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Recommended Reading

Fiction
A fictional tale inspired by the life of Marie Antoinette presents the story of a teenage empress’s daughter who is forced to leave her family home to marry the future king of France and who rebels against the formality and rigid protocol of court life.

Fact
Describes the life of Marie Antionette from her betrothal as a fourteen-year-old girl to the future King Louis XVI, through her life in the French court, to her courage in the face of revolutionaries who sent her to the guillotine.

Fiction
Re-creates an infamous serial killer case involving the 1910 Scotland Yard investigation into the murder of Bella Elmore, whose body is discovered in the cellar of her husband and killer Hawley Crippen, a doctor who has fled in disguise along with his mistress on a cruise ship bound for America.

Fact
A portrait of the Edwardian era recounts two parallel stories — the case of Dr. Hawley Crippen, who murdered his wife and fled to America, and Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communication — as the new technology is used to capture a killer.

Fiction
A fictional portrait of the infamous last empress of China follows the life of Orchid, a beautiful teenager from an aristocratic but impoverished family, who is chosen to become a low-ranking concubine of the emperor and who uses her seductive talents and intelligence to rise to a position of power in the Chinese court.

Fact
Reappraises the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and portrays a strong, complex woman struggling to keep her country from unraveling.

Fiction
During the summer of 1841, High Constable Jacob Hays, New York City’s first detective, finds himself investigating a series of brutal crimes, including the rape and murder of Mary Rogers, a young clerk at a Manhattan tobacco shop.

Fact
Traces the July 1841 murder investigation into a twenty-year-old saleswoman whose demise was marked by sensational media coverage and the debut of Edgar Allen Poe, whose short stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” associated him with the crime.

Fiction
A tale based on the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis finds the widow of an assassinated president remembering her childhood, struggling privately with her late husband’s philandering, and embarking on a controversial new marriage.

Fact
A portrait of an American icon chronicles the rise of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from “debutante of the year” in 1947 through her subsequent high-powered marriages to JFK and Aristotle Onassis.

Fiction
The last living survivor of a 1911 sweatshop fire, 106-year-old Esther Gottesfeld passes away leaving numerous questions about the fire, the truth of which is investigated by her granddaughter Rebecca, Rebecca’s composer partner, and a zealous feminist historian with a personal agenda.

Fact
Describes the 1911 fire that destroyed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village, the deaths of 146 workers in the fire, and its implications for twentieth-century politics and labor relations.

Fiction
An evocative historical novel chronicles the life of Henry VIII’s first wife, Katharine of Aragon, from her early days in England after being sent from Spain to marry Henry’s sickly older brother, through her subsequent marriage to Henry, to the divorce that ignited a storm of controversy that changed history.

Fiction
The daughters of a ruthlessly ambitious family, Mary and Anne Boleyn are sent to the court of Henry VIII to attract the attention of the king, who first takes Mary as his mistress, in which role she bears him an illegitimate son, and then Anne as his wife.

Fact
Profiles each of Henry VIII’s six wives, describing their backgrounds, personalities, relationship to the king, and ultimate demise, and shows how each reflected the perceptions of women and marriage at the time.