Lillian Dunkle, the Ice Cream Queen of America, lives in a Park Avenue apartment and has a home in Bedford but began life as Malka Treynovsky in Vishnev, Russia. Susan Jane Gilman’s new novel, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street, opens in 1913 when, at age six Malka came to America with her parents and her three sisters and ended up in an Orchard Street tenement. Shortly ... Read More...
Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest
Claire and Dora Williamson are wealthy British women using their inheritance to travel the world in the early 1900s. Like many people of the time they are convinced that they could be in better health and like many women, with so little understanding of their own bodies, they believed that the slightest discomfort was indicative of a greater disorder. To that end they abandoned ... Read More...
Fever: A Novel
When Mary Mallon leaves Ireland for the United States in the late 1800s she has already seen too much of death—both of her parents, her sister, and her sister’s young children. Death holds little mystery for her but life in Manhattan is full of opportunity when her aunt teaches her to cook. Rather than live as a laundress, with her arms up the elbows in scalding hot water or ... Read More...
The Museum of Extraordinary Things
The Museum of Extraordinary Things is both the name of Alice Hoffman’s new historical novel and the name of the museum Coralie’s father owns. She lives alone with him in the house next to the museum on Coney Island. Her mother died when she was an infant and her father is highly protective so the only company she has is their housekeeper, Maureen. He is also adamant she not go ... Read More...
Rutherford Park
Rutherford Park is the estate of the Cavendish family and like any good British estate, it is rife with intrigue and drama. Elizabeth Cooke captures all the details, upstairs and downstairs, in her new novel Rutherford Park, the story of the Cavendish family, on the cusp of World War I. Despite the many changes in the world around them, the English aristocracy continues to ... Read More...
Life After Life
Ursula Todd is born at home in the winter of 1910, but without medical supervision she dies before she can take her first breath. In succeeding chapters, she returns and each time a twist of fate changes her destiny. Once, the doctor has arrived and there are no problems and another time her mother is able to take action. This is our introduction to the fact that Ursula is a ... Read More...
