Collection: Historical Fiction

'I am completely blown away by this series...Simply outstanding.' Book Reviews for U, book reviewer

This single paperback volume contains the first, second and third books in Susie Murphy's historical fiction series A Matter of Class.

Society said they shouldn't fall in love...

A Class Apart: It's 1828, and Ireland is in turmoil as Irish tenants protest against their upper-class English landlords. Spirited Bridget Muldowney, a landowner's daughter, and loyal Cormac McGovern, a stable hand's son, once ran wild around the country estate as childhood friends. But now that they're adults, Bridget's overbearing mother is determined to enforce the employer-servant boundaries between them and plots to keep them apart. With the odds stacked against them, can Bridget and Cormac's childhood attachment blossom into something more?

They never thought they'd see each other again...

A Class Entwined: Trapped in distressing circumstances, Bridget and Cormac must each seek courage within themselves to do what they can to survive. In the face of unspeakable struggles, they discover that fate can act in the most unexpected of ways.

His past could destroy their future...

A Class Forsaken: As they confront the consequences of Bridget's embittered mother's actions, Bridget and Cormac must also come to terms with an agonising choice between family and duty. And when their loved ones are endangered, will the threat be great enough to crush the hopeful future they have envisioned together?

The story continues in the fourth book in the series, A Class Coveted.

Praise for A Matter of Class:

'A beautifully written historical novel with characters who linger long after the last page is turned.' Hazel Gaynor, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Came Home

'Not only are Murphy's characters well developed, interesting, and genuine, but their love story is epic...These books have been wonderful reads and capture the essence of sweeping saga.' The Lit Bitch, book reviewer

'This series keeps getting better...Once I started reading this book, it was so hard to stop...Such evocative writing.' Elizabeth Bell, author of the Lazare Family Saga

'Murphy must own a time machine, or else she couldn't possibly do such a good job of sucking a modern-day reader completely back into 1800s Ireland. The story of Bridget and Cormac comes vividly to life in this sweeping tale of romance.' Ashley O'Melia, author and freelance writer

'An Irish historical saga full of romance and betrayal across the class divide...My heart broke repeatedly for the characters...Highly recommend!' Kelsey Gietl, author of Across Oceans

'With adventure and drama and romance, this is a series I'll continue to recommend left, right and centre.' Between My Lines, book reviewer

'Susie Murphy is an exceptional writer, with a keen ability for creating memorable characters and sweeping settings...Settle in for your new favorite book series.' Pursuing Stacie, book reviewer

What readers are saying:

★★★★★ 'The Irish Downton Abbey! Fabulous.'

★★★★★ 'If it was possible to give 100 stars to this book, I would!'

★★★★★ 'An absolute page turner.'

★★★★★ 'This is a fantastic saga! I am completely hooked!'

★★★★★ 'A brilliant love story.'

★★★★★ 'A hugely satisfying read.'

★★★★★ 'If you love romance and historical regency then this series is for you.'

★★★★★ 'Don't contemplate whether or not to read it, just read it!'

★★★★★ 'Superbly written.'

★★★★★ 'I just couldn't put it down.

'Susie Murphy...is an absolute HIT...This is another excellent installment to a beautiful series.' The Lit Bitch, book reviewer

Their choices have shackled her dreams...

It's 1836, and Bridget and Cormac have arrived, full of hope, to the city of Boston with their growing family. However, as they adjust to domestic life together for the first time, they face anti-Irish sentiment from the local Americans, as well as a threat to their happiness from a much closer source.

Cormac undertakes the challenging search for his missing sister, Bronagh. He is determined to do all he can to put the broken pieces of his family back together, but the appalling truth he uncovers will shake him to his core.

Meanwhile, as Emily grows up in this new country, she realises how her parents' past actions will affect her entire future and she begins to covet that which is no longer within her reach. When she receives an unexpected proposition, will she be able to resist its temptation, despite the untrustworthy nature of the person behind it?

A Class Coveted is the fourth book in Susie Murphy's historical fiction series A Matter of Class. The story continues in the fifth book, A Class Reunited.

