Caleb's Crossing
10 best books like Caleb's Crossing (Geraldine Brooks): The Handmaid's Tale, The Underground Railroad, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, A Good Hard Look, The Invisible Bridge, The Winthrop Woman, Remarkable Creatures, Dreams of Joy, Doc, Exit the Actress
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
| Author | Colson Whitehead |
| ISBN | 0385542364 |
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad,...
| Author | Maria Semple |
| ISBN | 0316204277 |
Bernadette Fox has vanished.
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox...
| Author | Ann Napolitano |
| ISBN | 1594202923 |
Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses in life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to the observation that the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach...
| Author | Julie Orringer |
| ISBN | 0307713547 |
A grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war.
Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the...
First published in 1958 and set in the early 17th century, this bestselling novel—and follow-up to Katherine—follows Elizabeth Winthrop, a courageous Puritan woman who finds herself at odds with her heritage and surroundings. A real historical figure, Elizabeth married into the family of...
| Author | Tracy Chevalier |
| ISBN | 0007178379 |
In 1810, a sister and brother uncover the fossilized skull of an unknown animal in the cliffs on the south coast of England. With its long snout and prominent teeth, it might be a crocodile – except that it has a huge, bulbous eye.
Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent...
In her most powerful novel yet, acclaimed author Lisa See returns to the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl’s strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy. Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father—the...
| Author | Mary Doria Russell |
| ISBN | 1400068045 |
Born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday arrives on the Texas frontier hoping that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Soon, with few job prospects, Doc Holliday is gambling professionally with his partner, Mária Katarina Harony, a high-strung,...
| Author | Priya Parmar |
| ISBN | 1439171173 |
While selling oranges in the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, sweet and sprightly Ellen "Nell" Gwyn impresses the theater's proprietors with a wit and sparkle that belie her youth and poverty. She quickly earns a place in the company, narrowly avoiding the life of prostitution to which her sister has...
Fabulous novel! I couldn't put it down. There is history, war, romance, and even a mystery in a way. The setting is the the very end of the American Civil War when North and South are still dealing with their hatred of each other and a country is torn apart by different ideas and beliefs. Tho the war is officially...
| Author | Michael David Lukas |
| ISBN | 0062012096 |
An elegantly crafted, utterly enchanting debut novel set in a mystical, exotic world, in which a gifted young girl charms a sultan and changes the course of an empire's history Late in the summer of 1877, a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes suddenly appears over the town of Constanta on the Black Sea,...
| Author | Kate Grenville |
| ISBN | 1921758627 |
In the final book of a trilogy that began with her bestselling novel, "The Secret River," Commonwealth Prize-winner Kate Grenville returns to the youngest daughter of the Thornhills and her quest to uncover, at her peril, the family's hidden legacy.
Sarah is the youngest child of William Thornhill,...
| Author | E.L. Doctorow |
| ISBN | 0812976150 |
In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained...
| Author | Amy Brill |
| ISBN | 1594487448 |
A love story set in 1845 Nantucket, between a female astronomer and the unusual man who understands her dreams.
It is 1845, and Hannah Gardner Price has lived all twenty-four years of her life according to the principles of the Nantucket Quaker community in which she was raised, where simplicity...
| Author | Beverly Swerling |
| ISBN | 1439136947 |
Beverly Swerling’s critically acclaimed epic saga continues as New York emerges from the Civil War into the Gilded Age—a city marked by soaring expansion and teeming with unbridled ambition and dazzling glamour.
It is 1864. The South’s surrender is inevitable, and Manhattan is at...
| Author | Andrew Krivak |
| ISBN | 1934137340 |
The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When World War One comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s...
| Author | John Sayles |
| ISBN | 1936365189 |
It’s 1897. Gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. Spanning five years and half a dozen countries, this is the unforgettable story of that extraordinary...
An uplifting novel about the families we create and the places we call home.
It is 1904. When Frederick and Jette must flee her disapproving mother, where better to go than America, the land of the new? Originally set to board a boat to New York, at the last minute, they take one destined for New...
| Author | Sally Cabot Gunning |
| ISBN | 0061240257 |
Alice Cole spent her first seven years living in two smoky, crowded rooms in London with her family. But a new home and a better life waited in the colonies, or so her father promised a bright dream that turned to ashes when her brothers and mother took ill and died during the arduous voyage. Arriving in New...
| Author | Sally Gunning |
| ISBN | 0060791586 |
Married for twenty years to Edward Berry, Lyddie is used to the trials of being a whaler's wife in the Cape Cod village of Satucket, Massachusetts—running their house herself during her husband's long absences at sea, living with the daily uncertainty that Edward will simply not return. And when...
| Author | Amanda Hodgkinson |
| ISBN | 1611760038 |
A tour de force that echoes modern classics like Suite Francaise and The Postmistress.
At the end of the Second World War, Silvana and eight-year-old Aurek board the ship that will take them from Poland to England. After living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana...
| Author | Richard Harvell |
| ISBN | 0307590526 |
I grew up as the son of a man who could not possibly have been my father. Though there was never any doubt that my seed had come from another man, Moses Froben, Lo Svizzero, called me “son.” And I called him “father.” On the rare occasions when someone dared to ask for clarification, he simply laughed...
| Author | Kelly O'Connor McNees |
| ISBN | 0399156526 |
A richly imagined, remarkably written story of the woman who created Little Women- and how love changed her in ways she never expected. Deftly mixing fact and fiction, Kelly O'Connor McNees returns to the summer of 1855, when vivacious Louisa May Alcott is twenty-two and bursting to free herself from...
