National Network for Equitable Library Service

"In a time of cataclysmic upheaval, a bold new generation of Romans vied for greatness amid the disintegrating remnants of their beloved Republic. They were the chosen - and the cursed - blessed with wealth and privilege yet burdened by the dictates of destiny in a savage struggle for power that would leave countless numbers crushed and destroyed.

A strong, vivid historical novel set against the backdrop of the 1812 war between Britain and America. Fire Along the Sky is the story of one woman's unforgettable journey across a young nation threatened by the flames of war. The year is 1812 and Hannah Bonner has returned to her family's mountain cabin. But Nathaniel and Elizabeth can see that Hannah is not the same woman as when she left. For their daughter has come home without her husband and son, and with a story of loss and tragedy that she can't even bear to tell.

A young man pursued by a lynch mob, claims sanctuary at Shrewsbury monastery, causing problems for the monks. Brother Cadfael determines to solve the mystery surrounding the boy's plight.

Sometimes it’s best to leave the past alone. For when biographer Martin Nanther looks into the life of his famous great-grandfather Henry, Queen Victoria’s favorite physician, he discovers some rather unsettling coincidences, like the fact that the doctor married the sister of his recently murdered fiancě. The more Martin researches his distant relative, the more fascinated—and horrified—he becomes. Why did people have a habit of dying around his great grandfather?

The Japanese are defeated and India moves jerkily towards independence from Britain. Divided loyalties and religious antagonism form the tangled background to this, the last novel of the "Raj Quartet" series.

Two centuries after the building of the elaborate Gothic cathedral in Kingsbridge, its prior finds himself at the center of a web of ambition and revenge that places the city at a crossroad of commerce, medicine, and architecture.

In 1923, devout Eva English and her not-so-religious sister Lizzie embark on a journey to be missionaries in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar.

In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo.

Highlight the plight of the working class and to show the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early-20th century. The novel depicts in harsh tones poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of those in power.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a historical novel by Charles Dickens; it is moreover a moral novel strongly concerned with themes of guilt, shame, redemption and patriotism. The plot centers on the years leading up to French Revolution and culminates in the Jacobin Reign of Terror. It tells the stor