National Network for Equitable Library Service

Seventeen-year-old Orchid belongs to an aristocratic family that has fallen on hard times. Unexpectedly, she is chosen as one of the emperor's lesser concubines. Within the Forbidden City are thousands of women hoping to bear the emperor a son and become his empress. Orchid, determined and resourceful, schemes her way into the royal bed and seduces the emperor. But as the opium trade erodes the might of the Ch'ing dynasty, Orchid find herself at the center of a crumbling nation.

During the 1937 attack on Nanjing, American missionary and women's college dean Minnie Vautrin decides to remain at her school during a violent Japanese attack that renders the school a refugee center for ten thousand women and children.

Following her discovery selling oranges outside of Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, Ellen "Nell" Gwyn leaves behind a life of poverty to become a theatre star. Soon she is mistress to the libertine King Charles II. And though their love is true, gossip-mongers and court politics threaten to tear their romance apart.

Sam Houston is a living legend in 1861. Yet now, approaching seventy years of hard living, he finds everything he has fought for being torn asunder. Texas is joining the Confederacy, and Houston, a Unionist who has been cast out as governor, quickly loses power, prestige, and friends. He could hide in retirement, but such is not the way of a warrior. The Raven prepares for his most important fight yet.

A novel based on the true story of the Spanish princess Eulalia, an outspoken firebrand at the Bourbon court during the troubled and decadent final years of her family's reign, and her journey to see her scandalous, incendiary autobiography published.

In 1739, Eliza Lucas is sixteen years old when her father leaves her in charge of their family's plantations in South Carolina, and now her family is in danger of losing everything. With the high value of indigo dye, Eliza believes it's their salvation, but it means striking a dangerous deal.

In the early 1900s, a young woman escapes the Warsaw ghetto to work as a domestic servant and finds the world opening to her through her connection with the scientists Pierre and Marie Curie.

First published in 1853 amidst rumors that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with one of his slaves, Clotel is a fictional chronicle of one such child. After Jefferson's death, his mistress and her two daughters are auctioned. One daughter, Clotel, is purchased by a white man from Virginia who impregnates her. Despite the promise of marriage, Clotel is instead sold to another man and separated from her daughter. After escaping from the slave dealer, Clotel returnss to Virginia to reunite with her daughter - now a slave in her father's house.

When Lilliet Berne is finally offered an original role at the Paris Opera, she realizes with alarm that it's based on a hidden piece of her past. As she searches for clues, she recalls her life as an orphan who went to Europe and was swept up into the world of Second Empire Paris.

The young Mary Cassatt never thought moving to Paris after the Civil War to be an artist was going to be easy, but when, after a decade of work, her submission to the Paris Salon is rejected, her fierce determination wavers. Then she meets Edgar Degas, and her life changes forever.