Category Archives: Historical Fiction

To Catch A Suitor by Sarah Adams

She needs to move on. He wants to let her go. Will they finally be able to go their separate ways even though their hearts seem to have other plans? Elizabeth Ashburn is madly, deeply, irrefutably in love with her best friend. They know each other better than their own minds. There is only one problem: To him, she is Little Lizzie, and nothing she does seems to replace the idea in his mind. No matter. It is her first Season and she is determined to make a match with a gentleman—any gentleman—who will help her steal her heart back from Oliver Turner and… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child abuse recounted
  • Childbirth
  • Miscarriage mentioned (secondary character)
  • Death of a parent

Queen Bee by Amalie Howard

Lady Ela Dalvi knows the exact moment her life was forever changed—when her best friend, Poppy, betrayed her without qualm over a boy, the son of a duke. She was sent away in disgrace, her reputation ruined. Nearly three years later, eighteen-year-old Ela is consumed with bitterness and a desire for . . . revenge. Her enemy is quickly joining the crème de la crème of high society while she withers away in the English countryside. With an audacious plan to get even, Ela disguises herself as a mysterious heiress and infiltrates London’s elite. But when Ela reunites with the only boy she’s ever loved, she begins to question whether…. Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical racism, sexism, classism & slut-shaming
  • Substance addiction discussed
  • Death of a parent

Red, White, and Whole by Rajani LaRocca

Reha feels torn between two worlds: school, where she’s the only Indian American student, and home, with her family’s traditions and holidays. But Reha’s parents don’t understand why she’s conflicted—they only notice when Reha doesn’t meet their strict expectations. Reha feels disconnected from her mother, or Amma, although their names are linked—Reha means “star” and Punam means “moon”—but they are a universe apart. Then Reha finds out that her Amma is sick. Really sick. Reha, who dreams of becoming a doctor even though she can’t stomach the sight of blood, is… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Displacement (theme)
  • Blood depiction
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a mother from leukemia

Morgan Is My Name by Sophie Keetch

When King Uther Pendragon murders her father and tricks her mother into marriage, Morgan refuses to be crushed. Trapped amid the machinations of men in a world of isolated castles and gossiping courts, she discovers secret powers. Vengeful and brilliant, it’s not long before Morgan becomes a worthy adversary to Merlin, influential sorcerer to the king. But fighting for her freedom, she risks losing everything – her reputation, her loved ones and her life.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sexism & slut-shaming
  • Rape by coercion and involuntary pregnancy*
  • Infidelity
  • Intimate partner violence & physical assault
  • Forced marriage
  • Self-injury (for magic)
  • Emesis
  • Childbirth (secondary character)
  • Infertility & stillbirth
  • Death of a step-father in battle
  • Near-drowning incident (secondary character)
  • Animal death & dead bodies

Context : The protagonist’s mother was raped by coercion as Merlin magically disguised Uther to look like someone else and he impregnated her. The protagonist sets her husband’s face on fire after he attacks her (and has been physically abusive). The protagonist’s father told her mother that her son was stillborn but he lied and gave the child away.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman—craftsman, widower, and father of Snow. SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished—exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Transphobia
  • Animal death

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

In 1986, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed by the experience. In 2009, pressed into a dangerous scheme by a former lover, a woman captures a rare two-headed cobra. And in 2011, a young, unhappy American living in Saigon with her sort-of boyfriend disappears without a trace. Over the course of the novel, the fates of these three women will lock together in an exhilarating series of nested narratives. Along the way, we meet a young boy sent to a boarding school in the mountains for the métis children of French expatriates just… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape & sexual assault
  • Incest
  • Attempted necrophilia
  • Eating disorder
  • Suicide
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Body horror
  • Murder
  • Animal death & cruelty

To Woo and to Wed by Martha Waters

West, the Marquess of Weston, and Sophie, Lady Fitzwilliam Bridewell, have lately been spending a considerable amount of time together. But West and Sophie are not new acquaintances. In fact, years ago, they had once been nearly engaged until West’s almost fatal curricle accident and his meddling father threw them off course. Now recently widowed, Sophie has put aside all thoughts of romance. But when her widowed sister, Alexandra, mentions a fondness for an earl, Sophie realizes that she may be holding her sister back. Alexandra won’t move forward with an engagement until Sophie, too, settles down again… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Infidelity mentioned (protagonist during her previous marriage)
  • Infertility discussed
  • Death of a friend
  • Death of a husband recounted
  • Blackmail
  • Near-fatal curricle accident resulting in a chronic leg injury recounted

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman

On the cusp of turning eighty, newly retired pharmacist Augusta Stern is adrift. When she relocates to Rallentando Springs—an active senior community in southern Florida—she unexpectedly crosses paths with Irving Rivkin, the delivery boy from her father’s old pharmacy—and the man who broke her heart sixty years earlier. As a teenager growing up in 1920’s Brooklyn, Augusta’s role model was her father, Solomon Stern, the trusted owner of the local pharmacy and the neighborhood expert on every ailment. But when Augusta’s mother dies and Great Aunt Esther moves in, Augusta can’t help but be drawn to… Read more,

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical misogyny
  • Death of a parent from diabetes

Husbands and Lovers by Beatriz Williams

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams— one of the world’s most… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Rape
  • Forced adoption recounted & discussed
  • Hospitalisation of a child from accidental death cap mushroom poisoning

The Briar Club by Kate Quinn

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Period-typical racism & homophobia
  • Domestic violence and abuse
  • Postpartum depression
  • Murder