Category: Past Tense

Inspired by the first all-female gang in London, The Forty Elephants tells the story of Alice Diamond and 1920s London, where gang violence and pickpockets run rampant. When she’s recruited by a notorious group of female thieves, she finally finds success and a desire for more — no matter the cost.

The English translation of this French sensation follows a Polish exile living in Argentina who struggles with guilt and identity, wondering what caused him to flee when so many others — including his own mother — remained. Inspired by the author’s grandfather, this novel is part biography and part fiction as Amigorena confronts the toll of trauma and silence.

Set in Jaffa in the 1940s and ’50s, this story tells the tale of a 15-year-old mechanic, Subhi, and the peasant girl he hopes to marry one day, Shams. But the Mediterranean port city is soon being bombed indiscriminately, and the Palestinian families who remain must figure out how to survive.

In this alternate history novel set during WWI, a nurse and an American soldier find love in the midst of war. But the choices they make affect the outcome of the war, and when Germany wins, leaving behind a brutally occupied France, they must decide whether their choices were worth it. And if they had the opportunity to go back and change them, would they?

Based on the true story of two warrior sisters who raised an army in ancient Vietnam to overthrow the Han Chinese invaders, Bronze Drum follows Trung Trac and Trung Nhi as they try to stay true to Vietnamese traditions even as Confucianism and heavy taxes are forced upon them. But frustrations are reaching a boiling point, turning toward war, and these two sisters will be at the heart of the conflict to come.

In a Portuguese village during the golden age of the Roman Empire, five young girls live an idyllic life of friendship and races through the lemon orchard. But when they’re abducted by the commander who lives on the hill, they find themselves at the center of a deadly standoff just as the edges of the empire are beginning to crack.

As the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner and an enslaved woman, Sylvie de Rosiers enjoys the comforts of a lady. But as the Haitian Revolution begins, Sylvie and her brother leave Saint-Domingue for France, only to find themselves enmeshed in another society on the brink of uprising.

Maria Lagana grew up watching movies at the cinema with her father. Now, an associate producer at Mercury Pictures in Hollywood, Maria likes to keep her personal and professional lives separate even as both feel the strain of a world at war. Just as American enters WWII, a figure from her past returns, and Maria must finally confront the truth of what happened to her father all those years ago.

A former nuclear specialist is taken from a Siberian prison in the 1960s by an old professor, only to find that his new work in a mysterious, unnamed city, detecting radiation levels in local animals, might be even worse than imprisonment.

Ava is a librarian turned spy during the Second World War, having moved on from her quiet job at the Library of Congress to work undercover in Lisbon. Through a series of coded messages, she becomes connected to an apprentice at a printing press in France, passing secrets back and forth even as the war ravages Europe.

Two sisters fight for survival in Dark Ages Britain when their blacksmith father dies, leaving their fate at the hands of local warlord dangerously uncertain. Fleeing to the remains of Roman Londinium is their best hope of survival, and there, they discover a whole world of rebel women living secretly among the ruins.

In this reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau, the tenuous balance between Moreau’s human / animal hybrids and the humans, including his daughter, who live alongside them is upended by a careless guest who sets off a dangerous chain reaction.

The 36th installment of this very cool series about socks, feelings, and other stuff.

Sweet baby cheeses, this book brie-longs on my shelf.

In 1947, Eva Cardon is the owner of DC’s most famous Black-owned restaurant, with plans to open another diner soon to serve Southern comfort food to the working class. The last thing she needs is to fall in love with a white politician. Her mother and grandmother fell for white men, and their family paid the price. But when her equal rights activism puts junior senator Courtland Hardiman Kingsley IV in her path, neither of them are able to resist their feelings for each other despite the potential consequences.

The acclaimed author of Island Queen is back with another historical fiction novel, this time about the extraordinary true-life stories of two women during the Haitian Revolution. One, a warrior kidnapped and sold into slavery from West Africa, is at the forefront of the rebellion on the French colony of Saint Domingue. The other, a free woman of color raised in privilege and security because of her white grandfather, falls in love with a revolutionary despite her marriage to a Frenchman. The paths of these two very different women cross when war breaks out, pitting the French, Spanish, and enslaved people against each other. And both of them has a pivotal role to play.

Blanca has been hanging around the fifteenth-century monastery she died in since her untimely demise at only fourteen. Now, four hundred years later, a woman arrives in the village with her two children and lover. Blanca is immediately enchanted with George, but even as the woman and her lover find themselves in growing trouble with the village for their unconventionality, the ghost of a girl longs for a woman who doesn’t even know she exists.

In medieval Britain, two sisters live in the shadow of the abandoned ruins of Londinium, the once-glorious Roman settlement on the banks of the Thames. For years, the sisters have run wild, one secretly learning her father’s blacksmithing trade, forbidden to women, and the other communing with animals and plants. But when their father dies, the two face enslavement at the hands of the warlord who imprisoned their father. Forced to flee into Londinium, they discover a community of rebel women living secretly amid the ruins. But with men still hunting them, the sisters will have to rely on their ingenuity and all the magic of their foremothers to protect themselves and fight back.

Who else is as excited for this new Silvia Moreno-Garcia book as I am? In The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, nineteenth-century Mexico comes to life as the backdrop for this retelling of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Carlota Moreau is the only daughter of either a genius or a madman, isolated in a manor from the strife on the Yucatán peninsula. Carlota lives in relative peace alongside her father, his assistants, and their hybrid human-animal experiments. But when a stranger arrives, he threatens to overturn the delicate balance that’s been created.

A former nuclear scientist in a Siberian gulag in the 1960s knows that the right connections with guards will get him access to food and cigarettes and the right pair of boots will keep him from losing toes to frostbite. But when Valery’s university mentor steps in to take them from the prison camp to a mysterious unnamed town, he’s told he will serve the rest of his sentence studying the effects of radiation on animals. But why exactly is there so much radiation in this town? And what is being hidden from its thousands of inhabitants?