Showing results for "The Race" in Historical Fiction

In the sweltering summer of 1911, suffragette Connie Callaway is introduced to Will Maitland, cricketer and rising star of his county. Despite parting on uncertain terms, they are destined to meet again, their lives inextricably entangled. Combining national drama and private tragedy, this is a story of love, sacrifice, suffrage and county cricket, projected against a vivid backdrop of England in an extraordinary age of turmoil and violence.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Race of Scorpions by Dorothy Dunnett, read by John Banks. This is the third book in the House of Niccolo series. Set in 15th-century Cyprus, this novel continues the saga of Nicholas van der Poel, international mercenary who started out as a dyer's apprentice, as he plays for the highest stakes with the greatest superpowers in Europe.

1915. May and Naomi are extended family, their grandmothers’ lives inseparably entwined on a Virginia plantation in the volatile time leading up to the Civil War. For both women, the twentieth century promises social transformation and equal opportunity. May, a young white woman, is on the brink of achieving the independent life she’s dreamed of since childhood. Naomi, a nurse, mother, and leader of the NAACP, has fulfilled her own dearest desire: buying a home for her family. But they both are about to learn that dreams can be destroyed in an instant.

Aeon, a mixed-up and mixed-race teenager from a leafy Liverpool suburb, is desperate to find his Black roots. He needs to understand the Black identity foisted upon him by his friends and his community. To his growing shame, the only Black people in his life are his dad and his cousin, Increase – but they don’t count. Aeon’s dad is intent on ignoring race and climbing the social ladder. And Increase has taken to demeaning all Black culture since the shady and unresolved death of his father, a Yardie gangster.

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.

The king has been appointed by god to marry six queens. Those six queens are all that stand between the kingdom of Elben and ruin. Or so we have been told. Each queen vies for attention. Clever, ambitious Boleyn is determined to be Henry's favourite. And if she must incite a war to win Henry over? So be it. Seymour acts as spy and assassin in a court teeming with dragons, backstabbing courtiers and strange magic. But when she and Boleyn become the unlikeliest of things—allies—the balance of power begins to shift. Together they will discover an ancient, rotting magic at Elben's heart.

New York, 1960: For Benny Lament, music is his entire life. With his father’s deep ties to the mob, the Bronx piano man has learned that love and family can get you in trouble. So he keeps to himself, writing songs for other musicians, avoiding the spotlight…until the night his father brings him to see Esther Mine sing. Esther is a petite powerhouse with a gorgeous voice. And when Benny writes a hit song and performs it with her, their collaboration thrusts the duo onto the national stage…and stirs up old issues and new scrutiny that the mob--and Benny--would rather avoid.

Ever since running away at the age of fourteen, Paul-Edward, the son of a white landowner and a black slave, has had one dream: to own land every bit as good as his daddy's. While growing up, Paul-Edward loved, and feared, his father, but he loved the land unconditionally. Then, after a rash act of youthful rebellion, he leaves his family behind and vows to succeed on his own. However, for anyone black coming of age in 1880's Mississippi, this is no simple goal.

Born the daughter of an enslaved woman and a Louisiana plantation owner, Jeannette Bébinn is raised alongside her white half sister—until her father suddenly dies. His vindictive wife refuses twelve-year-old Jeannette her inheritance and sells her into slavery. Now on her own, Jeannette must fight the injustices she faces because of her mixed race. She escapes enslavement and travels from Mississippi to Philadelphia to New York to Ohio, all while searching for purpose, love, and her place in a country torn asunder by the burgeoning Civil War.

The Kindred sisters - Ezra and Cinthy - grew up with an abundance of love. Love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true. Love from their neighbours, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town. And love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful New England village perched high up on coastal bluffs. But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbours, including Ezra's best friend, Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way.

The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man. But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own.

A stunning portrait of the devastation left by the American Civil War, as seen through the eyes of a woman who played a part at the heart of it. With her marriage prospects ruined in the wake of her father's financial decline, teenage Varina Howell decides her best option is to wed the much older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects a life of security as a Mississippi landowner.

It's 1986, the heart of the Cold War. Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She's brilliant and talented, but she's also a black woman working in an all-white boys' club, and her career has stalled with routine paperwork - until she's recruited to a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic, revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention. In the year that follows, Marie will observe Thomas, seduce him and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down.

Rosa Reed attends a charity stock-car race in Santa Bonita and expects to have an exhilarating time shared with family and friends. That ends when a driver inexplicably crashes into a guard rail and dies. When local assistant medical examiner, Dr. Larry Rayburn, determines the death is suspicious, Rosa once again finds herself working with handsome Detective Miguel Belmonte in an awkward and uncomfortable alliance to solve the murder.

If you love early rock & roll, poodle skirts, clever whodunnits, a charming cat, and an even more charming detective, you're going to love this series.

NASA’s race with the Russians to land a man on the moon. The meteoric rise of the Beatles, considered by many to have revolutionized the music industry. In the postwar era, each stood as an unprecedented cultural watershed. Together they captured the heady zeitgeist of the 1960s, and ignited the imagination of - just about everyone on the planet.

More like sisters than best friends, Issa Bui and Olivia Nong grew up dreaming of becoming movie stars. But for young Vietnamese women in 1930s Hollywood, the MGM back lot seems unreachable. Undeterred, Issa knows she’s meant for great things. The blood of shamans runs through her veins. To find fame in this town, for herself and for Olivia, Issa needs to make connections. For starters, with her dead grandmother Bà Ngoại.

When Alice Jones, a blue-collar woman with at least one Black parent marries Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the son of one of New York’s most prominent society families, the scandal rocks high society—and eventually sets the city afire when Kip later sues for an annulment, accusing Alice of having hidden her “Negro blood” and intentionally deceiving him that she was white.

1931. Frances Palmer is overjoyed when her brother, Rob, returns to Adelaide as a racecourse veterinarian. But all is not well on the turf, and when a man is murdered, there's only one suspect - Rob. Frances and her boyfriend, charming night-club owner Jack Sullivan, along with ex-vaudevillian Uncle Sal and their friends, have only one chance to unmask the real murderer by infiltrating the racecourse. The odds are against them...luckily, putting on a dazzling show where everything depends on sleight of hand is what they do best. But nothing is a dead cert against a cold-blooded killer.

Set in 1950 in the rural Midwest, and inspired by real events, this gripping novel explores what happens when an African American railroad repair crew is dropped into a tiny, tight-knit farm community. Will frictions build to an all-too familiar American tragedy, or can tensions be overcome in that uniquely American way, with balls and bats and a field of green? Seventeen-year-old Carlin Littman has big dreams, much bigger than will fit into sleepy Julian, Nebraska, population 172. She has set her sights on college, Chicago, and beyond.