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Bess is Carol McManus' second historical novel. As with Ida, Carol's award-winning and best-selling first novel, Bess is based on the author's close observations of pioneer women who lived and worked in the first part of the twentieth century in western Colorado. Life in those days was filled with determined women who tried to make a better life for themselves and their families. As opposed to their Victorian counterparts, who were for the most part...

Facing her 100th birthday Roseanne McNulty has decided to record her past from inside a mental hospital, and while the facility is scheduled to close, Dr. Grene takes an interest in Roseanne to determine if she is capable of reentering society, but when a document -- written by a local priest -- surfaces, it offers a history different from the one Roseanne offers.

Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given an awful choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone and everything he loves in the hope that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Young, scared, lonely, and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier just as an economic crash wrecks the dreams of a nation. Soon, with few alternatives...

"In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tèatowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners. Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism--but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion....

"It is 1914 and the world has been on the brink of war so many times, many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and became close confidantes. Now Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime, home with Sofya to see the splendors of Russia. But when Austria declares war on Serbia and...

Novelist Ernest Hemingway creates a spy ring in Cuba to combat German agents during World War II and the novel describes his adventures as he chases enemy submarines with his fishing boat. Narrating is an agent planted by the FBI to keep an eye on the ring, a man who never read a word of Hemingway. Famous people make appearances, including spy Ian Fleming, author of James Bond books. By the author of Fires in Eden.

A fictionalized account of how in 1849 a Virginia slave, Henry "Box" Brown, escapes to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia.

Zane Grey is an American icon, the premier chronicler of the West, and the writer who first brought the frontier to life in all its gritty glory. In this classic western, frontier legend Buffalo Jones won't back down from the most dangerous hunt of all. . .
Big, brash and fearless, Buffalo Jones is in pursuit of the greatest mountain lion ever spotted in the remote Arizona desert. Determined to bring the beast home alive, Jones leads a colorful...

Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history--culpable regardless of her intentions.The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters,...

A fictional tale of the life of Marie Antoinette presents the story of a teenage empress's daughter who is forced to leave her family home to marry the future king of France and who rebels against the formality and rigid protocol of court life.