The Good Clean Fiction bookshelf
A little room for a good book.
Historical
by Elizabeth Musser
Provence, summer 1944. In the town of Sisteron, Isabelle Seauve helps the Resistance hide Jewish children. Her fifteen-year-old cousin René reaches her after a German attack, bringing an orphaned Jewish girl with him, while an American army chaplain, Peter Christensen, still carries what he saw in North Africa. Their three stories meet as the Allies bomb the town.
Before you read
Read our approach to language, romance, and difficult subjects before choosing your next book.
How we choose our booksFind your copy
Retailer links may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Read our disclosure.
Historical
Evie Woods
In the 1920s, Opaline Carlisle runs from an arranged marriage to Paris and then Dublin, where she opens a bookshop of her own. A century later in Dublin, Martha, starting her life over, and Henry, a scholar chasing a lost manuscript, stumble on a shop that seems to appear and vanish. A dual-timeline story about books, second chances and a little magic.
Literary
Marilynne Robinson
In 1956, John Ames — a preacher in a small Iowa town, old and ailing — begins a long letter to the young son he won't live to see grow up. What emerges is a life's accounting: his father and his abolitionist grandfather, a friendship that has cost him, and a hard-won gratitude for ordinary light. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Literary
Amor Towles
In 1922 Moscow, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol hotel across from the Kremlin — and spends the next thirty years discovering how large a life can be lived inside one building. Amor Towles writes with wit and enormous warmth; the Count's friendships, especially with a small girl who knows the hotel's secrets, carry decades of Russian history without ever losing their lightness.