Historical Fiction

A grandfather clock in a 1660 house stops every night at 3:41. Nobody can fix it, and nobody will explain it. Freida McFadden's dual-timeline thriller runs a 1692 witchcraft trial alongside a present-day haunting, and the second reveal turns on an object you have been staring at since chapter four.

Every bank in New York turns down Ray Carney's wife for a loan, so the furniture man goes back to fencing. The last Harlem Trilogy novel runs from 1981 to 1986 and asks one question over and over: what do you value enough to steal for?

A furniture dealer four years out of the crooked life needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, and the only man who can get them is a corrupt detective with a subpoena and nothing left to lose. Whitehead's 1970s Harlem novel is angrier and funnier than the first.

A furniture salesman with a business degree, a signed photo of Lena Horne, and a cousin who cannot stop volunteering him for robberies. Whitehead's Harlem novel is a heist story, a social history and a very funny book about the price of respectability.

In August 1978 an eighteen-year-old golf prodigy drives a ball through a torn practice net and kills a caddy fifteen yards away. Bohjalian's twenty-sixth novel is her memoir, written at sixty-six, and it is far angrier about class and older men than it is about golf.