HISTORICAL FICTION
Carnegie’s Maid By Marie Benedict Sourcebooks Landmark, 288 pages, $36.99
The public’s appetite for upstairs/downstairs dramas is seemingly endless. So much so, in fact, that it’s easy to view such outings with skepticism. But this new novel from the author of “The Other Einstein” proves a special addition to the Downton Abbey canon.
When Irish farm girl Clara Kelley arrives in Philadelphia in 1863, determined to support her destitute family back home, she receives a stroke of good luck. Mistaken for another immigrant of the same name — a domestic with excellent references, who’s died on the passage over — Clara secures employment in uppercrust Pittsburgh, in the posh Carnegie household. There, she serves as lady’s maid to the domineering Mrs. Carnegie and soon finds herself involved with the matriarch’s driven industrialist son, none other than Andrew Carnegie himself.
An absorbing exploration of the influence one plucky young woman might have had on this pioneering philanthropist. Inspired by Benedict’s own Irish ancestors, whose use of Carnegie’s first library helped transform the family from mill and steel workers to doctors and lawyers.
White Houses By Amy Bloom Random House, 240 pages, $36
The affair between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Associated Press journalist Lorena Hickok is the stuff of Washington legend. It is now the subject of this astonishingly good outing from New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom, inspired by three thousand letters between the two historical figures.
Told from the perspective of the bold, uncompromising “First Friend,” this is a story of deep, enduring love. After meeting while hard-scrabble Hickok — affectionately known as “Hick” — was reporting on FDR’s first presidential campaign in 1932, the two women become close friends, and then more, with Hick moving into the White House. Bloom has described this novel as “the opportunity of a lifetime,” and it’s easy to see why.
A tender, nuanced, and utterly absorbing portrait of middleaged love that beat all the odds.
The English Wife By Lauren Willig St. Martin’s Press, 384 pages, $34.99
Set in the late 1890s, “The English Wife” opens at a glitzy high society ball hosted at an elite New York family’s country home. Scion Bayard Van Duyvil has commissioned an architect to recreate his English wife’s childhood estate, with spectacular results. (Tongues have been wagging that his wife is cuckolding him with the architect, but never mind that.) Before the dancing can commence, Bay is discovered outdoors, stabbed to death, his wife missing.
To get to the bottom of the tragedy, Bay’s sister Janie joins forces with a rough-cut News of the World reporter, and the two set out to find out the truth, uncovering all manner of family secrets in the process.
A fast-paced murder mystery that grips to the very last page.