2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Historical Fiction

The Mercies

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster.  
 

A Long Petal of the Sea

In the late 1930s, civil war gripped Spain. General Franco and his Fascists overthrew the government; hundreds of thousands fled over the mountains to the French border. Roser, a pregnant young widow, finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. To survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them wants; Sponsored by poet Pablo Neruda, they embark on the SS Winnipeg along with 2,200 other refugees in search of a new life.

Zorrie

 

Cast adrift in the Depression-era West after the last of her relatives pass away, Zorrie survives by working at a radium processing plant before finding love, community and unexpected loss upon returning to her small Indiana hometown.This book was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Clark and Division

There are multiple books, fiction and nonfiction, about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, but stories of what happened to the detainees after being released from the camps are less frequently told. Hirahara changes that with this deeply researched historical mystery about a Japanese family from California who were "resettled" in Chicago in 1944 after spending more than two years at the Manzanar internment camp.

Lady Clementine

The best-selling author of The Only Woman in the Room presents a historical tale inspired by the life of Clementine Churchill that traces her unflinching role in protecting the life and wartime agendas of her husband, Winston Churchill.

Lost Roses

The runaway bestseller Lilac Girls introduced the world to the real-life heroine Caroline Ferriday. Now, a generation earlier, this sweeping new novel featuring Caroline's mother, Eliza, follows three equally indomitable women from St. Petersburg to Paris under the shadow of World War I.

Cartier's Hope

 

New York, 1910: Vera Garland is set on making her mark in a man's world of serious journalism. After the world-famous Hope Diamond is bought by Pierre Cartier, Vera begins investigating rumors about his scheme to manipulate its value. Appealing to a young Russian jeweler for help, Vera is unprepared when she gets caught up in his deceptions and finds herself at risk of losing all she has worked so hard to achieve.

Valentine

It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ram©Ưrez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead's ranch house, broken and barely alive, after a vicious attack in a nearby oil field. This act of brutality is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law.