Shanghai Girls
Two Shanghai sisters flee war and face Angel Island to start over in Los Angeles.
1,914-word summary · 9 min read
Tag: historical
52 books with this tag.
Page 2 of 3
On the Way to the Wedding
Gregory chases the wrong friend while Lucy fights a forced engagement.
1,938-word summary · 9 min read
Horse
A racehorse links an enslaved groom, a painter, and modern researchers.
1,920-word summary · 9 min read
City of Thieves
Two boys cross siege Leningrad to find eggs for a colonel's cake.
1,985-word summary · 9 min read
An Echo in the Bone
Jamie and Claire endure Revolution war while Brianna reads their letters at home.
1,945-word summary · 9 min read
A Fine Balance
Four strangers share a flat and sewing work during India's Emergency.
2,204-word summary · 10 min read
The Alienist
In 1896 New York, alienist Laszlo Kreizler, reporter John Moore and Sara Howard hunt a killer of boy prostitutes while police commissioner Roosevelt backs…
3,099-word summary · 14 min read
Lamb
Christopher Moore gives Jesus a wisecracking best friend, Biff, who tells the missing years from age thirteen to thirty in a wild trip east full of jokes and…
2,928-word summary · 13 min read
Half Broke Horses
Jeannette Walls tells her grandmother Lily Casey Smith's frontier life, from a Texas dugout to teaching at fifteen and ranching in Arizona.
2,580-word summary · 11 min read
Blood Meridian
A teenage runaway joins a scalp hunting gang in 1849 Mexico under the strange Judge Holden. McCarthy writes brutal biblical prose about violence and power on…
3,524-word summary · 16 min read
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
A Paris station orphan tends clocks, steals parts, and wakes a drawing machine that points to filmmaker Georges Melies.
2,946-word summary · 13 min read
The Vampire Lestat
Lestat tells his own tale from French village to rock star, waking ancient ones who hate questions.
1,916-word summary · 9 min read
The Mists of Avalon
Morgaine tells Arthur story from Avalon side, where goddess worship fades before priests.
1,944-word summary · 9 min read
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Quasimodo loves Esmeralda from the bells while Frollo lusts and Gringoire watches Paris burn in 1482.
1,939-word summary · 9 min read
The Bear and the Nightingale
Wild girl Vasya sees household spirits in medieval Russia while a priest calls them demons.
1,907-word summary · 8 min read
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Two cousins create the Escapist in golden age comics while war takes family they cannot save.
1,960-word summary · 9 min read
The Women
Nurse Frankie McGrath serves in Vietnam and fights to be seen at home.
1,980-word summary · 9 min read
The Poisonwood Bible
A missionary drags his wife and four daughters to the Congo in 1959, and Africa remakes each of them.
2,227-word summary · 10 min read
The Pillars of the Earth
A priory, a builder, and a town raise a cathedral through war and fire.
2,068-word summary · 9 min read
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
A London writer trades letters with Guernsey islanders after the war.
1,979-word summary · 9 min read
The Four Winds
Elsa Martinelli fights the Dust Bowl to save her Texas farm, then risks everything on the road to California.
2,099-word summary · 9 min read
The Color Purple
Celie writes letters to God and to her sister, surviving abuse in the rural South to find her own voice.
2,053-word summary · 9 min read
Girl with a Pearl Earring
A maid in Vermeer's Delft household is drawn into the painter's world and into his most famous canvas.
1,973-word summary · 9 min read
The Night Circus
Two young magicians duel inside a black-and-white circus that only opens at night, and fall in love against the rules.
2,660-word summary · 12 min read