Historical Fiction

Paris, 1940: The City of Lights under German occupation. Christian, son of a bank director, falls in love with Jewish girl Judith. The young couple secretly plan to flee, but suddenly Judith disappears. Christian begins a frantic search.

‘A profound meditation on forgiveness and forgetting . . . Dao’s extraordinary debut novel combines fiction and history to chronicle his Vietnamese grandparents’ traumatic life.’ – The Observer Moving from 1930s Hanoi through wars and displacements to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, a deeply moving novel of memory and inheritance, colonialism and belonging, exile and home. Born to a Vietnamese family based in Melbourne, the narrator is haunted by the story of his grandfather whose ten-year imprisonment by the Communist government in Vietnam’s notorious Chi Hoa prison looms large over his own place in the world and his choice to become a human rights lawyer. As he oscillates between identities of his Australian upbringing and his Vietnamese heritage, it is the death of his grandfather in a Parisian suburb and the birth of his daughter that crystallize the strands of thought that have shaped his life. André Dao’s Anam blends fiction and essay, theory and everyday life to imagine that which has been repressed, left out, and forgotten by archives and by families. As the grandson sifts through letters, photographs, government documents and memories, he has his own family to think about: a partner and an infant daughter. Is there a way to remember the past that creates a future for them as well? Or does coming home always involve a certain amount of forgetting?

The grand master of gripping fiction is back. International No.1 bestseller Ken Follett returns to Kingsbridge with an epic tale of revolution and a cast of unforgettable characters. Revolution is in the air 1792. A tyrannical government is determined to make England a mighty commercial empire. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte begins his rise to power, and with dissent rife, France’s neighbours are on high alert. Kingsbridge is on the edge Unprecedented industrial change sweeps the land, making the lives of the workers in Kingbridge’s prosperous cloth mills a misery. Rampant modernization and dangerous new machinery are rendering jobs obsolete and tearing families apart. Tyranny is on the horizon Now, as international conflict nears, a story of a small group of Kingsbridge people - including spinner Sal Clitheroe, weaver David Shoveller and Kit, Sal’s inventive and headstrong son - will come to define the struggle of a generation as they seek enlightenment and fight for a future free from oppression. . . Taking the reader straight into the heart of history with the fifth novel in the ground-breaking Kingsbridge series, The Armour of Light is master storyteller Ken Follett’s most ambitious novel to date.

The captivating new novel from David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize Paris, 1806. Michel Adanson is dying. The last word to escape his lips is a woman’s name: Maram. Who was she? Why, in the course of his long life, has he never spoken of her before? As Adanson’s daughter sorts through his things, she discovers a notebook. It reveals a secret history both fantastical and terrible, of his time as a young botanist travelling in Senegal. How Adanson first heard of the ‘revenant’: a young woman of noble birth, abducted and sold into slavery across the seas, who then did the impossible-she came back, to live in hiding. How he became obsessed with finding her, embarking on an odyssey that would lead to danger and destruction. How a man who longed to solve the mysteries of nature instead found himself faced with the uncontrollable impulses of the human heart. Tragic and tender, alive with feeling, this is a story of adventure, revenge and impossible desires, one which subverts our every expectation about who we are and who we love.

The box closet was a real closet in the attic of the family house in Washington, D.C. in which Mary Meigs grew up. Bags and boxes of letters and diaries were found there after her mother’s death in 1958, and when Meigs read them she decided that they were the material for a book. In the course of reading her family’s letters and her mother’s early diaries, she no longer saw her parents as Mother and Father but as Margaret and Edward, young and vulnerable: Margaret who flirted, Edward who waited ten years to propose marriage. Meigs saw aspects of them that made them and their parents more fully real to her than they had been in life. She has woven the diaries and letters together with a narrative that integrates her discoveries with her memories as a daughter and granddaughter. The result is a moving portrait of a family that was protected by another kind of box closet—that of privilege and of moral certitude—with opaque walls that shut out most of the world. It was, in her father’s words, “the easy sheltered life,” which is so hard for “good” people to escape from.

By all accounts, Simon Basset is on the verge of proposing to his best friend’s sister, the lovely – and almost-on-the-shelf – Daphne Bridgerton. But the two of them know the truth – it’s all an elaborate plan to keep Simon free from marriage-minded society mothers. And as for Daphne, surely she will attract some worthy suitors now that it seems a duke has declared her desirable… Their ruse works like a charm – at first. But as Daphne waltzes across ballroom after ballroom with Simon, it’s hard to remember that their courtship is a complete sham. Maybe it’s his devilish smile, certainly it’s the way his eyes seem to burn every time he looks at her. It wasn’t the plan, but it seems she’s falling for the duke, for real. And amidst the glittering, gossipy, cut-throat world of London’s elite, there is only one certainty: love ignores every rule…