Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Grace Steele and Eliza Jones may be from completely different backgrounds, but when it comes to the army, specifically the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, they are both starting from the same level. Not only will they be among the first class of female officers the army has even seen, they are also the first Black women allowed to serve.
(Description from Amazon)

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.)

Oscar Wilde, his wife, Constance, and their two sons deal with the aftermath of the famous playwright's imprisonment for homosexuality, told against the backdrop of Victorian England and World War I.
(Description from catalog)

The best-selling author of The Only Woman in the Room presents a historical tale inspired by the life of Clementine Churchill that traces her unflinching role in protecting the life and wartime agendas of her husband, Winston Churchill. (Description from NoveList.)

The director of the luxurious Hotel Ritz in occupied Paris and his courageous American wife, Blanche Auzello, risk their marriage and lives to support the French Resistance during World War II. (Description from NoveList.)

The enthralling story of a young Puritan woman who marries the wrong man and soon finds herself caught up in the violence and hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.
(Description from catalog)

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)

An epic, dazzling tale based on true events, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye illuminates a woman of color's rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.
(Description from catalog)

Based on the true story of the first female Pinkerton detective whose next assignment could end the Civil War.
(Description from NoveList)

The epic story of a Polish queen whose life and name were all but forgotten until now. To her father, the great duke of Poland, Swietoslawa and her two sisters represent three chances for an alliance. Three marriages on which to build his empire. But Swietoslawa refuses to be simply a pawn in her father's schemes; she seeks a throne of her own, with no husband by her side.
(Description from catalog)

Resisting the power grabs of an increasingly formidable Nazi Party in 1930s Berlin, the courageous American wife of a German intellectual and her circle of women friends engage in a clandestine battle to sabotage Hitler's regime. (Description from NoveList.)

Describes the scandalous love affair between the legendary opera singer, Maria Callas, and the fabulously rich Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, whose relationship ended suddenly with the shocking news that he was to marry Jacqueline Kennedy.
(Description from NoveList)

Born on a plantation but set apart from the others by her mother's position as a medicine woman, a young slave is forced to leave home at eighteen and unexpectedly finds herself in an infamously cruel jail.
(Description from catalog)

Going undercover to infiltrate the seedy side of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, Kate Warne, the first female Pinkerton detective, assumes a range of sophisticated identities to track down evildoers and bring them to justice. (Description from NoveList)

Depicts the downfall of Anne Boleyn at the hands of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell as Anne and her powerful family fight back while she is on trial for adultery and treason. (Description from NoveList.)

A tale of spycraft, love and sacrifice inspired by the true story of Doctor Zhivago follows the efforts of two CIA agents to help publish Boris Pasternak's censored masterpiece against a backdrop of Cold War politics in Moscow. (Description from NoveList.)

When Heather Mackenzie discovers that the embroidered flowers among her grandmother's possessions are the same pattern from Queen Elizabeth II's wedding gown, she sets out to discover why they were in her possession. (Description from NoveList.)

While working as divers with the all-female diving collective on a small Korean island, Mi-ja and Young-sook find their friendship challenged by their differences and forces outside their control. (Description from NoveList)

Grand Duchess Olga Romanov comes of age amid a shifting tide for the great dynasties of Europe. But even as unrest simmers in the capital, Olga is content to live within the confines of the sheltered life her parents have built for her and her three sisters: hiding from the world on account of their mother’s ill health, their brother Alexei’s secret affliction, and rising controversy over Father Grigori Rasputin, the priest on whom the tsarina has come to rely.
(Description from Amazon)

Born from young King Henry's first marriage, his elder daughter, Princess Mary, is raised to be queen once it becomes clear that her mother, Katherine of Aragon, will bear no more surviving children. However, Henry's restless eye has a devastating influence on the young princess's future when he declares her a bastard and his marriage to her mother unlawful. In hopes of a male heir, he marries Anne Boleyn and banishes Katherine and Mary from the royal court. But when Anne too fails to produce a son, she is beheaded and Mary is allowed to return to court as the default heir.
(Description from catalog)