Historical Fiction

Historical Fiction genre

Genghis Khan

This is the story of a boy named Temujin. As a boy, he inherited the role of leader after his father’s death. As a man, he earned it–by fiercely protecting his people, no matter the cost, and by demanding total loyalty from those he led. His story is one of courage and survival, sacrifice and death. The boy who became the great Genghis Khan would take his people from the brink of survival to near-world domination — and lead the largest empire ever created in the lifetime of one man. Based on both history and legend, Demi’s classic story of Genghis Khan takes readers into a world of battle and victory and shows why Genghis Khan has gone down in history as the greatest conqueror of all time.

See also Chingis Khan.

The Cuckoo’s Child

Eleven-year-old Mia refuses to believe that her parents are not coming back after they are reported lost at sea. In 1962, Mia’s parents suddenly disappear while sailing off the coast of Greece. Mia and her two sisters are returned to the United States to the custody of her aunt they barely know. Mia wishes for a regular American life and spends a summer in her aunt’s Tennessee home, waiting for news of her parents. By summer’s end, Mia gradually understands why her mother left her and how she disrupted her aunt’s life.

Anne Frank and Me

The successful play is now a gripping novel. Knocked unconscious after explosions ring out during a field trip to an Anne Frank exhibit, boy-crazy Nicole Burns wakes to find herself living a parallel life as a Jew in 1942 Paris. This Nicole is dating the boy of her present-day dreams, but living under the Nazis gradually becomes a nightmare. Her family survives the Nazi occupation with the help of friends, but when her father is exposed as a resistant, their fate takes a dire turn. The shifts in Nicole’s lives — from a carefree, sophisticated Parisian girl to a wretch riding in a cattle car with Anne Frank; from a modern girl focused only on the drama of her high school life to a thoughtful observer of the potential of everyday injustices — will engage teens and change their views of history found in books and the history we’re making today.

Wildflower Girl

Thirteen-year-old Peggy O’Driscoll, left orphaned and homeless by the Great Famine of the 1840s, leaves Ireland to seek her fortune in America.

Wicked Will: A Mystery of Young William Shakespeare

To the outside world, Tom Pryne is an orphan traveling Elizabethan England with his uncle-s theater troupe. In actuality, -Tom- is Viola, in disguise because her parents- Catholic sympathies have put them at odds with the law and forced them into hiding. When the troupe arrives in the sleepy little town of Stratford-on-Avon, Viola-s uncle is arrested for murder, and she joins forces with young Will Shakespeare, a local boy with a penchant for trouble and a smart turn of phrase, to uncover the real culprit.

The Bomb

It is 1946, a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and World War II is over. But the U.S. government has decided that further tests of atomic bombs must be conducted. Bikini Atoll is chosen for the testing site, so the people who have lived there for generations must be relocated for two years. Sixteen-year-old Sorry Rinamu believes the Americans are lying and that it will never be safe for his people to return. He must find a way to stop the first bomb before it is dropped . . . even if that means risking his own destruction. This chilling novel is based on the true story of atomic weapons testing at Bikini Atoll in the western Pacific Ocean. “A haunting, soundly researched work.”–Publishers Weekly

Two Suns in the Sky

In 1944, an Upstate New York teenager named Christine meets and falls in love with Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew living in a refugee camp, despite their parents’ conviction that they do not belong together.

Hidden Voices: The Orphan Musicians of Venice

While studying under Vivaldi, three girls in a Venice orphanage forge their own notions of love in a sensuous, engrossing novel told in three narrative voices. It is a longing and search for love that motivates three girls living in the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage renowned for its extraordinary musical program. But for Rosalba, Anetta, and Luisa, the love they seek is not where they expect to find it. Set in the early 1700s in the heart of Venice, this remarkable novel deftly weaves the history of Antonio Vivaldi’s early musical career into the lives of three young women who excel in voice and instrument.