Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Based on a True Story

Grace Steele and Eliza Jones may be from completely different backgrounds, but when it comes to the army, specifically the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, they are both starting from the same level. Not only will they be among the first class of female officers the army has even seen, they are also the first Black women allowed to serve.
(Description from Amazon)

Sponsored by the poet Pablo Neruda to flee the violence of the Spanish Civil War, a pregnant widow and an army doctor unite in an arranged marriage, only to be swept up by the early days of World War II. (Description from NoveList.)

Oscar Wilde, his wife, Constance, and their two sons deal with the aftermath of the famous playwright's imprisonment for homosexuality, told against the backdrop of Victorian England and World War I.
(Description from catalog)

The director of the luxurious Hotel Ritz in occupied Paris and his courageous American wife, Blanche Auzello, risk their marriage and lives to support the French Resistance during World War II. (Description from NoveList.)

The enthralling story of a young Puritan woman who marries the wrong man and soon finds herself caught up in the violence and hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.
(Description from catalog)

An epic, dazzling tale based on true events, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye illuminates a woman of color's rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.
(Description from catalog)

Based on the true story of the first female Pinkerton detective whose next assignment could end the Civil War.
(Description from NoveList)

The epic story of a Polish queen whose life and name were all but forgotten until now. To her father, the great duke of Poland, Swietoslawa and her two sisters represent three chances for an alliance. Three marriages on which to build his empire. But Swietoslawa refuses to be simply a pawn in her father's schemes; she seeks a throne of her own, with no husband by her side.
(Description from catalog)

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a novel set on a train packed with a cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia.
(Description from NoveList)

Describes the scandalous love affair between the legendary opera singer, Maria Callas, and the fabulously rich Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, whose relationship ended suddenly with the shocking news that he was to marry Jacqueline Kennedy.
(Description from NoveList)

In 1927, eight-year-old Clara’s world shatters when her mother, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, vanishes off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn had amazed the nation with a book written in an invented language at just twelve years old. By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her daughter, Wynnie. A stranger contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language.
(Description from NoveList)

Zora Neale Hurston's unpublished novel offers a reimagined portrayal of Herod the Great, not as the notorious villain of the New Testament, but as a philosophical and visionary king who brought prosperity to Judea during a tumultuous period of war and imperial expansion in the first century BCE.
(Description from NoveList)

Two pairs of siblings, devotees of Jane Austen, find their lives transformed by a visit to England and Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother and keeper of a long-suppressed, secret legacy.
(Description from NoveList)

Born on a plantation but set apart from the others by her mother's position as a medicine woman, a young slave is forced to leave home at eighteen and unexpectedly finds herself in an infamously cruel jail.
(Description from catalog)

Depicts the downfall of Anne Boleyn at the hands of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell as Anne and her powerful family fight back while she is on trial for adultery and treason. (Description from NoveList.)

In 1919, Jessie Redmon Fauset is named literary editor of The Crisis - the first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine. But she is also having a secret affair with the magazine's founder, W. E. B. Du Bois. Despite rumors of their liaison, Jessie is determined to prove herself. When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts.
(Description from NoveList)

A tale of spycraft, love and sacrifice inspired by the true story of Doctor Zhivago follows the efforts of two CIA agents to help publish Boris Pasternak's censored masterpiece against a backdrop of Cold War politics in Moscow. (Description from NoveList.)

Including a readers guide and exclusive vintage Barbie photos, a bold new novel shows how Ruth Handler, along with head engineer Jack Ryan and designers Charlotte Johnson and Stevie Klein, created a doll like no other.
(Description from NoveList)

While working as divers with the all-female diving collective on a small Korean island, Mi-ja and Young-sook find their friendship challenged by their differences and forces outside their control. (Description from NoveList)

"The year is 1923. The Ku Klux Klan is at the height of its power in the US as membership swells into the millions and they expand beyond their original southern borders. As they grow, so do their targets. As they continue their campaigns of terror against African Americans, their list now includes Catholics and Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, all in the name of "white supremacy." But they are no longer considered a terrorist organization. By adding the messages of moral decency, family values, and temperance, the Klan has slapped on a thin veneer of respectability and has become a "civic organization," attracting ordinary citizens, law enforcement, and politicians to their particular brand of white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant "Americanism." Pennsylvania enthusiastically joined that wave. That was when the Grand Dragon of Pennsylvania decided to display the Klan's newfound power in a show of force. He chose a small town outside of Pittsburgh named after Andrew Carnegie; a small, unassuming borough full of "Catholics and Jews," the perfect place to teach these immigrants "a lesson." Some thirty thousand members of the Klan gathered from as far as Kentucky for "Karnegie Day." After initiating new members, they armed themselves with torches and guns to descend upon the town to show them exactly what Americanism was all about. The Day the Klan Came to Town is a fictionalized retelling of the riot, focusing on a Sicilian immigrant, Primo Salerno. He is not a leader; he's a man with a troubled past. He was pulled from the sulfur mines of Sicily as a teen to fight in the First World War. Afterward, he became the focus of a local fascist and was forced to emigrate to the United States. He doesn't want to fight but feels that he may have no choice. The entire town needs him-and indeed everybody-to make a stand"-- Provided by publisher.