historical fiction Archives - The Gilmore Guide to Books

The Top of the World by Ethan Joella

Catherine — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:29:35 +0000

When Maggie’s older brother, Chip disappears for the summer after the end of his senior year in high school it’s a big deal. Because it’s probably the last summer he’ll ever have and she and her parents are left alone and wondering if they’ll ever see him again. They do, but he never says anything […]

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Land by Maggie O’Farrell

Catherine — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:03:09 +0000

One family and a country wiped out by famine are the heart and soul of Land, Maggie O’Farrell’s sweeping new novel. The lives of Tomás, Phina, and their children, Liam, Enda, Rose, and Eugene play out on the page with all the verdant vibrancy of the land they love. It’s a decade after the Great […]

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Workhorse: A Novel

Catherine — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:41:27 +0000

Clo Harmon is a 25-year-old assistant at a fashion magazine. She’s a workhorse—eager, bright, hardworking, but with no fashion pedigree. Meaning she will never achieve her dream of being an editor because those jobs only go to the show horses—wealthy, skinny girls with Ivy League degrees and all the right connections. What’s an ambitious, but […]

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Let’s Call Her Barbie

Catherine — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 07:02:02 +0000

As a child of the 60s/70s I was one of the numerous little girls clamoring for a Barbie doll. Much like the opening for the movie Barbie (fabulous, a must see) I’d loved my baby doll to death, but needed something more and Barbie was the dream, but it was not to be for […]

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Belgravia by Julian Fellowes

Catherine — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 07:52:00 +0000

I decided to leave the gloom of October behind and start November with an uncomplicated, lovely novel that opens in a time that seems quiet to us, but was tumultuous for those living it. The novel is Belgravia and it begins with a very real event, the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels in 1815. […]

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Bright Young Women

Catherine — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 07:53:12 +0000

Pamela Schumacher is the president of her sorority at Florida State University, a job she takes so seriously she doesn’t go out with her friends one Saturday night because she has too much work to do. In the early hours of the following morning this same sense of responsibility will uproot her life from its […]

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September Reading Wrap-Up

Catherine — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 07:54:20 +0000

September has come and gone and with it, the last weak bits of Seattle summer. Shorts and tees have been packed away and I’m back to layering clothes and wearing fuzzy socks. No complaints, I love all things soft and warm—in my clothes. In my books, not so much. Still, September was a month of […]

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August Reading Wrap-Up

Catherine — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:12:26 +0000

August has followed summer out the door, but the weather was as lovely as the majority of my reading, with more highs than lows. The first week of September is about to end so I thought I ought to check in with what worked and what didn’t before I head into all the new fall […]

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The River We Remember

Catherine — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 07:59:06 +0000

Summer is just beginning in the small town of Jewel, Minnesota when the body of Jimmy Quinn, one of the town’s wealthiest citizens, is discovered in the nearby river. Given that he was also one of the most disliked there are plenty of people in William Kent Krueger’s The River We Remember who wanted him […]

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The Invisible Hour

Catherine — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 07:08:22 +0000

I had asked to be forgiven in the past, but I was someone else now. I was the girl who knew how to escape, the one who could become invisible, who believed that a single dream was more powerful than a thousand realities. Ivy Jacob is a dreamy, book loving 16-year-old who steps into the […]

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