Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

From debut author Hope Adams comes a thrilling novel based on the 1841 voyage of the convict ship Rajah, about confinement, hope, and the terrible things we do to survive.
(Description from catalog)

Sponsored by the poet Pablo Neruda to flee the violence of the Spanish Civil War, a pregnant widow and an army doctor unite in an arranged marriage, only to be swept up by the early days of World War II. (Description from NoveList.)

In a village in northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, a stranger with piercing blue eyes presents a new father with a gift intended for his young daughter. Uncertain of its meaning, Pytor hides the gift away and Vasya grows up a wild, willful girl, to the chagrin of her family. But when mysterious forces threaten the happiness of their village, Vasya discovers that she may be the only one who can keep the darkness at bay.
(Description from catalog)

A midwife and conjurer of curses reflects on her life before and after the Civil War, her relationships with the families she serves and the secrets she has learned about a plantation owner's daughter.

Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war. It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.
(Description from Amazon)

A tale inspired by the first wife of Albert Einstein follows the experiences of Mitza Mari, a female physics student at an elite late-nineteenth-century school in Zurich, where she falls in love with a charismatic fellow student who eclipses her contributions to his theory of relativity. (Description from NoveList.)

In an award-winning debut novel, a sharecropper's daughter navigates celebrity encounters, bootlegging, and gangster activities in Jazz Age Chicago before sharing her story with a grieving film student nearly a century later.
(Description from catalog)

A tale set in the Wild West during the golden age of fossil hunting follows the exploits of two ambitious paleontologists who sabotage each others' careers in a rivalry that came to be known as the Bone Wars. (Description from NoveList)

A conclusion to the prequel trilogy finds Victorian detective Charles Lenox defying Scotland Yard and navigating the dual challenges of royal obstinance and class prejudice to investigate the murder of a first-class passenger at Paddington Station. (Description from NoveList.)

A multi-generational saga of the Whittaker family, whose progenitor makes a fortune in the quinine trade before his daughter, a gifted botanist, researches the mysteries of evolution while falling in love with an utopian artist against a backdrop of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. (Description from NoveList.)

"England, 1535. Women-- even the privileged few who can read and write-- have little independence. Agnes Peppin, daughter of a butcher, left her family in disgrace and is living out her days behind the walls of the Shaftesbury Abbey. As assistant to the Abbess she becomes integrated into the unstable royal landscape of King Henry VIII. As he proclaims himself the new head of the Church, religious houses are being subjugated; the Abbey is no exception. Free to be the master of her own fate, Agnes must use her wits and test her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary."

Angrboda's story begins where most witch's tales end: with a burning. A punishment from Odin for refusing to give him knowledge of the future, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into the farthest reaches of a remote forest. There she is found by a man who reveals himself to be Loki, and her initial distrust of him grows reluctantly into a deep and abiding love. Their union produces three unusual children who she is keen to raise at the edge of the world, safely hidden from Odin's all-seeing eye.
(Description from catalog)

During England's 17th century civil war, Alinor, a woman without a husband and skilled with herbs, helps a young man on the run and unwittingly brings disaster into the heart of her life. (Description from NoveList.)

Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem. (Description from NoveList.)

A retelling of the Trojan War from the perspectives of its women follows the stories of a vigil-keeping Penelope, an Amazon princess rival of Achilles, and three goddesses whose feud sparks a tragic conflict.
(Description from catalog)

A first-century intellectual fights the limitations imposed on women before an encounter with an 18-year-old Jesus leads to their marriage, his dangerous public ministry and her flight to safety in Alexandria. (Description from NoveList.)

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. (Description from catalog.)

Secretly hired by an eccentric Lady Franklin to lead a team of women explorers into the Arctic to recover Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition, Virginia Reeve survives a harrowing quest only to find herself on trial for murder. (Description from NoveList)

Follows Circe, the banished witch daughter of Helios, as she hones her powers and interacts with famous mythological beings before a conflict with one of the most vengeful Olympians forces her to choose between the worlds of the gods and mortals. (Description from catalog)

A dark fairy tale inspired by folklore is set against the Jazz age in Mexico's underworld, where a young dreamer is sent by the Mayan God of Death on a life-changing journey. (Description from NoveList.)

From the bestselling author of The Wives of Los Alamos comes the riveting story of a stranger’s arrival in the fledgling colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts—and a crime that shakes the divided community to its core. (Description from NoveList.)

Two unlikely best friends in Aldleigh, England investigate the mystery of a vanished nineteenth century explorer uncovering a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit.
(Description from NoveList)

In December 1866, tensions were rising in Wyoming, between the Native American tribes who had lived on the land for generations and the settlers who would destroy their home. Crazy Horse and his fellow Lakota hunters had been watching for months as Colonel Carrington and his army set up camp on one of the most crucial swaths of hunting ground in hundreds of miles, and began to build forts. More disconcertingly, the settlers had brought women and children, which meant they planned to stay.
(Description from catalog)

When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband's three-hundred-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a farm or raise a child, must endure the darkest days of the war on her own. By the time Major Hockaday returns two years later, Placidia is bound for jail, accused of having borne a child in his absence and murdering it. What really transpired in the two years he was away?

Ariadne, Princess of Crete, grows up greeting the dawn from her beautiful dancing floor and listening to her nursemaid's stories of gods and heroes. But beneath her golden palace echo the ever-present hoof-beats of her brother, the Minotaur, a monster who demands blood sacrifice every year.
(Description from catalog)

Charles Dickens is not feeling the Christmas spirit. His newest book is an utter flop, the critics have turned against him, relatives near and far hound him for money. While his wife plans a lavish holiday party for their ever-expanding family and circle of friends, Dickens has visions of the poor house. But when his publishers try to blackmail him into writing a Christmas book to save them all from financial ruin, he refuses ... On one of his long night walks, in a once-beloved square, he meets the mysterious Eleanor Lovejoy, who might be just the muse he needs. (Description from catalog)

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son's crucifixion and struggling with guilt, anger, and feelings that her son is not the son of God and that His sacrifice was not for a worthy cause. (Description from NoveList)

Historical fiction about Lady Virginia Courtauld in the last days of colonial Rhodesia, a daring blend of crime, romance and history, deeply evocative of time and place.
(Description from NoveList)

In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramirez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field--an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, one of the town's women decides to take matters into her own hands, setting the stage for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences. - description from Novelist

Peter Winceworth, a disaffected Victorian lexicographer, inserts false entries into a dictionary in an attempt to assert some sense of individual purpose and artistic freedom. In the present day, Mallory, a young overworked and underpaid intern employed by the dictionary's publishing house, is tasked with uncovering these entries before the work is digitized. As the novel progresses and their narratives combine, Mallory discovers more about the anonymous lexicographer's life through the clues left in his fictitious entries.
(Description from catalog)