For Fans of Outlander

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

In 1940, eighteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. She is sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked to monitor the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers. She discovers the work to be, by turns, both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, Juliet presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. 

Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought on a different battleground, but Juliet is once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally realizes that there is no action without consequence.

The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer

It is equal parts a transporting love story and a gripping historical conspiracy. Think The Girl with a Pearl Earring meets Outlander. Debut author Melodie Winawer takes readers deep into medieval Italy. Here are the past and present blur, and a twenty-first-century woman will discover a plot to destroy Siena. 

Accomplished neurosurgeon Beatrice Trovato knows that her deep empathy for her patients is starting to impede her work. When her beloved brother unexpectedly dies, she welcomes the unexpected trip to the Tuscan city of Siena to resolve his estate. Even as she wrestles with grief, she delves deeper into her brother’s affairs. She discovers intrigue she never imagined—a 700-year-old conspiracy to decimate the city. 

After uncovering the journal and paintings of Gabriele Accorsi, the fourteenth-century artist at the heart of the plot, Beatrice finds a startling image of her face. She is suddenly transported to the year 1347. She awakens in a Siena unfamiliar to her, one that the Plague will soon hit. Yet when Beatrice meets Accorsi, something unexpected happens: she falls in love with Gabriele and the beauty and cadence of medieval life. As the Plague and the ruthless hands behind its trajectory threaten her survival and Siena’s very existence, Beatrice must decide in which century she belongs. 

The Scribe of Siena is the captivating story of a brilliant woman’s passionate affair with a time and a place that captures her in an impossibly romantic and dangerous trap–testing the strength of fate and the bonds of love.

The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen Flynn

London, 1815: Two travelers—Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane—arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem, but rather colleagues who have returned in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters—a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team from the future to “go back,” their mission is by far the most audacious. Meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.

Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature. She must let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen’s circle via her favorite brother, Henry.

But diagnosing Jane’s fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous convolutions of living a lie. Jane’s friendship deepens, and her relationship with Liam grows complicated. Rachel fights to reconcile the woman she is with the proper lady that nineteenth-century society expects her to be. Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive as their portal to the future prepares to close. Can they leave history intact and exactly as they found it. . . however heartbreaking that may prove?