Facing History

The Lost Diary of Don Juan: An Account of the True Arts of Passion and the Perilous by Douglas Carlton Abrams - (July 2008)

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins -The life of legendary photographer Edward S. Curtis is the basis for this resonant exploration of history and family, landscape and legacy. (June 2008)

Redemption by Frederick Turner - New Orleans in 1913 from the author of 1929. (June 2008)

North River by Pete Hamill - It is 1934, and New York City is in the icy grip of the Great Depression. With enormous compassion, Dr. James Delaney tends to his hurt, sick, and poor neighbors, who include gangsters, day laborers, prostitutes, and housewives. If they can't pay, he treats them anyway. But in his own life, Delaney is emotionally numb, haunted by the slaughters of the Great War... (June 2008)

Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon - McCarthy-era Washington, D.C., is as twisted and morally compromised as a noir Los Angeles in Mallon's latest, a wide-ranging examination of betrayal and clashing ideologies. (May 2008)

The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish by Elise Blackwell - Louis Proby is an old man now, sitting in his study in New Orleans awaiting what they say is a huge storm, Hurricane Katrina. (April 2008)

Brendan Wolf by Brian Malloy - A hard-luck Minneapolis guy hits the skids in a major way. Brendan Wolf, a gay 35-year-old perennial menial employee, can't cover rent and food on $7 an hour. His brother, Ian—in prison for fraud—directs him to Marv, a wealthy, withering elderly gay man. An interesting spin on classic noir. (April 2008)

Lost Son by M. Allen Cunningham - Fiction based on the life of artist Rainer Maria Rilke. Spanning Western Europe form 1875 to 1917, Lost Son brings a brooding atmosphere and human complexity to an intimate, imaginative portrait of one of the most sensitive artists fo the times. (April 2008)

Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett - The year is 1527. The great portraitist Hans Holbein, who has fled the reformation in Europe, is making his first trip to England under commission to Sir Thomas More. In the course of six years, Holbein will become a close friend to the More family and paint two nearly identical family portraits. But closer examination of the paintings reveals that the second holds several mysteries... Set against the turmoil, intrigue and, tragedy of Henry VIII's court. (April 2008)

The Mercy Seller by Brenda Rickman Vantrease - (April 2008)

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney -The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. (March 2008)

Medicus by Ruth Downie - Gaius Petrius Ruso is a divorced and down-on his luck army doctor who has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia. The most likeable sleuth to come out of the Roman Empire. (March 2008)

All Will Be Revealed by Robert Anthony Siegel - Crippled from a childhood illness, the reclusive Augustus Auerbach has built a fortune in the pornography business; largely confined to his opulent mansion and rarely encountering people, Auerbach is as incurious about others' lives as he is clueless about his own. His controlled existence begins to unravel when one of his models brings him to a séance conducted by the widowed (and crooked) medium. (March 2008)

The Mosaic Crimes by Giulo Leoni - Florence, June 1300. The body of an artist, his face covered in quicklime, is discovered next to the mosaic he had almost completed. Dante Alighieri, the newly appointed prior of the city of Florence (and the man who will one day write that exhaustive treatise on criminology, the Inferno), is on the case. (February 2008)

The Rossetti Letter by Christi Phillips - With impeccable research into seventeenth-century Venetian politics, Phillips plots an intriguing literary suspense debut novel contrasted with a modern romance between two rival academics. (February 2008)

Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan - A beautiful, wrenching debut novel chronicling the life of a family struggling for survival during the Armenian genocide in Turkey, in 1915. (March 2008)

Red River by Lalita Tademy - Tademy, author of the highly acclaimed Cane River, revisits her fascinating family history in this fictionalized account of the family's survival of a riot in 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana. (January 2008)

Mistresss of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin - A chilling, mesmerizing novel that combines the best of modern forensic thrillers with the detail and drama of historical fiction. (Janaury 2008)

City of Glory by Beverly Swerling - Follow up to City of Dreams, set against the backdrop of the War of 1812, when New Yorkers are suffering the dire economic effects of a British blockade of American Ports and talk of secession is rife. (January 2008)

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak - Shafak, whom the Turkish government has put on trial for "denigrating Turkishness," writes in her second novel about the 1915 massacre of Armenians. (January 2008)

Lords of the North by Bernard Cornwell (January 2008)

The Terror by Dan Simmons - Based on the true story of two ice ships that disappeared in the Arctic Circle during the Sir John Franklin Expedition in 1845, this book is a meticulously researched and fascinating account of 19th century seafaring life. (December 2007)

Oil by Upton Sinclair - Sinclair's 1927 novel did for California's oil industry what The Jungle did for Chicago's meat-packing factories. The plot follows the clash between an oil developer and his son. Typical of Sinclair, there are undertones here of socialism and sympathy for the common working stiff. A classic tale of greed and corruption. (December 2007)

Partriot Hearts by Barbara Hambly - When Martha Dandridge Custis marries her second husband, George, she never suspects that the soft-spoken Virginia planter is destined to command the founding of a nation—or that she is to be “Lady Washington.” (December 2007)

The Ruby in Her Navel by Barry Unsworth - It is 1149, and all is not well in Norman Sicily. This novel can be read either as an exceptional historical novel or a modern parable on the dangers of blind patriotism. (November 2007)