Julia Bryan Thomas‘s novel The Radcliffe Ladies’ Reading Club is a mid-1950s historical fiction about four college freshmen and a bookstore owner who bond over feminist literature while navigating the rigid social and patriarchal constraints of post-war America. Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1954, this 2023 novel begins when a newly divorced Chicago transplant named […]
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Set in 1954, Dennis Lehane’s psychological thriller Shutter Island follows U.S. Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, as they arrive at Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on a remote island in Boston Harbor. Their mission is to investigate the impossible disappearance of patient Rachel Solando, who vanished from a locked
Set in 1955 in Connecticut, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road is a devastating portrayal of 1950s suburban conformity, unfulfilled potential, and the slow, agonizing collapse of a marriage. The story centers on Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, attractive couple living at 115 Revolutionary Road in a suburban enclave called Revolutionary Hill Estates. Unlike their neighbors,
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“The Lost Summers of Newport,” a collaborative historical fiction novel by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White, weaves together three storylines spanning over a century, centered on the crumbling Sprague Hall in Newport, Rhode Island. The narrative alternates between 1899, 1957, and 2019, revealing layers of family secrets, scandal, and murder within a Gilded
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John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, published in 1981, is a sprawling, darkly comedic, and eccentric family saga that explores the resilience of love, the necessity of illusions, and the chaotic nature of fate. Narrated by John Berry, the novel follows the unorthodox lives of the Berry family, led by their optimistic yet delusional father,
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