The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

IN 1942, Will Truesdale an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong falls passionately in love with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But, their affair is threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their lives.

Ten year later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. Seduced by the colony's heady social life, she soon begins an affair, only to discover that her lover is hiding a devastating past. As the threads of this spellbound novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge between love and safety, courage and survival, the present and above all, the past.

MUDBOUND by Hillary Jordan

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place that is both foreign and frightening. As the McAllan's are tested in every way two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to help work on the farm. Ronsel Jackson is the eldest son of a black sharecropper who live on the McAllan farm. Jamie is everything that his older brother Henry is not.

Mudbound reveals how everyone becomes a player in a tragedy on the grandest scale as they strive for love and honor.

Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross

Brilliant and talented, Joan rebels against the medieval social structures that forbid women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed, during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloak and his identity and enters the monastery of Fulda. As brother John, Joan distinguishes herself as a great scholar and healer. Eventually, she is drawn to Rome, where she become enmeshed in a dangerous web of love, passion and politics. She finally attains the highest office in Christendom wielding a power greater than any woman before or since. But, such power always comes at a price.

The Dark Ages come to life in all their brutal splendor. It is the story of a woman whose strength of vision led her to defy the social restrictions of the day.