Cozy Historical Fiction for Cool Fall Evenings

Banished from court by Eleanor of Aquitaine and sent to become prioress of an English abbey, seventeen-year old Marie de France finds the life of a nun to be a dreadful existence. The same coarseness and determination that caused her to be cast out of court are exactly what it takes to create a stable life for herself and her sisters in the midst of poverty and royal dismissal. But with so much shifting in the world around them, can the bulwark of one woman and her unnerving passion and faith stand up against waves of religious and societal pressure?

In the years leading up to the Great War, the daughter of a lexicographer working on the first Oxford English Dictionary finds a scrap of paper with a wayward word, one the lexicographers no longer seem interested in. That word is the beginning of Esme’s interest in what words the lexicographers ignores–words most often pertaining to women–and her own version of the dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. I can think of few things more comforting to a reader than a book about words.

A nostalgia-filled book about girlhood friendship and the 1970s. Running into an old friend sends August down a mental journey back to her childhood in Brooklyn, where friendship was everything and the streets were their playground. Brooklyn was a place where anything seemed possible, but beneath that veneer of perfection, lie the dark realities of being a young girl in the city.

An aging English butler reflects on his life after three decades in service of “a great gentleman,” though he is beginning to have doubts about just how great that gentleman is. On a motoring trip that turns into a six-day journey into the past, he considers a life lived through two world wars and an unrealized romance between the butler and his housekeeper.