Novels (Mystery of Edwin Drood / Tale of Two Cities)

Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel as the Soviet century remakes the world outside. Over three decades he builds a life of friendship, purpose, and quiet resistance within the hotel’s walls.

Five Russian families move through court, love, and the Napoleonic invasion as 1805 becomes Borodino and Moscow burns. Tolstoy’s epic is Napoleonic historical fiction on a national scale—ballrooms and battlefields, Pierre and Natasha, and the question of who makes history.

In 1815, convict Jean Valjean is released from the galleys and tries to live honestly under a stolen name, while Inspector Javert hunts him through Restoration and July-Monarchy France. Hugo’s novel follows Fantine, Cosette, Marius, and the 1832 Paris barricades—crime, mercy, and a social epic that still defines French historical fiction after Waterloo.

A young American nurse serves in Vietnam and struggles to be seen when she comes home.

A girl steals books in Nazi Germany; Death narrates a story of words and survival.

Linked stories follow two half-sisters’ lineages across centuries of African and American history.