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.)

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.

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 feud rages in Gilded Age New York City between newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. When Grace Harrington lands a job at Hearst's newspaper in 1896, she's caught in a cutthroat world where one scoop can make or break your career, but it's a story emerging from Cuba that changes her life. Unjustly imprisoned in a notorious Havana women's jail, eighteen-year-old Evangelina Cisneros dreams of a Cuba free from Spanish oppression. When Hearst learns of her plight, she becomes a rallying cry for American intervention in the battle for Cuban independence.
(Description from catalog)

Narrowly surviving the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a bordello proprietor's daughter bonds with an unlikely new family, from a Chinese clan and an orphan caregiver to tenor Enrico Caruso and tabloid celebrity Alma Spreckels.
(Description from catalog)

"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."

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother's choices and is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, Libertie has skin that is too dark.
(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 talented young deep-sea diver from occupied 1948 Korea's neighboring Jeju Island visits Mt. Halla for her family's annual trading trip before her romance with a mountain youth is upended by family tragedy and political turbulence. (Description from catalog)

In Finnmark, Norway, 1617, after 40 fishermen are drowned in the sea, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardo must fend for themselves especially when a sinister figure arrives, bringing with him a mighty evil that threatens their very existence. (Description from NoveList.)

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)

Patroclus, an awkward young prince, follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate. Set during the Trojan War. (Description from catalog)

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.)

Arizona Territory,1893: two extraordinary lives collide. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman, alone in a house abandoned by the men in her life, her husband and her two older sons, who have gone in search of their father after his return is delayed. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son and a seventeen year old maid named Josie, her husband's cousin who communes with spirits. Lurie is the son of a dead dockworker, a former outlaw, and a man haunted by ghosts and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires an epic journey across the West.
(Description from catalog)

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)

Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Doll bought her freedom—and that of her sister and her mother—from her Irish planter father and built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur, merchant, hotelier, and planter that extended from the marketplaces and sugar plantations of Dominica and Barbados to a glittering luxury hotel in Demerara on the South American continent.
(Description from Amazon)

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)

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