Praise for A Class Coveted:

'A Class Coveted is author Susie Murphy's BEST book yet...An outstanding read that I just didn't want to end.' Book Reviews for U, book reviewer

'Simply superb storytelling...a story of love and family to savor. Strongly recommended.' Historical Novel Society (May 2022 issue Historical Novels Review)

'Once again, Susie Murphy has created a page-turning and beautifully paced novel...Her observations on class and culture blend seamlessly with the narrative.' Lisa Reads Books, book reviewer

'It's Outlander without the time travel, except that I'm absolutely traveling back in time while I read it.' Ashley O'Melia, author and freelance writer

'It felt like meeting up with old friends, and I couldn't read it fast enough.' Coffee, Books and China Cups, book reviewer

'Each book keeps getting better and better...Susie Murphy wields her pen in her usual style, making the reader both cheer and weep for her characters.' Kelsey Gietl, author of the War Across Waters duology

What readers are saying:

★★★★★ 'The story keeps getting better and better!'

★★★★★ 'Of all the books in the series, this was my favorite.'

★★★★★ 'I absolutely could not put this book down.'

★★★★★ 'Well worth the wait!'

★★★★★ 'A must read for those who love historical family sagas.'

★★★★★ 'Heartfelt and tender and heartbreaking and uplifting.'

★★★★★ 'Wow! Another great read in this wonderful series.'

★★★★★ 'Well paced and gripping, with an exciting finish.'

★★★★★ 'I love following the characters through their triumphs and turmoil.'

★★★★★ 'I can't wait for the next book.'

Now in English for the first time, the prequel to Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, the War and Peace of the twentieth Century.

In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini meet in Salzburg where they agree on a renewed assault on the Soviet Union. Launched in the summer, the campaign soon picks up speed, as the routed Red Army is driven back to the industrial center of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga. In the rubble of the bombed-out city, Soviet forces dig in for a last stand.

The story told in Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe, and its characters include mothers and daughters, husbands and brothers, generals, nurses, political activists, steelworkers, and peasants, along with Hitler and other historical figures. At the heart of the novel is the Shaposhnikov family. Even as the Germans advance, the matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna, refuses to leave Stalingrad. Far from the front, her eldest daughter, Ludmila, is unhappily married to the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum. Viktor's research may be of crucial military importance, but he is distracted by thoughts of his mother in the Ukraine, lost behind German lines.

In Stalingrad, published here for the first time in English translation, and in its celebrated sequel, Life and Fate, Grossman writes with extraordinary power and deep compassion about the disasters of war and the ruthlessness of totalitarianism, without, however, losing sight of the little things that are the daily currency of human existence or of humanity's inextinguishable, saving attachment to nature and life. Grossman's two-volume masterpiece can now be seen as one of the supreme accomplishments of twentieth-century literature, tender and fearless, intimate and epic.

She'll light the fire of resistance--but she may get burned...

1942. Though she survived the bomb that destroyed her home, Yvonne Rudellat's life is over. She's estranged from her husband, her daughter is busy with war work, and Yvonne--older, diminutive, overlooked--has lost all purpose. Until she's offered a chance to remake herself entirely...

The war has taken a turn for the worse, and the men in charge are desperate. So, when Yvonne is recruited as Britain's first female sabotage agent, expectations are low. But her tenacity, ability to go unnoticed, and aptitude for explosives set her apart. Soon enough she arrives in occupied France with a new identity, ready to set the Nazi regime ablaze.

But there are adversaries on all sides. As Yvonne becomes infamous as the nameless, unstoppable woman who burns the enemy at every turn, she realizes she may lose herself to the urgent needs of the cause...

Based on a true story, The Woman With No Name is a gripping story of secrets, spies, and the women behind the Resistance, from USA Today bestselling author Audrey Blake.

"The Alienist set in eighteenth-century Stockholm: Brawny, bloody, intricate, enthralling--and the best historical thriller I've read in twenty years." --A.J. Finn, #1 bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

"Thrilling, unnerving, clever, and beautiful." --Fredrik Backman, #1 bestselling author of A Man Called Ove

"Chilling and thought-provoking. Relentless, well-written, and nearly impossible to put down." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

One morning in the autumn of 1793, watchman Mikel Cardell is awakened from his drunken slumber with reports of a body seen floating in the Larder, once a pristine lake on Stockholm's Southern Isle, now a rancid bog. Efforts to identify the bizarrely mutilated corpse are entrusted to incorruptible lawyer Cecil Winge, who enlists Cardell's help to solve the case. But time is short: Winge's health is failing, the monarchy is in shambles, and whispered conspiracies and paranoia abound.

