Category Archives: Historical Fiction

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

In 1914, war feels far away to Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood. They’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with the dreamy, poetic Ellwood – not having a clue that his best friend is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt’s mother asks him to enlist in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, he signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings. But Ellwood and their classmates soon follow him into the horrors of trenches. Though Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, their friends are dying in front of them, and at any moment they could be next….

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Classism & minor bullying
  • Homophobia & internalised homophobia, including slurs
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (‘shell shock’) & psychological trauma from war, including survivor’s guilt, nightmares, depression, and panic attacks
  • Suicidal ideation & self-sacrifice (in battle)
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Minor drug use (i.e. morphine in a medical context)
  • Starvation
  • Blood, gore, and injury descriptions, including hospitalisation in military facilities, amputations, graphic descriptions of bodies, and general medical treatment and illness from battlefield wounds & injuries
  • Graphic depictions of World War Two, including trench warfare, combat violence, gas attacks (mustard gas), and battle scenes
  • Animal death (horses)

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales. In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the…. Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Grooming & incest (uncle-niece)
  • Dubious consent (‘dubcon’)
  • Murder
  • Animal death

Artifice by Sharon Cameron

Isa de Smit was raised in the vibrant, glittering world of her parents’ small art gallery in Amsterdam, a hub of beauty, creativity, and expression, until the Nazi occupation wiped the color from her city’s palette.
The “degenerate” art of the Gallery de Smit is confiscated, the artists in hiding or deported, her best friend, Truus, fled to join the shadowy Dutch resistance.
And masterpiece by masterpiece, the Nazis are buying and stealing her country’s heritage, feeding the Third Reich’s ravenous appetite for culture and art. So when the unpaid taxes threaten her beloved… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical antisemitism & homophobia
  • Child sexual assault (groping) & mentions of underage sex work
  • Alcohol consumption & drug use
  • Secondary character with a substance addition (morphine)
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a friend & child at the hands of Nazis
  • Torture
  • Murder by gun violence
  • World War Two (theme), including depiction of the Holocaust & mentions of concentration camps

The Night Guests by Marina Scott

Once a prominent fixture in Omaha’s high society, Nina Wilson is now drowning in debt and disgrace following the untimely death of her father. Her engagement has been broken off, her family’s grand estate has fallen into disrepair, and her mother, consumed by grief, is incapable of running the household. Attempting to bring closure to her grieving mother, Nina invites a mysterious medium, Leroy Marshall, into their home. But Leroy Marshall’s brand of charisma—equal parts alluring and repellent—leaves Nina feeling deeply unsettled. The man’s presence seems to have awakened something otherworldly in the house itself, and now it’s stepping out of the shadows, refusing to leave,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father

I, Medusa by Ayana Gray

Meddy has spent her whole life as a footnote in someone else’s story. Out of place next to her beautiful, immortal sisters and her parents—both gods, albeit minor ones—she dreams of leaving her family’s island for a life of adventure. So when she catches the eye of the goddess Athena, who invites her to train as an esteemed priestess in her temple, Meddy leaps at the chance to see the world beyond her home. In the colorful market streets of Athens and the clandestine chambers of the temple, Meddy flourishes in her role as Athena’s favored acolyte, getting her first… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & misogyny
  • Colonisation
  • Rape, grooming & child sexual assault (on-page)
  • Domestic abuse

Euphoria by Lily King

In 1933 three young, gifted anthropologists are thrown together in the jungle of New Guinea. They are Nell Stone, fascinating, magnetic and famous for her controversial work studying South Pacific tribes, her intelligent and aggressive husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson, who stumbles into the lives of this strange couple and becomes totally enthralled. Within months the trio are producing their best ever work, but soon a firestorm of fierce love and jealousy begins to burn out of control, threatening their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives…

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Infidelity
  • Miscarriage discussed (protagonist), due to intimate partner assault
  • Emotionally & psychologically abusive relationship
  • Cannibalism & starvation discussed
  • Physical illness depiction (malarial fever)

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way—until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened. Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Military & naval service discussed

Wicked and the Wallflower by Sarah MacLean

When a mysterious stranger finds his way into her bedchamber and offers his help in landing a duke, Lady Felicity Faircloth agrees—on one condition. She’s seen enough of the world to believe in passion, and won’t accept a marriage without it. Bastard son of a duke and king of London’s dark streets, Devil has spent a lifetime wielding power and seizing opportunity, and the spinster wallflower is everything he needs to exact a revenge years in the making. All he must do is turn the plain little mouse into an irresistible temptress, set his trap, and destroy his enemy. But there’s… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical slut-shaming
  • Physical child abuse recounted
  • Suicide mentioned

The Rogue Not Taken by Sarah MacLean

The youngest of the infamous Talbot sisters scandalized society at the Liverpool Summer Soiree, striking her sister’s notoriously philandering husband and landing him backside-first in a goldfish pond. And we thought Sophie was the quiet one… When she finds herself the target of very public aristocratic scorn, Sophie Talbot does what she must to escape the city and its judgment—she flees on the back of a carriage, vowing never to return to London…or to society. But the carriage isn’t saving her from ruin. It’s filled with it. The marquess of Eversley was espied desc… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical slut-shaming
  • Physical child abuse recounted
  • Cheating (secondary characters)
  • Death of a partner in a coach accident
  • Gun violence

The Day of the Duchess by Sarah MacLean

The one woman he will never forget… Malcolm Bevingstoke, Duke of Haven, has lived the last three years in self-imposed solitude, paying the price for a mistake he can never reverse and a love he lost forever. The dukedom does not wait, however, and Haven requires an heir, which means he must find himself a wife by summer’s end. There is only one problem—he already has one. The one man she will never forgive…
After years in exile, Seraphina, Duchess of Haven, returns to London with a single goal—to reclaim the life she left and find happiness, unencumbered by the man who broke her heart. Haven offers her a… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical slut-shaming
  • Infidelity recounted
  • Miscarriage (on-page)
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of an infant recounted

Context : The male protagonist slept with another woman as ‘revenge’ when he found out his shunned wife was pregnant and hadn’t told him. It is implied the wife caught him with the other woman.