost Bookshop by: Evie Woods

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found...

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.
But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are ever...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #womenfiction #historical #generalfiction #romance

On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found...

For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.
But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder... where nothing is as it seems.

Readers have fallen in love with The Lost Bookshop:
‘Beautifully written and captures the wonder and awe that a story can bring to its reader...a delightful story for any book lover...an ode to storytelling and the connections that books can make!’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Wowwww!! It’s been awhile since I read something so fascinating, captivating and special all in one...It takes you on a journey like most books do, but this one, I just want to inscribe on my back and hope that it becomes a part of me so that I can carry it with me always’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
‘A must read for readers that love books’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
‘A beautiful story that begs to be read in one sitting...a magical story filled with beautiful prose and many surprises that readers will not soon forget’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
‘This spellbinding book hooked me from the very beginning and I couldn't put it down til the end’ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
‘A love story, one with books and booklovers at its heart. A war

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56d

📚 The Book of Records by: Madeleine Thien

Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish schola...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literaryfiction #historical #generalfiction #sciencefiction

Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.

Memory, political revolution, generational change, and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina’s illuminating conversations with her fellows in the Sea: how we come to believe what we believe, and how every person is an irreplaceable, unique vessel of history. Through the guidance of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption when her ailing father begins to reveal his role in their family’s tragic past.
As Lina confronts her father’s troubling admissions, she begins to reconceptualize the world around her, gaining a deeper understanding of how our individual futures are shaped by our political circumstances, and she relies on the collective joy of art and intellectual endeavors to carry her through difficulty. A novel that voyages between centuries, generations, and ideas, The Book of Records is an indelible testament to the migratory nature of humanity and our ceaseless search for a home—in the physical world, in cyberspace, in history, and in the imagin

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57d

📚 The Antidote by: Karen Russell

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prai...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literaryfiction #historical #generalfiction #visionarymetaphysical

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. NATIONAL BESTSELLER. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE. From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Lit Hub, Marie

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55d

📚 The Paris Express by: Emma Donoghue

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Ru...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #historical #generalfiction #literaryfiction #worldliterature

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.

From an author whose 'writing is superb alchemy' (Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author), The Paris Express is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the bestselling and 'soul-stirring' (Oprah Daily) author of Room, a sweeping historical 'nail-biter' (People) of a novel about the infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.

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45d

📚 Helm by: Sarah Hall

Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind — a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time.

Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic t...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literaryfiction #historical #generalfiction #worldliterature

Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind — a subject of folklore and awe, part-elemental god, part-aerial demon blasting through the sublime landscape of Northern England since the dawn of time.

Through the stories of those who’ve obsessed over Helm, an extraordinary history is formed: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate Helm, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish Helm, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture Helm — and the farmer’s daughter who fiercely loved Helm. But now Dr. Selima Sutar, surrounded by infinite clouds and measuring instruments in her observation hut, fears human pollution is killing Helm.
Rich, wild, and vital, Helm is the story of a singular life force, and of the relationship between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.

Sarah Hall's writing has conquered the body and the soul and now it conquers the wind itself. She gets better with every word she writes. Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters and The Hotel

From the twice-Booker-nominated writer of Burntcoat, a bold and astonishing literary masterpiece that explores faith, connection, and our relationship to the natural world.

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26d

📚 Kindred by: Octavia E. Butler

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: pro...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #historical

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present.

Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise. (New York Times).

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.")

The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation

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2d

📚 The Underground Railroad by: Colson Whitehead

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently ...

https://bookblabla.com/book/the-underground-railroad-pulitzer-prize-winner-national-book-award-winner-oprahs-book-club

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #literaryfiction #historical #generalfiction #general

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, PULITZER PRIZE WINNER, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER, "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century. A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century. A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years

The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series di

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2d

📚 The High Mountains of Portugal by: Yann Martel

In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that--if he can find it--would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe's earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this stran...

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In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that--if he can find it--would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe's earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure.

Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás's quest.

Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion.

The High Mountains of Portugal--part quest, part ghost story, part contemporary fable--offers a haunting exploration of great love and great loss. Filled with tenderness, humor, and endless surprise, it takes the reader on a road trip through Portugal in the last century--and through the human soul.

Praise for The High Mountains of Portugal

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Fifteen years after The Life of Pi, Yann Martel is taking us on another long journey. Fans of his Man Booker Prize-winning novel will recognize familiar themes from that seafaring phenomenon, but the itinerary in this imaginative new book is entirely fresh. Martel's writing has never been more charming."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Just as ambitious, just as clev

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3h

📚 Call Me Ishmaelle by: Xiaolu Guo

I must work on a ship as a man... I must find freedom on the seas.
1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and de...

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#books #reading #libraries #fiction #feministfiction #historical #19thcentury #general

I must work on a ship as a man... I must find freedom on the seas.
1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York.

Years later, as the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the white whale who claimed Seneca’s leg.

Built on the bones of Melville’s classic, Call Me Ishmaelle is a dynamic new tale, imbued with an eclectic crew—from a Polynesian harpooner to a Taoist Monk—and a powerful exploration of human nature, gender, man’s place among the animals, and the nature of home.

A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
A propulsive powerhouse of a read. Marie Claire (UK)
Ambitious, brave, and strange. Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan
From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author, a feminist reimagining of Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick through the eyes of one inimitable woman and a diverse, swashbuckling crew

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227d

#sapphicfictionsaturday
I’m reading Tarnished Gold by Ann Aptaker. What’s in your hands today? 📖
https://www.goodreads.com/book/24693894-tarnished-gold/get_a_copy

Bluesky: @annaptaker.bsky.social‬
IG: @ann_aptaker
Website: http://www.annaptaker.com/

#whatareyoureading #sapphicbooks #mystery #historical #noir #murder #criminal #butchfemme #lesfic #bookstodon #readingcommunity #lesbian #lgbtq #lgbtqia
@lgbtqbookstodon @bookstodon @sapphicbooks

A woman laying outside in a hammock reading next to a picture of the cover of Tarnished Gold by Ann Aptaker with the caption “What Are You Reading?” for Sapphic Fiction Saturday on 05/31/25.

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201d

Queer Romance Club July selection - Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma Alban

Aka More Than a Best Friend.

***

A swoon-worthy debut queer Victorian romance in which two debutantes distract themselves from having to seek husbands by setting up their widowed parents, and instead find their perfect match in each other—the lesbian Bridgerton you never knew you needed!

***

QRC is open to all, read at your own pace over the month and post about it under the #QueerRomanceClub and @queerromanceclub tags.

No rules: let’s hear reactions, theories, reviews, favourite quotes etc, any time throughout the month or indeed whenever you happen to read it 😊 CW for spoilers appreciated.

More about the club here:
https://mastodon.au/@wendypalmer/113144943004145104

#books @lgbtqbookstodon #LesbianRomance #historical

The Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend cover. Two cartoony girls in pretty ball dresses, holding hands. There’s a group of purple tinged silhouettes in the lighter purple background like a crowd scene at a ball.

This is the More Than A Best Friend cover. It’s the same as the Don’t Want You cover, but the font is larger and sans serif, it’s zoomed in a little, and the purple shades are darker.

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