Winge and Cardell become immersed in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams. From a farmer's son who is lead down a treacherous path when he seeks his fortune in the capital to an orphan girl consigned to the workhouse by a pitiless parish priest, their investigation peels back layer upon layer of the city's labyrinthine society. The rich and the poor, the pious and the fallen, the living and the dead--all collide and interconnect with the body pulled from the lake.

Breathtakingly bold and intricately constructed, The Wolf and the Watchman brings to life the crowded streets, gilded palaces, and dark corners of late-eighteenth-century Stockholm, offering a startling vision of the crimes we commit in the name of justice, and the sacrifices we make in order to survive.

The Christmas Bride - A "Chance Sisters" novella

A sweet, Regency-era story of forgiveness, redemption - and love.

A chance meeting on a dark highway, a wounded heroine, a hero-in-waiting and Christmas . . .

When Blake Ashton reluctantly returns to England for a business meeting-his first visit in ten years-he learns his partners are getting ready for a big family Christmas in the country. Ash wants none of that. He has just one plan in mind-to show his face, then immediately return to his free and easy life in the Far East.

Making his way to Devon on a freezing dark night, he's accosted on the road by a footpad. Shots are exchanged and to Ash's horror he discovers he's accidentally wounded a girl. Ash can't leave her bleeding in the road, so he stays and tends her.

Charlotte Underwood, in hiding from an unscrupulous guardian, is battling to support herself and her little brother. Wounded, and helpless in the hands of this handsome stranger, Charley soon realizes her heart is in danger from him too.

Swept into a family Christmas with Max and Abby Davenham, and Abby's 'sisters of the heart'-not to mention their imperious aunt, Lady Beatrice-Charley finds the friendship and support her lonely heart craves. And as his feelings for Charley grow, Ash is forced to face up to his own past, and the reason he left England in the first place.

A collection of vibrant and incisive short stories depicting the sometimes humorous, but more often tragic interactions between Black people and white people in America in the 1920s and '30s.

One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but these stories showcase his talent as a lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.

Stories included in this collection:
"Cora Unashamed"
"Slave on the Block"
"Home"
"Passing"
"A Good Job Gone"
"Rejuvenation Through Joy"
"The Blues I'm Playing"
"Red-Headed Baby"
"Poor Little Black Fellow"
"Little Dog"
"Berry"
"Mother and Child"
"One Christmas Eve"
"Father and Son"

A woman is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist, unknowingly echoing her family's dangerous past and risking the foundations of her future in this electrifying novel.

"An exhilarating novel of star-crossed romances and radical politics, with writing so evocative I swear I could smell the tear gas."--Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness

Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled--private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the notorious public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris. There, she falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled in to the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly almost repeats a secret tragedy from her family's past. Her father wasn't always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to conceal from his family and from the world.

In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously ignoring the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he's been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is leading--one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined.

Minnow's and Keen's intertwining stories take us through the turmoil of the late sixties student movements and into the chaos of the modern world. Exploding with suspense, heart, and intelligence, There's Going to Be Trouble is a story about revolution, legacy, passionate love, and how we live with the consequences of our darkest secrets.

The haunting and poignant story of a how a young Japanese girl's understanding of the historic and tragic bombing of Hiroshima is transformed by a memorial lantern-floating ceremony.

Twelve-year-old Nozomi lives in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. She wasn't even born when the bombing of Hiroshima took place. Every year Nozomi joins her family at the lantern-floating ceremony to honor those lost in the bombing. People write the names of their deceased loved ones along with messages of peace, on paper lanterns and set them afloat on the river. This year Nozomi realizes that her mother always releases one lantern with no name. She begins to ask questions, and when complicated stories of loss and loneliness unfold, Nozomi and her friends come up with a creative way to share their loved ones' experiences. By opening people's eyes to the struggles they all keep hidden, the project teaches the entire community new ways to show compassion.

