1950s
New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel has been the scene of a lot of scandals, triumphs, joys and heartbreak over the years. Hazel Ripley and Maxine Mead are just two of the women who’ve passed through its iconic red brick façade, and they have problems bigger than the ghosts haunting the hotel†...
I've been intrigued for years by things I've heard about Beatriz Williams' work, but it wasn't until I picked up her latest novel, The Summer Wives, that I realized what a master storyteller the author really is. Reading this book has been one of the high points of my summer, and I can't wait for ot ...
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In Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance, readers follow Willa Drake from the ages of eleven to sixty-one and watch her make difficult decisions at every turn, choosing between broadening herself or shrinking herself to please others.
As a child gamboling around the streets of 1950s Lark City, Pennsylvania, ...
I love early twentieth century history and am delighted whenever I find a book set during that era. Pride and Passion, part of the Decades: A Journey of African-American Romance series, takes place during the 1950s and looks at a crucial period during the Civil Rights Movement. All Decades novel are ...
This island will break your heart if you let it.
Home, exile, family and above all, hope. These themes all figure prominently in Next Year in Havana, Chanel Cleeton's beautiful novel of love and Cuba. We see the love stories of a grandmother and her granddaughter playing out in Havana, but we also ...
Under a Sardinian Sky offers the reader a complete immersion into the Sardinia of the 1950s. Every page makes you feel as if you’re right there experiencing everything, as there is no detail deemed too big or too small to reveal the subtlest nuances of the setting. Joy of family and familial love ...
Dorothy Garlock, master of heartwarming heartland-based mid-century romances, returns with her fifty-fifth book, the post-World War II centered Sunday Kind of Love.
Gwen Foster is an Indiana girl searching for just the right kind of love. Home to visit her family in Buckton, this trip will repr ...
Starcrossed lovers show up often enough in romance, but rarely with such convincing emotion as in The Sleeping Night. Barbara Samuel's tale of an interracial couple in postwar Texas takes readers through a rollercoaster of emotion as we see her characters dealing with love, loss, and poisonous bigot ...
The Summer Hideaway is part of Susan Wiggs' Lakeshore Chronicles series, set at a camp in upstate New York, but it works as a standalone. It combines a contemporary romance with the story of three children growing up during World War II. I enjoyed both stories, but would have liked a bit more of eac ...
Have you ever been to Delphi, Greece? It’s a truly magical, mystical place. Whatever your own religious persuasion is, there you’ll find it very easy to feel close to a higher being, and understand perfectly well why the Greeks built a sanctuary for Apollo on that very mountainside. The novel th ...