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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In the 2014 novel A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline, a middle-aged Christina Olson reflects on her life at her remote Maine farmhouse, which is both her sanctuary and prison. Suffering from an undiagnosed degenerative nerve disease, she finds purpose and an unexpected, enduring artistic legacy when she meets a young Andrew
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Set in remote Vermont, Howard Frank Mosher’s 2014 novel Northern Borders is a poignant, humorous coming-of-age novel. In 1948, six-year-old Austen Kittredge is sent to live on his grandparents’ hardscrabble hill farm in the wilderness of Lost Nation Hollow. There, he undergoes a remarkable education, spending his next twelve formative years coming of age. Austen’s
The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin was written in 2023 and details the fierce and unconventional life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Facing the stifling restrictions of 19th-century society, Gardner overcame profound personal tragedy—the death of her only child—to rebel against upper-class norms. She forged her own path as a visionary art collector, reshaping Boston’s
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Beatriz Williams‘s The Beach at Summerly is a sweeping historical fiction and espionage novel, written in 2023 and set on the fictional Winthrop Island off the New England coast. Told across alternating timelines in 1946 and 1954, it follows the gripping story of Emilia Winthrop as she navigates class divides, dangerous Cold War secrets, and
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Set in early 19th-century Massachusetts, Anita Diamant’s The Last Days of Dogtown chronicles the decline of a hardscrabble settlement on Cape Ann. Once an inland farming community that eventually turned into a desolate ghost town, the area becomes a refuge for society’s castoffs and a poignant backdrop for a dying way of life. Dogtown, pejoratively
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In Jane Healey’s historical novel The Saturday Evening Girls Club, set in 1908 in Boston’s North End, four young female immigrants—two Italian Catholic and two Russian Jewish—strive to navigate traditional family expectations, romantic heartbreaks, and cultural prejudices. The real-life club serves as their refuge, empowering them to seek their versions of the American Dream. Caprice
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Flight of the Sparrow, by Amy Belding Brown, is a historical novel set in colonial New England during the violent conflict known as King Philip’s War. Written in 1914, the novel is inspired by the true story of Mary Rowlandson, the novel follows a Puritan minister’s wife whose life is transformed after she is captured
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A Hundred Summers, written in 2013 by Beatriz Williams, is a historical romance and drama set against the backdrop of the devastating 1938 New England hurricane. The novel moves between two timelines—1931 and 1938—and centers on Lily Dane, a reserved young woman from a wealthy New York family who spends her summers in the elite
An Act of Oblivion, written in 2022 by Robert Harris, is a historical thriller set during the turbulent years following the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I. The novel explores themes of justice, revenge, loyalty, and survival through the intertwined lives of men hunted across continents after one of the most
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