A Student of History, by Nina Revoyr. Akashic Books, 2019
Grad student Rick Nagano’s life isn’t going well. He’s been stuck on his thesis for months and sees no future for it, his grant is about to run out and not be renewed, and his girlfriend has dumped him. Then things turn better: his friend is leaving the country, and leaving her job as a ( Read more... )

American Duchess: A Novel of Consuelo Vanderbilt, by Karen Harper. William Morrow, 2019
Consuelo Vanderbilt was brought up strict by her socialite mother, Alva. Taught all the things a society lady was supposed to know, and confined to a corset with a steel rod in the back to make sure her posture was perfect, she was expected to marry well and ( Read more... )

The Red Address Book, by Sofia Lundberg. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019
Doris, 96, still lives on her own in Sweden, with the assistance of delivered meals and daily helper calls that clean and help her bathe. She visits with her only relative, her American grand-niece Jenny, via Skype. One day she decides that she’d like Jenny to know more about ( Read more... )

The Poison Bed, by Elizabeth Fremantle. Pegasus Books, 2019
In 1615, Frances Howard and her husband Robert Carr, are imprisoned separately in the Tower of London, accused of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury. In alternating chapters, they tell the reader what led up to this ( Read more... )

Call Your Daughter Home, by Deb Spera. Park Row Books, 2019
Set in South Carolina in 1924, this novel weaves together narrations from three disparate women. Annie Coles is the rich, white, woman. She’s not as rich as she used to be, though; the Cole family money was in cotton and the boll weevil has left that business in tatters. But they are ( Read more... )

The Wolf and the Watchman, by Niklas Natt Och Dag. Atria Press, 2017
In Sweden in 1793, some children find a body floating in a particularly gross part of the river. They call on Mickel Cardell, a watchman moonlighting (and drinking) as a bouncer, and he fishes the body out. It’s not odd that there is a body in the river, but this one is missing ( Read more... )

Karna’s Wheel, by Michael Tobert. Top Hat Books, 2017

Stephen Smith’s mother has died. He has inherited the few things she owned- which include some boxes of her father’s memoirs. His flatmate, Seamus, talks him into reading them and then using them as the basis of a screenplay. Turns out Stephen Smith (using the same name for two characters ( Read more... )

The Golden Tresses of the Dead: A Flavia de Luce Novel, by Alan Bradley. Delacorte Press, 2019
Flavia de Luce is the 12 year old heroine of a series of mysteries; this is the tenth installment. At this point, she is an orphan, with one sister marrying and one sister ensconced in the library. Her father figure is Dogger, her late father’s aide (and ( Read more... )

The Kinship of Secrets, by Eugenia Kim. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018
In 1948, a Korean family is split up. Najin and Calvin Cho want to go to the USA with their two daughters, but money is short and there is the issue of convincing the government that they intend to return. Leaving one daughter will solve both those problems, so they take baby ( Read more... )

The Age of Light, by Whitney Scharer. Little, Brown and Company, 2018
In 1929, American Lee Miller moved to Paris to become a photographer. She was not stranger to cameras; she had a career as a model of Vogue, and her father used her as a model from toddlerhood on. But she doesn’t want to be a model anymore; she wants to be a creator of art, ( Read more... )