Soul Lanterns is an honest exploration of what happened on August 6, 1945, and offers readers a glimpse not only into the rich cultural history of Japan but also into the intimate lives of those who recognize--better than most--the urgent need for peace.

In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing--the Xhosa people's ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination--the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Jurassic Park comes classic historical thriller about Victorian London's most notorious gold heist.

London, 1855, when lavish wealth and appalling poverty exist side by side, one mysterious man navigates both worlds with perfect ease. Edward Pierce preys on the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of his century. Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could mastermind the extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England's industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive? Based on fact, but studded with all the suspense and style of fiction, here is a classic historical thriller, set a decade before the age of dynamite--yet nonetheless explosive...

Loyalty is tested in this second book in the thrilling time travel adventure trilogy from New York Times bestselling Charlie Thorne and Spy School author Stuart Gibbs--now with a brand-new look!

Having assumed the identity of a young D'Artagnan, Greg Rich is beginning to get the hang of things in 1615 Paris. But he hasn't figured out how to get home yet. Or how to defeat the dangerous Michel Dinicoeur, who has made it his mission to destroy Greg, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos.

When Dinicoeur escapes the Bastille and flees to Spain, the Musketeers charge after him, only to be ambushed. Someone is anticipating their every move. Could there be a traitor in their midst? If the Musketeers can't trust each other, who can they trust? It's "all for one and one for all" . . . isn't it?

And don't miss the action-packed finale, The Last Musketeer #3: Double Cross.

From National Book Award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author Louise Erdrich, a profound and enchanting new novel: a richly imagined world "where butchers sing like angels."

Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family--which includes Eva and four sons--and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New--in the person of Delphine Watzka--the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life, and the trajectory of this brilliant novel.

A lost midcentury classic--the farcical misadventures of a queer Black teen sharing a house with two adoptive mothers, a lascivious cook, and a reticent ghost.

In a small Michigan town, in the late 1950s, the widow Etta Klein--wealthy and Jewish--has for more than thirty years relied for aid, comfort, and companionship on her Black housekeeper Harriet Gibbs. Between "Aunt Harry" and Etta, a relationship has developed that is closer than a friendship, yet not quite a marriage. They are inseparable, at once absurdly unequal and defined by a comic codependence.

Forever mourning the early death of her favorite son, Sargent, Etta has all but adopted Aunt Harry's nephew, the precocious, gay seventeen-year-old Oliver, who has been raised by both women. Oliver is facing down his departure to college--and fending off the advances of Etta's cook, Nella Mae--when the household is disrupted by the arrival of a self-proclaimed "warlock," one Maurice LeFleur, who has convinced Etta and Harry that he might be able to contact Sargent in the afterlife . . .

Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes was the debut of the extraordinary Henry Van Dyke, whose witty and outrageous novels look back to the sparkling, elaborate comedies of Ronald Firbank and forward to postmodern burlesques like Fran Ross's Oreo. There is nothing else quite like them in American fiction.

The year is 1964. Bobby Bailey doesn't realize he is about to fulfill his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office to join up. Close-mouthed, damaged, innocent, trying to forget a past and looking for a future, it turns out that Bailey is the perfect candidate for a secret U.S. government experimental program, an unholy continuation of a genetics program that was discovered in Nazi Germany nearly 20 years earlier in the waning days of World War II. Bailey's only ally and protector, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes, which sets off a chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone's control. As the titular monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, literal and ironic, the story reaches its emotional and moral reckoning.

Monsters is the legendary project Barry Windsor-Smith has been working on for over 35 years. A 380-page tour de force of visual storytelling, Monsters' narrative canvas is both vast and deep: part familial drama, part political thriller, part metaphysical journey, it is an intimate portrait of individuals struggling to reclaim their lives and an epic political odyssey across two generations of American history. Trauma, fate, conscience, and redemption are just a few of the themes that intersect in the most ambitious graphic novel of Windsor-Smith's career.

Monsters is rendered in Windsor-Smith's impeccable pen-and-ink technique, the visual storytelling with its sensitivity to gesture and composition is the most sophisticated of the artist's career. There are passages of heartbreaking tenderness, of excruciating pain, and devastating violence. It is surely one of the most intense graphic novels ever drawn.