Historical Diaries

The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck “always to stumble in on the real show.” Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South’s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime’s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her.

One fateful day in December, Piper Davis awaits news of her brother, a soldier on the battleship Arizona, stationed in Pearl Harbor. As Piper learns about the harsh realities of war, she understands that she has the power to make a difference.

While her father is in hiding after attempts on his life, 12-year-old Cleopatra records in her diary how she fears for her own safety and hopes to survive to become queen of Egypt some day.

A journey into the unseen emotional world of the Victorian child—where discipline shaped conscience, imagination opened secret doorways, and private feelings survived behind closed doors. This book uncovers the hidden rooms of early life and traces the origins of the modern self. A profoundly intimate history of Victorian childhood—told through the hidden emotional lives of the young. Victorian children left behind more than schoolroom recitations and moral instruction. In their diaries, sketches, bedtime fears, treasured objects, and whispered longings lie the earliest traces of the ...

2025 National Indie Excellence Award - Finalist for Historical Fiction 2025 NYC Big Book Awards - Distinguished Favorite for Historical Fiction The Diary of Essie Lassiter was an authentic read, with a strong female narrator blazing a fiery path in a harsh new world. Her voice was as captivating as her journey, and the world created around her was vibrant with the sights, sounds and smells of colonial life. – Reedsy Discovery In the runup to the Revolutionary War, a young English midwife is unsuspectingly thrown into the London Debtor’s Prison. With no prospect of retiring her debt, she...

Docia Ingalls was more than just the little sister of Charles "Pa" Ingalls from the Little House books. She was a spirited, fiercely independent, passionate woman, who experienced love, heartbreak, hard work, trials, and tribulations, but kept on going. She was a true pioneer woman from the hardy stock that filled the Ingalls family. A romantic, loving and naive young woman, she married twice, divorced once and birthed and raised nine children all the while doing the best she could with what she had. Married to an alcoholic whom she loved despite his faults, Docia carried her family and ...

Told through intimate diary entries, this fiction series unfurls the extraordinary sagas of the Bible's best-known characters through the eyes of ordinary girls. In Book 3 of The Promised Land Diaries, Alisah, a young nursemaid, must leaver her family to live with beautiful Rebekah in order to help her aging nurse Deborah and care for her growing household. Alisah learns of Rebekah's generous spirit and witnesses firsthand the tender love story of Rebekah and Isaac.

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own...

India and Matt thought all their problems would come to an end once they found Chronos. But the watch magician brings with him as many questions as answers, and a load of trouble. To fix Matt's magic watch, they must find an old diary that once belonged to a doctor magician murdered decades ago. The hunt drags them into a sordid mystery involving two of London's craft guilds. With old and new enemies determined to stop them, and long-held secrets unearthed, Matt and India must work together better than ever.

The Jesus diary is the up-dated version of the most comprehensive chronology of the events in the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of God ever written. Jesus, the Son of God visited this earth at a point in history. The Gospels in the Bible give four accounts of the one story of Jesus' birth, baptism in the Holy Spirit, his ministry, death and resurrection. The Jesus diary records all of those events in the correct order then places each one on a specific date in history. The result is the most detailed time-frame of the events in Jesus' life ever compiled.

For the first time we discover what really happened between his sister and the dastardly Wickham. How did he distract his friend Bingley from pining for his beloved Jane? Why did he propose to another young woman? Only to his diary does he tell his true story. At last we see Darcy as he really is; and, beneath his polite facade, we find a sensitive, private and passionate man.

The diaries of Samuel Pepys have enthralled readers for centuries with their audacious wit, gripping detail, and racy assignations. Pepys stopped writing at the age of 36. Or did he? Named one of the best historical fiction books of the year by the Sunday Times, this action-packed historical...

Lady Janine Cook, daughter of the Duke of Sussex, is in turmoil. Her father's insistence on marriage by her next birthday leaves her in distress, especially since the match he's chosen is the oppressive and controlling Viscount Shardwood. To complicate things even further, although she can hardly admit it to herself, Lady Janine’s true feelings lay with another. Douglas Irvin, the Viscount who stole her thoughts, might be a friend of the family, but she knows her stubborn father will never change his mind. She can at least confess all of her heart’s secrets to her dear diary… When the...

Abridged Edition Curated Selections from the definitive, career-spanning collection of writing from Anthony Bourdain, assembled for the first time and read by Tony with Dion Graham, Kimberly Witherspoon, Kaleo Griffith, David Colacci, and Chris Patton. Anthony Bourdain represented many things to...

Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.

In the darkest years of Nazi occupation and genocide, Etty Hillesum remained a celebrant of life whose lucid intelligence, sympathy, and almost impossible gallantry were themselves a form of inner resistance. The adult counterpart to Anne Frank, Hillesum testifies to the possibility of awareness and compassion in the face of the most devastating challenge to one's humanity. She died at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of twenty-nine.

Judy Montagu spent her late teenage years and early twenties directing anti-aircraft defenses during the Second World War as a Captain in Gunnery for the British Army. Demobilised in 1946, she set out in search of fun and freedom in America and found herself swept into a bright and glamorous social circle. She soon counted Joe Alsop and the Cushing Sisters among her new friends and even began to consider becoming a US citizen. In 1949, determined to understand America more deeply, Judy embarked on a three-month tour of the country by Greyhound bus.

No one is more surprised than Mattie Spenser herself when Luke Spenser, considered the great catch of their small Iowa town, asks her to marry him. Less than a month later, they are off in a covered wagon to build a home on the Colorado frontier. Mattie's only company is a slightly mysterious husband and her private journal, where she records the joys and frustrations not just of frontier life, but also of a new marriage to a handsome, but distant stranger.

A yellow leather diary. A forgotten hand. A conversation across centuries. In 1923, Janki, a schoolteacher in Lahore, purchased a worn, yellow-covered journal from a second-hand bookshop. Its earliest pages already contained mysterious fragments about Alexander the Great, written in an unknown hand. But Janki did not treat the diary as a relic. He made it his own. Across the decades, he filled its remaining pages with observations, memories, historical reflections, and quiet meditations on love, death, time, and the strange endurance of human longing. He wrote not for fame, nor for ...

In the vein of Inside Out and Back Again and The War That Saved My Life comes a poignant, personal, and hopeful tale of India's partition, and of one girl's journey to find a new home in a divided country It's 1947, and India, newly independent of British rule, has been separated into two...