C.P.’s Comments (group member since Jan 25, 2014)

C.P.’s comments from the New Books Network group.

What would you do to get a job? Would you agree to pretend insanity to report from the inside on conditions in an asylum? Nellie Bly did! Find out more in The Girl Puzzle: A Story of Nellie Bly by Kate Braithwaite.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Family secrets, love, power, revenge, ownership, conscience—and sugar turn this story of 19th-century Barbados into an un-put-downable read: The Summer Country by Lauren Willig.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

A writer fictionalizing the life of another writer—and not any writer, but the great Russian/American stylist Vladimir Nabokov. Adrienne Celt's Invitation to a Bonfire—part homage, part exposé, part pure fantasy (in the best sense of that word)—definitely should not be missed.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Ten thousand babies were born to Japanese women fathered by US servicemen; the vast majority of them did not survive. The Woman in the White Kimono explains the challenges that the children and their mothers faced. Ana Johns tells a story that will linger in your mind long after you turn the last page.

Interview at New Books in Historical Fiction.

The Glovemaker asks important questions about love and loyalty, faith and independence, the power of love and of family. And through Deborah and her struggles, Ann Weisgarber brings vividly to life the joys and terrors of life in a small, isolated community on the US frontier, the moral compromises we all face, and the capacity of one strong woman to adapt in a time of rapid change.

Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Third in a wonderful series of detective novels featuring a storyteller and a librarian, City of Ink by Elsa Hart is a wonderfully complex yet satisfying tale that plays out against the backdrop of early Qing China, with its rebels, dynasts, foreign visitors, and ordinary folk with conflicting motives—not to mention the main character's own troubled past.

Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Create a film trilogy about a dictator for a dictator? No wonder the poor director had a heart attack? In This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia, Joan Neuberger explores the many artistic and political decisions noted filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made to get his vision on the screen and out to the public.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

How far is too far when you're tracking a war criminal, intent on bringing her to trial? Where does the desire for justice cross into vengeance? Questions like these drive Kate Quinn's compelling new novel, The Huntress. Not to be missed!



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

In The Lost Girls of Paris, Pam Jenoff returns to her favorite setting, World War II, this time with a twist. Grace Healey is late for work when a detour through Grand Central Station ends with her in possession of a group of photographs. Her attempts to track down the owner not only open a window onto the often neglected sacrifices made by women behind the lines but help Grace herself come to terms with her own losses and needs.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Olivia Givens and her Protestant family leave Ireland in 1819 after losing everything they owned to crop failure and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. They wind up in the new and burgeoning city of Cincinnati, where they decide to stay. But right across the river is the slave state of Kentucky, and before long the Givens family finds itself caught up in the tensions that will one day blaze into the US Civil War.

The Eulogist by Terry Gamble pits her strong and lovable characters against one another, seamlessly blending issues of female power, family ties, the abolition movement, and social class without ever losing track of her story.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Anchoress, abbess, mystic, theologian, musician, and healer—Hildegard of Bingen was many things, but one of them was Germany's first recognized female physician. In The Greenest Branch: A Novel of Germany's First Female Physician, P.K. Adams explores the childhood and youth of this remarkable woman. Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

With an ear for crisp dialogue, an unflinching focus on character, and a remarkable instinct for spare but telling detail, Lee Zacharias, creates in Across the Great Lake, an unforgettable tale about the child inside every adult and the long-term effects of the choices we make.

Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

In Mr. Dickens and His Carol, Samantha Silva takes events we all know from childhood and, through the application of a light touch and a gifted imagination, turns them into a story at once comfortably familiar and delightfully different.

Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction and the Literary Hub.

You can never have too much Uhtred. Our favorite Saxon is back with bells on in his eleventh adventure, War of the Wolf, and we have managed to secure another interview with his creator, Bernard Cornwell. You can hear the results at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Romance, murder, and religious disputation in the mountains of southern France. And yes, that really is Rennes-le-Chateau in the cover of Leslie Schweitzer Miller's debut novel, Discovery.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

The clash between defenders and opponents in the pre-Civil War US South, together with the Underground Railroad, form the backdrop to Jacqueline Friedland's romantic debut novel, Trouble the Water.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Robert Goolrick turns his lyrical prose style to historical fiction with The Dying of the Light, tracing the story of a house, Saratoga, and the beautiful heiress whose life is inextricably tied to it in early 20th-century Virginia.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Cinderella had a wicked stepmother, right? And ugly stepsisters? We all know this! Although maybe we don't, because everything looks different from the other side. All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother, by Danielle Teller, takes a playful look at an old, beloved fairy tale and gives a whole new sparkle to those glass slippers.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Post-partum depression is a big problem now, for women and the men who love them. In 1910s Montana, it's a much bigger deal. Listen to Ellen Notbohm discuss these and many other topics as portrayed in her debut novel, The River by Starlight.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.

Dance, crime, Hollywood starlets, and self-discovery during the building of Las Vegas fill Adrienne Sharp's latest novel, The Magnificent Esme Wells.



Interview with the author at New Books in Historical Fiction.