Showing titles in Historical

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste its authentic cuisine.

Bloomsbury presents The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley, read by Thomas Judd. Escape into the enchanting world of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. This extraordinary sequel transports readers to Japan, where time, destiny and love collide to electrifying effect 'A Japan that...

Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners, three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy.

In West Berlin in 1989, 18-year-old Ralf has just left school and is living a final golden summer with his three best friends. They spend their days swimming, smoking and daydreaming about the future, oblivious to the storm gathering on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But an unsettling discovery about his family and a meeting with the mysterious Oz shatters everything Ralf thought he knew about love and loyalty.

 Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of 10 in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now 25 and facing the future she has built for herself, as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. 

Kate Winthrop, the only child of a wealthy shipping magnate, has the course of her life charted for her by her parents. She's expected to marry well and produce a successor to the Winthrop empire. But Kate has a very different path in mind. Her true passion lies with photography - and with women. Alone in the city after losing her brother, Sicilian immigrant Giuliana Russo starts working for the Winthrops as a maid. Despite their different social status, Kate and Giuliana become friends, much to the dismay of Kate's parents.

“Luke” Hamilton has always been sure she’d never marry. She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man. After working in a brothel for three years, Nora Macauley has lost all illusions about love. She no longer hopes for a man who will sweep her off her feet and take her away to begin a new, respectable life. But now, they find themselves married and on the way to Oregon in a covered wagon, with 2,000 miles ahead of them.

Bloomsbury presents A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago, read by Sarah Durham. Longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award A GUARDIAN SUMMER READING PICK ‘Sumptuous … If you’re feeling bereft after finishing The Mirror and the Light, let Jago transport you to the Jacobean...

Bloomsbury presents The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley, read by Jot Davies. A SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2022 The Times Historical Fiction Book of the Month The truth must come out. In 1963, in a Siberian gulag, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to...

Lodging-house keeper Clem Talleyfer prefers a quiet life. He's happy with his hobbies, his work - and especially with his lodger Rowley Green, who becomes a friend over their long fireside evenings together. If only neat, precise, irresistible Mr. Green were interested in more than friendship. Rowley just wants to be left alone - at least until he meets Clem, with his odd, charming ways and his glorious eyes. Two quiet men, lodging in the same house, coming to an understanding...it could be perfect.

New York City, 1943. From jazz clubs to back alleys, passion and peril collide in this slow-burn sapphic love story that simmers through every twist and turn. Nightclub singer–turned–OSS spy Kathryn Hammond has a past she can’t outrun and a mission she can’t afford to fail. But when fearless reporter Jenny Ryan becomes her assignment, sparks fly and everything starts to unravel.

Based on a real-life scandal that gripped England in 1864. From the bestselling author of Room, Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter is a delicious tale of secrets, betrayal, and forbidden love. Helen Codrington is unhappily married. Emily 'Fido' Faithfull hasn't seen her once-dear friend for years...

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize 2026 A Finalist in the Nota Bene Prize 2026 ‘Casually magisterial’ Guardian 'Endlessly intriguing' Observer ‘A marvel of a novel’ Ali Smith ‘Jane Eyre by way of Patricia Highsmith’ BBC Radio 4 ‘Puts Stevens in the class of Sarah Waters’...

London. 1928. For centuries, the establishment has suppressed public knowledge of lesbian love. Now, a celebrated writer is set to fight back. Award-winning author, Radclyffe Hall, hopes her new novel, The Well of Loneliness, will transform attitudes to same-sex relationships. It soon comes...

Death is only the beginning… 'Breathtaking … A new talent [in] the field of gothic historical literature' NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS 'Devilishly macabre … As dark as a midnight graveyard' PATRICE McDONOUGH 'Hauntingly gothic, intimately told, and wickedly, wonderfully grotesque' MARIELLE...

“Luke” Hamilton has been living as a husband and father for the past 17 years. No one but her wife, Nora, knows she is not the man she appears to be. They have raised their daughters to become honest and hard-working young women, but even with their loving foundation, Amy and Nattie are hiding their own secrets. Just as Luke sets out on a dangerous trip to Fort Boise, a newcomer arrives on the ranch - Rika Aaldenberg, who traveled to Oregon as a mail-order bride, hiding that she’s not the woman in the letters.

Sunday Times Novel of the Year Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize A magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations. In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet...

'A glorious love story' – Sarah Winman, author of Still Life 'Extraordinarily daring . . . a remarkable novel, an almost visionary celebration of the death-defying power of the women’s love' - Sunday Times, Book of the Year From a 19th-century Prussian village to the dusty plains of...

Oxford, 1883. Young men are being found bound, gagged, and hooded at the gates of their colleges in the small hours. Basil Rice, Jesus College fellow, is asked by the senior proctor to investigate. But investigating matters of sexual purity is dangerous, as it lays Basil open to unwelcome scrutiny of his own private life. Meanwhile, the University Vice Chancellor's Court has wrongly imprisoned a young shopgirl from the town, and she seeks the services of Non Vaughan, a young academic and budding journalist, to clear her name.

This novel centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.