Showing titles in Historical

Decorated artilleryman Edgar Mason was forced to find new work when the British Empire replaced its foot soldiers with monstrous machines. Agamemnon Frost, however, is far from the foppish man-about-town he appears to be. He's working to protect the Earth from an alien invasion being planned by a face-changing creature known as Pandarus. And on the night he plans to confront the aliens, he enlists Mason to assist him. For a man to love a man is a serious crime in Victorian England. But when Mason meets Frost, his heart thunders and his blood catches fire.

Clubbed Two is historical fiction, set in Philadelphia from 1982 to 1992. Club Sanctuary can be seen as a metaphor for the greater LGBTQ community, but it is written as a real place, with characters who are fabulous, funny, and flawed. The author combines historical characters and events with fictional ones, creating a story that's entertaining, informative, and emotional. The love story between the two main characters, Joey and Henry, serves as a vehicle for connecting the stories of diverse Queer characters.

From the moment she stepped foot in the ominous and towering Gerard House, Constance Beechum sensed an evil chill that was far more deadly than the frigid blasts which had buffeted her on the way to Castine, Maine. She couldn't turn back. She had left nothing behind, not even a life-line. Her uncle had found her a job caring for the old and dying Lady Elizabeth Gerard. Although she hadn't an ounce of experience in nursing or caring for the ill, Constance had no choice but to accept the offer. She was penniless.

One of the most famous partnerships in literature yields, over time, to a peculiar romantic triangle. Sherlock Holmes. Dr. John Watson. And the good doctor's second wife, whom Doyle never named. In L.A. Fields's novel, Mrs. Watson is a clever woman who realizes, through examining all the prior cases her husband shared with the world's greatest consulting detective, that the two men shared more than adventures: they were lovers, as well.

Morehead is an explicitly adult novel about Dave Morehead, a young man living in San Francisco during the height of the sexual revolution, in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. It was a time of sexual, evolutionary, and political change, with both glorious and nearly catastrophic consequences. San Francisco was teeming with diversity, and an evolving political base that forever changed the landscape of what had always been a progressive city. Morehead tells the tale of a straight young man living in a gay old city.

After the success of The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of the small English town of Handsmouth. Usually a quiet and undisturbed place, Handsmouth becomes the centre of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. The town fills with journalists and television crews, who latch onto the public's fearful suspicions that the missing girl was abducted.

Settembre 1939. Aldo, ventenne fiorentino, giunge a San Domino, l’isola delle Tremiti scelta dal regime fascista come confino per chi era accusato di omosessualità. I cosiddetti “femminielli” alloggiano in due baracche fatiscenti, con un secchio a fare da gabinetto e un camino mal funzionante per le notti più fredde. Sono perlopiù siciliani, perché arrestati per un omicidio avvenuto anni prima a Catania e tuttora impunito, che continua a perseguitarli.

Long before "Don't ask, don't tell", gays served in the military - sometimes openly - more often in secret. In this volume the author imagines what their lives might have been like. Within, you will find tales of historical fiction mixed occasionally with supernatural horror, including: a French fusilier fighting guerrillas and growing disillusionment in Napoleonic Spain; soldiers encountering the unthinkable during the 1812 occupation and retreat from Moscow; and more.

The year is 1904. Nurse Clara Tyler happily spends her days tending patients in rural Ohio. Her brother, who is working in Panama on the great canal, informs the family he must return home due to illness. Too sick to travel alone, he begs Clara to come and get him. Anxious about going but determined to save her brother, Clara makes her way to the Canal Zone. She is quickly drawn into a web of heartbreak, controversy, and friendship that keeps her there. When her father demands she return, Clara must decide where she belongs in this gripping tale about love and loss, courage, and the ...

Inga Belova leaves NYC for post-perestroika Moscow to launch her own business. She falls in love with two women along the way. Gary Shteyngart says, “If you're going to read one bisexual management consulting Russian novel this year, please, dear god, make it this one."

Renad Amdarien's daring escape from the brutal confines of a sorcerer's dungeon has made him a legend throughout the land. Now trusted without question, Renad suffers the truth alone: his former master's sorcery rules him still. Broken both in body and mind, he finds brief solace only in the Gardens, lush sanctuaries of sex and secrets staffed by willing, skilled companions.

Set in Calgary in 1982, during the recession that arrived on the heels of Canada’s National Energy Program, The Western Alienation Merit Badge follows the Murray family as they struggle with grief and find themselves on the brink of financial ruin. After the death of her stepmother, Frances "Frankie" Murray returns to Calgary to help her father, Jimmy, and her sister, Bernadette, pay the mortgage on the family home. When Robyn, a long-lost friend, becomes their house guest, old tensions are reignited.

It's 1922 at Far Cry Cannery, a quarter-mile of boardwalk and wooden buildings strung along the rocks of Rivers Inlet on the northwest coast of British Columbia. The time has come for Anders Viken, storekeeper and honorary uncle to the recently orphaned Kit, to give an account of his secret self—from his first home in Norway, another land of islands and fjords, to his escape from his family's loving grip, to his wide-open years of rough living and impossible love.

1816. Mary, 18 years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities, haunted by the loss of her baby daughter. Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary. Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits.

It is summer 1956 when 15-year-old Bridget first meets Isabella. In their conservative Connecticut town, Isabella is a breath of fresh air. She is worldly, alluring and brazen: an enigma. When they receive an offer to study at the Academy in Italy, Bridget is thrilled. This is her ticket to Europe and - better still - a chance to spend nine whole months with her glamorous and unpredictable best friend. There, lodged in a convent of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, the two girls move towards a passionate but fragile intimacy.

This historical fiction novel gives a riveting account of what life was like before the LGBTQ community had the same civil rights as other citizens - with a twist! In this alternate reality tale, only 10 percent of the population is heterosexual, and the only difference in the course of history over the past 100 years is that the majority of the population is gay, instead of straight. The love story is based in Southern California. Marcus is a 79-year old straight man whom against all odds, finds the woman of his dreams.

The war is over, but Berlin is a desolate sea of rubble. There is a shortage of everything: Food, clothing, tobacco. The local population is scrabbling to get by. Kasper Meier is one of these Germans, and his solution is to trade on the black market to feed himself and his elderly father. He can find anything that people need, for the right price. Even other people. When a young woman, Eva, arrives at Kasper's door seeking the whereabouts of a British pilot, he feels a reluctant sympathy for her but won't interfere in military affairs.

In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for everyone, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact. As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance, and as reputations rise and fall, the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story.

Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick", as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have.

Nantucket in 1846 is an island set apart not just by its geography but by its unique circumstances. With their menfolk away at sea, often for years at a time, women here know a rare independence—and the challenges that go with it. Eliza Macy is struggling to conceal her financial trouble as she waits for her whaling captain husband to return from a voyage. In desperation, she turns against her progressive ideals and targets Meg Wright, a pregnant free Black woman trying to relocate her store to Main Street.