KDL Recommends

BROOKS

Forging a deep friendship with a Wampanoag chieftain’s son on the Great Harbor settlement where her minister father is working to convert the tribe, Bethia follows his subsequent Ivy League education and efforts to bridge cultures among the colonial elite.

BROWN

Daughters to the second son of the Earl of Summerset, Rowena and Victoria, after their father dies, move in with their uncle’s family in a much more traditional household where they learn about class division and, as war approaches, hope for a more modern future.

BUCHANAN

In belle époque Paris, the Van Goethem sisters struggle for survival after the sudden death of their father, a situation that prompts young Marie’s ballet training and her introduction to a genius painter.

CONKLIN

Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate at a law firm, searches for the perfect plaintiff to lead a historic lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

COPLIN

When two feral girls appear on his homestead, solitary orchardist Talmadge, who carefully tends the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century, vows to save and protect them while trying to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past.

FORD

After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, 15-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature that interferes with Dell’s quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.

HOLLINGHURST

Embraced by the family of his Cambridge schoolmate, Cecil Valance writes an inspiring poem in an autograph album that becomes a staple of every English classroom after he is killed during World War I.

JOHNSON

The son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il.

KEANE

A fictionalized account of the life of Typhoid Mary, an Irish immigrant who moved to New York at the turn of the century and became a successful cook, until the Department of Health noticed the trail of disease she left behind.

LIVESEY

Overcoming a life of hardship and loneliness, Gemma Hardy, a brilliant and determined young woman, accepts a position as an au pair on the remote Orkney Islands where she faces her biggest challenge yet.

MATHIS

Traces the story of Great Migration-era mother Hattie Shepherd, who in spite of poverty and a dysfunctional husband uses love and Southern remedies to raise nine children and prepare them for the realities of a harsh world.

MORTON

Withdrawing from a family party to the solitude of her tree house, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson witnesses a shocking murder that throughout a subsequent half century shapes her beliefs, her acting career, and the lives of three strangers from vastly different cultures.

OTSUKA

Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.

RATNER

Her life of privilege in Cambodia shattered by the outbreak of civil war on the streets of Phnom Penh, young Raami endures four years of loss, starvation, and brutal forced labor while clinging to memories of the legends and poems told to her by her father.

ROSNAY

Determined to protect her historical family home from Emperor Napoleon’s orders to renovate 1860s Paris, Rose Bazelet establishes a defense in the basement of her house on rue Childebert and records her experiences in letters to her late husband.

STEDMAN

Moving his young bride to an isolated lighthouse home on Australia’s Janus Rock where the couple suffers miscarriages and a stillbirth, Tom allows his wife to claim an infant that has washed up on the shore, a decision with devastating consequences.

THORLAND

Rebel Kate Gray cannot resist the advances of British Major Peter Tremayne, but after a member of her own family steals his military dispatches, Peter, having narrowly escaped hanging, vows to get revenge on Kate.

WARD

A kaleidoscopic tale follows the experiences of seven women models from different historical periods, the artists for whom they sit, the factors that shape the creations of their portraits, and the ties that connect them to each other.