by Hilary Mantel (2009)
Winner of the Man Booker Prize. England in the 1520s is a heartbeat away from disaster if King Henry VIII dies without a male heir. Enter Thomas Cromwell, a pragmatic blacksmith's son who orchestrates the seismic breach with Rome.
Maggie O'Farrell
Florence, the mid-sixteenth century. Lucrezia de' Medici is thrust into a sudden dynastic marriage to the Duke of Ferrara, discovering that behind his cultivated courtly refinement lies a sinister and lethal intent.
Nella Larsen
A seminal masterwork of the Harlem Renaissance exploring racial passing in 1920s America, tracking two childhood friends whose reunion leads to perilous deception, psychological obsession, and tragedy.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself.
Pip Williams
Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a hidden history lost between the lines. Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.