Historical fiction titles at the Peter White Public Library

Historical fiction is known for bringing a past setting to life through the eyes of people who may have lived during a specific place and time. Authors engage readers in the people and historical events of that time and place. I have chosen some more recent historical fiction titles I have enjoyed recently.

“The Pull of the Stars” by Emma Donoghue tells the story of nurse Julia Power who works in an understaffed hospital in Dublin’s center where expectant mothers who have come down with the “terrible new flu” are quarantined together in 1918. Two outsiders come into Julia’s world, Kathleen Lynn and Bridie Sweeney. Over three days in this tiny ward, they change in unexpected ways as they lose patients to the flu pandemic and bring new life into this uncertain world. But in it all, they do their work with compassion and tenderness. Finding light in the darkness, Donoghue tells a story of hope and survival against all odds.

In Jennie Field’s book “Atomic Love,” a physicist, Rosalind Porter, has always defied expectations. During the war, she worked on the Manhattan Project and had a passionate love affair with colleague Thomas Weaver. After the war, she turns to a more traditional life of a woman of the 1950s but she misses her life in the lab. However, when Weaver comes back into the picture, so does the FBI. Special agent Charlie Szydlo wants Rosalind to spy on Weaver, who is believed to be selling nuclear secrets to Russia. Charlie is haunted by his past as a POW during the war just as Rosalind is haunted by hers. As her affections deepen for each man, so does the danger she becomes a part of deepen. This page-turner will have you guessing … which will she choose?

In “The Evening and the Morning,”the prequel to “The Pillars of the Earth,” Ken Follett tells an epic story of three people who find their lives intertwined. Set in England at the dawn of the Middle Ages, a young boatbuilder, a Norman noblewoman, and a monk each come into conflict with a shrewd and merciless bishop who would do anything to increase his wealth and power. This novel ends where “The Pillars of the Earth” begins, bringing an epic journey through an intensely rich past, and adding yet another chapter to the Kingsbridge series.

Inspired by a true story of World War II, “The Book of Lost Names” by Kristin Harmel recounts a story of a young woman with a talent for forgery helping Jewish children flee the Nazis to Switzerland. Eva is a semi-retired librarian in Florida, who comes across a magazine with a picture of a book cover she hasn’t seen in over six decades. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral-und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from — or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but it means revisiting a past to reunite those lost during the war.