Genre: Historical Fiction

Secrets and Showgirls by Catherine McCullagh

Secrets and Showgirls by Catherine McCullagh Published by Big Sky Publishing on February 3rd 2021 Genres: Historical Fiction Pages: 360 Format: ARC Source: The History Quill Book Club Buy on Amazon Goodreads Le Prix d’Amour, a vibrant Paris cabaret, is caught in the crossfire of the occupation. Everyone is being watched, and some of Le Prix’s colourful performers are hiding dangerous secrets. Monsieur Maurice manages Le Prix d’Amour, a successful Parisian cabaret, which boasts glitzy performers and sassy showgirls. But with the German occupation in June 1940, Maurice treads a fine line between his German patrons, the French police and the Gestapo as he hides the dark secrets of his performers. Two of his lively showgirls, Lily and Poppy, soon join Maurice in the hunt for an informer who threatens to betray them. With the Allied landings, the tension builds and Maurice is pushed to his limits as his performers finally take the fight to the invader in their own flamboyant way. Secrets and Showgirls portrays an occupied Paris in which exotic cabarets existed uneasily under the heel of the invader. It follows the antics of Maurice, Lily and a glittering array of characters, but never loses sight of the […]

Posted October 20, 2021
4 Comments

Weekend Book Friends #22

Greetings you guys! It’s our last Friday before school starts again on Monday. I can’t believe our holidays are over… It feels as if we haven’t done anything but migrate from Blogger to WordPress. I guess most migration journeys does take some time and we are ever so happy in your new destination. Some unpacking and sorting still needs to be done, but we will get there. But not today. Today we will curl up with great book and just relax a bit. *Yea right. As soon as my Mommy press “publish”, she is going to find something else that she just quickly wants to tweak. Mark my words. We are busy reading the most wonderful review book that we received from The History Quill Book Club. Think Cabaret, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Moulin Rouge …. Yes, it really is as good as it sounds. Let’s share some snippets from this fabulous book by linking up with a few beloved Weekend Book Friends. For our first stop, we will pay a visit to Gilion over at Rose City Reader to share our Book Beginnings. Every Friday you can link up and share the first sentence of your current read (or the one you plan to devour […]

Posted October 8, 2021
24 Comments

The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesielski

The Ice Swan by J’nell Ciesielski Published by Thomas Nelson on July 6th 2021 Genres: Historical Fiction Pages: 400 Format: ARC Source: Netgalley Buy on Amazon Goodreads Amid the violent last days of the glittering Russian monarchy, a princess on the run finds her heart where she least expects it. 1917, Petrograd. Fleeing the murderous flames of the Russian Revolution, Princess Svetlana Dalsky hopes to find safety in Paris with her mother and sister. But the city is buckling under the weight of the Great War, and the Bolsheviks will not rest until they have erased every Russian aristocrat from memory. Svetlana and her family are forced into hiding in Paris’s underbelly, with little to their name but the jewels they sewed into their corsets before their terrifying escape. Born the second son of a Scottish duke, the only title Wynn MacCallan cares for is that of surgeon. Putting his talents with a scalpel to good use in the hospitals in Paris, Wynn pushes the boundaries of medical science to give his patients the best care possible. After treating Svetlana for a minor injury, he is pulled into a world of decaying imperial glitter. Intrigued by this mysterious, cold, and […]

Posted August 26, 2021
22 Comments

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn on March 9th 2011 Genres: Historical Fiction Pages: 624 Format: Paperback Source: Book Club Buy on Amazon Goodreads 1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla is the girl who has everything—beauty, wealth, and the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses—but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, and puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets. Imperious self-made Mab, product of east-end London poverty, works the legendary codebreaking machines as she conceals old wounds and looks for a socially advantageous husband. Both Osla and Mab are quick to see the potential in local village spinster Beth, whose shyness conceals a brilliant facility with puzzles, and soon Beth spreads her wings as one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts. But war, loss, and the impossible pressure of secrecy will tear the three apart. 1947. As the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip whips post-war Britain into a fever, three friends-turned-enemies are reunited by […]

Posted July 17, 2021
12 Comments

L’Origine: The Secret Life of the World’s most Erotic Masterpiece by Lilianne Milgrom

L’Origine: The Secret Life of the world’s most erotic Masterpiece by Lilianne Milgrom Published by Little French Girl Press on July 28th, 2020 Genres: Art, Historical Fiction Pages: 288 Format: ARC Source: France Book Tours Buy on Amazon Goodreads The riveting odyssey of one of the world’s most scandalous works of art. In 1866, maverick French artist Gustave Courbet painted one of the most iconic images in the history of art: a sexually explicit portrait of a woman’s exposed genitals. Audaciously titled L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the scandalous painting was kept hidden for a century and a half. Today, it hangs in the world-renowned Orsay Museum in Paris, viewed by millions of visitors a year. As the first artist authorized by the Orsay Museum to re-create Courbet’s The Origin of the World, author Lilianne Milgrom was thrust into the painting’s intimate orbit, spending six weeks replicating every fold, crevice, and pubic hair. The experience inspired her to share her story and the painting’s riveting clandestine history with readers beyond the confines of the art world. L’Origine is an entertaining and superbly researched work of historical fiction that traces the true story of the painting’s unlikely tale […]

Posted May 8, 2021
12 Comments

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

Salt to the Sea by Rita Sepetys on February 02, 2016 Genres: Historical Fiction Pages: 391 Format: Paperback Source: Book Club Buy on Amazon Goodreads While the Titanic and Lusitania are both well-documented disasters, the single greatest tragedy in maritime history is the little-known January 30, 1945 sinking in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise liner that was supposed to ferry wartime personnel and refugees to safety from the advancing Red Army. The ship was overcrowded with more than 10,500 passengers — the intended capacity was approximately 1,800 — and more than 9,000 people, including 5,000 children, lost their lives. Sepetys (writer of ‘Between Shades of Gray’) crafts four fictionalized but historically accurate voices to convey the real-life tragedy. Joana, a Lithuanian with nursing experience; Florian, a Prussian soldier fleeing the Nazis with stolen treasure; and Emilia, a Polish girl close to the end of her pregnancy, converge on their escape journeys as Russian troops advance; each will eventually meet Albert, a Nazi peon with delusions of grandeur, assigned to the Gustloff decks. Paperback 390 pages Read 09 August 2016 Published February 2016 Goodreads Blurb: Winter, 1945. Four teenagers. Four secrets. Each […]

Posted August 12, 2016
1 Comment

11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King Published by Scribner on November 8th, 2011 Genres: Historical Fiction Pages: 866 Format: eBook Source: My Kindle Goodreads On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force. Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a […]

Posted June 26, 2016
5 Comments

The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah Published by St Martin’s Press on February 3rd 2015 Genres: Historical Fiction Pages: 448 Format: Paperback Source: Book Club Buy on Amazon Goodreads In love we find out who we want to be. In war we find out who we are. FRANCE, 1939 In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says good-bye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive. Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaëtan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only […]

Posted April 14, 2016
1 Comment

Genre: Historical Fiction

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