Showing titles in Historical

Beyond the Pale - winner of the Lambda Literary Award - tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York.

One night to determine once and for all if he truly preferred men. But the last thing Lord Benjamin Parker expected to find in a questionable gambling hall in Cheapside is a gorgeous young man who steals his heart. Cavin Fox has done it many times - select a prime mark, distract him with lust, and leave his pockets empty. Yet when Cavin slips away under the cover of darkness, the only part of Benjamin he leaves untouched is his pockets. With a taste of his fantasies fulfilled, Benjamin wants more than one night with Cavin. But convincing the elusive young man to give them a chance proves difficult.

A conqueror's decree can't separate Aillil Callaghan from his Scottish heritage. He wears his clan's forbidden plaid with pride, awaiting the day he becomes Laird, restores his family's name, and fights to free Scotland from English tyranny. An Englishman in his home? Abomination!

1855, New Hampshire. Lucy Blunt is set to hang for a double murder. Murderess or victim? Only Lucy knows the truth. In the shadow of the gallows, Lucy reflects on the events that led to her bitter downfall - from the moment she arrived at the rambling Burton mansion looking for work and a better life to the grisly murders themselves.

In 1931, Gregory Hemingway's life begins in Kansas City, Missouri. The third and favourite son of an overbearing father, Greg is a paragon: a star athlete, a crack shot, bright and handsome and built like a pocket battleship. In 2001, Gloria Hemingway's life ends in a Miami women's correctional institution. Enduring heartache, disapproval and countless electroshock treatments, their existence has been a miracle. Inspired by true events and spanning seventy years of the last century, this is the story of a single, extraordinary life.

From an old family trunk comes a manuscript which never saw the light of day. Its pages tell of the life, times, and blackmail of a young queer aristocrat stepping into 1768 Society. A time of wig powder and heeled slippers. Duels and social climbers, when the most popular member of the government is declared an outlaw. Hugh Entwistle enters this world wealthy, witty, and well-connected. Everything to be a success—everything, except that thing stuck to the bottom of his heeled slipper.

As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.

Once a renowned tournament fighter known as the "Lion of Kent", William Raven joined the Templars in the Holy Land to escape his past and the political machinations of his enemies. Called to protect travelling pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, William comes face to face with Guy de Metz, his lover from the past. But Guy is no longer the foppish young noble William knew.

When Maybelle Crabtree, a God-fearing farm girl from Kentucky, has a chance encounter with a charismatic stranger, her life changes forever. With an invitation to join the infamous Alla Nazimova and her Sewing Circle, Maybelle’s eyes are opened to a life of decadence and glamour.

Amelia Cole—Lia for short—is one of the first women studying abroad at Oxford University in the 1920s. Finally free from her overbearing Brooklyn parents, she finds a welcome sense of independence in British college life. Lia quickly falls for Scarlett Daniels, an aspiring actress and hardheaded protester. Scarlett introduces her to an exciting gender-equality movement with high stakes. But when their secret love clashes with political uprising, their relationship is one of the casualties.

Would you have the courage to risk your life for what is right? Shona, Cuban, Elbie, and Chloe. Four lives inextricably linked. Will tragic events part them forever? Meet Me at 10 is the second novel in an epic historical fiction trilogy. If you like gripping pause-resisting, heroines with a heart, and captivating tales of love crossing boundaries, you’ll love Vicky Jones and Claire Hackney’s compelling and heart-breaking story of secrets too dangerous to confess in a time of cruel, unforgiving and relentless intolerance to difference.

Trapped in a necromancer’s tower on the longest night of the year. Merek is a pillar of his country community and a confirmed bachelor. He had his chance at love, and he let it slip away. But he’s got friends, a faithful dog, and a snug home. Holidays can be difficult, but Merek knows how to handle loneliness. When he volunteers to house-sit for a necromancer on the day before Solstice, Merek expects to be doing the job with no companion apart from his dog. He’s displeased to be trapped in the tower overnight by a sudden snow storm.

Mississippi, 1956. Shona Jackson knows two things - how to repair car engines and that her childhood secret must stay buried. On the run from Louisiana, she finds shelter from an unjust world in the home of a kindly old lady and a job as a mechanic. But a woman working a man’s job can’t avoid notice in a small town. And attention is dangerous, especially when it comes from one woman in particular....Free-spirited Lucy is new in town too. At 21 years old she is only now starting college. But her heart is just not in it, and when she meets Shona, something inside her begins to stir.

Born of daimon and angel, Diago Alvarez is a being unlike all others. The embodiment of dark and light, he has witnessed the good and the horror of this world and those beyond. In the supernatural war between angels and daimons that will determine humankind’s future, Diago has chosen Los Nefilim, the sons and daughters of angels who possess the power to harness music and light. As the forces of evil gather, Diago must locate the Key, the special chord that will unite the nefilim’s voices, giving them the power to avert the coming civil war between the Republicans and Nationalists.

On a mission deep in the jungle, Oxford anthropologist James Litchfield comes face-to-face with a local legend: a wild man who wanders with mountain gorillas and lives as one of their own. The chance encounter with the savage, whom James calls Michael, leads to a game of observation and exploration. Their mutual curiosity turns to an attraction, one that Michael has never experienced and James is desperate to deny.

Pregnant at fifteen after gleefully losing her virginity to pansexual neighborhood strongman Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, she is robbed of her baby by a pack of nefarious nuns and her embittered papa has her sterilized without her consent (legal in 1935). With the help of a besotted Francis and her top-secret meatball recipe, a devastated Bella embarks on a riotous quest through Depression-era Coney Island sideshows, the tawdry world of peek-a-boo striptease routines, a queer mob marriage, and a tasty collection of wisdom-filled recipes to find her lost child, herself, and maybe even true love.

Two women. Two swords. One victor. An action-packed tale that exposes the brutal underside of Imperial Rome, Sword of the Gladiatrix brings to life unforgettable characters and exotic settings. From the far edges of the Empire, two women come to battle on the hot sands of the arena in Nero's Rome. Enslaved, forced to fight for their lives and the Romans' pleasure; they seek to replace lost friendship, love, and family in each other's arms. But the Roman arena offers only two futures: The Gate of Life for the victors or the Gate of Death for the losers.

Jack Holmes is in love, but the man he loves never shares his bed. The other men Jack sleeps with never last long and he dallies with several women. Jack's friend, Will Wright, comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer, and like Jack works on the Northern Review, a staid cultural quarterly. Will is shy and lonely-and Jack introduces him to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry. Over the years Will discovers his sensuality and almost destroys his marriage in doing so.

In his novel based on the extraordinary life of the gay brother of Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey, his family, and friends lived; from wealth and position in prerevolutionary Russia, to the halls of Cambridge University, and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But it is the honesty and vulnerability of Sergey, our young gay narrator, that hook the reader.

When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one's shortlist to be president. Rough and reticent, he's a country lawyer lacking money and manners, living above a dry goods shop, but with a gift for oratory. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with a tireless interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. "I can only hope," she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, "that his waters being so very still, they also run deep."