Virginia Stars Fiction and Nonfiction Titles with a Virginia Setting. All genres are included.

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Fiction

  • Gypsy Man
    Author: Bausch, Robert
    Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151001723 Date: 2002
    starLibrary Journal
    Penny Bone is terrified of the town's local legend of a child-stealing phantom. Penny's husband, John, is in prison for an accidental murder. An eerie succession of events will take these people into the bull's-eye of risk that everyday life presents, and illuminates how an elusive truth lives behind every legend.
    Updated 10.08.02
  • Hello to the Cannibals
    Author: Bausch, Richard
    Publisher: HarperCollins $ 27.95 ISBN: 006019295x Date: 2002
    starBooklist
    At the end of the 20th century, Lily Austin is writing a play about the famed British explorer and travel writer Mary Kingsley. Through Kingsley's writings, Lily finds in Kingsley's courage and resourcefulness the inspiration she needs to navigate the complicated waters of intimacy and betrayal, kindness and love. Hello to the Cannibals is Bausch's most dazzling and beautifully crafted novel to date.
    Updated 10.15.02
  • Hotspur
    Author: Brown, Rita Mae
    Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345428226 Date: 2002
    starPW
    In her marvelous new work, bestselling novelist Brown returns to the fascinating world of foxhunting she brought so vividly to life in Outfoxed.
    Updated 11.05.02
  • Palladio
    Author: Dee, Jonathan
    Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 038550179x Date: 2002
    starBooklist
    In this masterful novel, critically acclaimed writer Jonathan Dee explores the price of compromise, the pain of lost love, and whether it pays to have a conscience in our cynical age.
    Updated 1/2/02
  • Meet John Trow
    Author: Dyja, Tom
    Publisher: Viking $ 24.95 ISBN: 0670030996 Date: 2002
    starKirkus
    Steven Armour, fighting off a mid-life crisis, joins a group of Civil War reenactors, and his life suddenly turns around. A haunting narrative of a man caught between his own life and a life he might have lived, Meet John Trow will take its place as a classic novel of history.
    Updated 5/9/02
  • The Mammoth Cheese
    Author: Holman, Sheri
    Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871139006 Date: 2003
    starLJstarPWstarKirkus
    On publication of her last novel, The Dress Lodger, The New York Times declared Holman an author with "an outstanding, generous, and fertile imagination." Now Holman delivers a sharp, contemporary story steeped in history that will captivate a new audience while gratifying readers of her earlier work.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 6.19.03
  • Stealing with Style
    Author: Jenkins, Emyl
    Publisher: Algonquin $ 22.95 ISBN: 1565124456 Date: 2005
    starBooklist
    Antiques appraiser Jenkins turns her talents to fiction in the first of a series of mysteries that follow the heroine behind the scenes of the sometimes murky world of antiques, sophisticated scammers, and shifty associates.
    Suggested Reading: Debuts | Antiques Mysteries
    Updated 5.9.05
  • The Known World
    Author: Jones, Edward P.
    Publisher: Amistad $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060557540 Date: 2003
    starKirkusstarLJstarBooklist
    Henry Townsend, a black bootmaker and former slave in antebellum Virginia, becomes a proprietor of his own plantation--as well as his own slaves. This modern masterpiece explores what happens when he dies and "the known world" unravels.
    Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | African American Stars | All Stars
    Updated 10.2.03
  • Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War
    Author: McCaig, Donald
    Publisher: Norton List Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 039304629x Date: 1998
    starPWstarLJ
    A novel that resonates with the bitter glory and deep human shame of the Confederacy. Against the epic canvas of the Civil War, the people, black and white, of one Virginia plantation fulfill their unforgettable destinies.
    Suggested Reading: Civil War Fiction
  • Miss Ophelia
    Smith, Mary Burnett
    Publisher: Morrow List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0688152341 Date: 1997
    starLJ
    Set in rural Virginia during 1948, Miss Ophelia is a remarkable debut novel that explores the issues of abortion, illegitmacy, adultry, and skin color. Belly Anderson, now in the autumn of her life, reminisces about the last summer of her childhood, a time when she learns a terrible secret about a close friend - a secret that forces Belly to grow up and learn what it really means to be an adult.
  • Argall
    Author: Vollmann, William T.
    Publisher: Viking $ 40 ISBN: 0670910309 Date: 2001
    starBookliststarPWstarLibrary Journal
    In the newest novel in his Seven Dreams series, Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia--as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 9/17/01
  • The Wolf Pit
    Author: Youmans, Marly
    Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 24 ISBN: 0374291950 Date: 2001
    starPW
    The Wolf Pit offers a gripping portrait of two young Virginians forever altered by violence and civil war: Robin, a Confederate soldier, enduring life at the Elmira prison camp, and Agate, the daughter of a hired-out slave, who struggles to survive loss and degradation and to pit knowledge and truth against evil.
    Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Civil War Stars
    Updated 7/19/01

Nonfiction

  • In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863
    Author: Ayers, Edward L.
    Publisher: Norton $ 27.95 ISBN: 0393057860 Date: 2003
    starKirkus starPWstarLJstarBooklist
    Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading historian tells a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict, of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South, vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars
    Updated 7.17.03
  • Five Sisters: The Langhorne Sisters of Virginia
    by Fox, James
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 30 ISBN: 0684808129 Date: 2000
    starLibrary Journal
    The author of the bestselling White Mischief tells the story of the beautiful Langhorne sisters who lived at the center of high and powerful society from the end of the Civil War through the Second World War. As they made their way across two continents, the five women acquired rich husbands, fame, and scandals.
  • Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad
    Author: Holman, Virginia
    Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 0743222857 Date: 2003
    starKirkusstarPWstarLJ
    In a dexterous portrait of madness and shadows, Pushcart Prize winner Holman recounts the dark days her family was held hostage by her mother's delusions and her country was beset with the folly of the Watergate era.
    Suggested Reading: All Stars | Memoir Stars
    Updated 1.3.03
  • Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation
    Author: Isaac, Rhys
    Publisher: Oxford $ 30 ISBN: 0195159268 Date: 2004
    starPWstarKirkus
    In this long-awaited work, Isaac mines the diary of a Revolutionary War-era Virginia planter--and many other sources--to reconstruct his interior world as it plunged into turmoil.
    Suggested Reading: 1776 Stars
    Updated 6.1.04
  • The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves
    Author: Levy, Andrew
    Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 0375508651 Date: 2005
    starBooklist
    Updated 4.22.05
  • Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocohontas, and the Heart of a New Nation
    Author: Price, David A.
    Publisher: Knopf $ 25.95 ISBN: 0375415416 Date: 2003
    starKirkusstarPW
    Unraveling the crucial roles of Pocahontas, Captain John Smith, and Chief Powhatan, Pagels offers a dramatic retelling of one of the great survival stories of American history--the opening of the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
    Updated 7.21.03