Honor roll:Romance books
From AwardAnnals
Each of these Romance books has received at least one award nomination. They are ranked by honors received.
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Paladin of Souls: A Novel
One of the most honored authors in the field of fantasy and science fiction, Lois McMaster Bujold transports us once more to a dark and troubled land and embroils us in a desperate struggle to preserve the endangered souls of a realm.
Three years have passed since the widowed Dowager Royina Ista found release from the curse of madness that kept her imprisoned in her family’s castle of Valenda. Her newfound freedom is costly, bittersweet with memories, regrets, and guilty secrets—for she knows the truth of what brought her land to the brink of destruction. And now the road—escape—beckons.…A simple pilgrimage, perhaps. Quite fitting for the Dowager Royina of all Chalion.
Yet something else is free, too—something beyond deadly. To the north lies the vital border fortress of Porifors. Memories linger there as well, of wars and invasions and the mighty Golden General of Jokona. And someone, something, watches from across that border—humans, demons, gods.
Ista thinks her little party of pilgrims wanders at will. But whose? When Ista’s retinue is unexpectedly set upon not…
- 1997 Anthony-Novel nominee
- 1997 Barry-Novel nominee
- 1997 Edgar–Novel nominee
- 1996 Agatha–Novel nominee
- Score: 24.47
Independent Hannah Trevor is a midwife in the small Maine town of Rufford several years after the end of the Revolutionary War. In the dead of a particularly brutal winter, an horrific act—the rape and murder of a young wife—draws Hannah into the constabulary’s investigation and threatens to destroy everything she holds dear. Now an honorable man has been accused of the crime—Hannah’s former lover, the father of her illegitimate daughter.
On the eve of the Daughter’s Day—the grand celebration that will honor the Lady of Spring, one of the five reigning deities—a man broken in body and spirit makes his way slowly down the road to Valenda. A former courtier and soldier, Cazaril has survived indignity and horrific torture as a slave aboard an enemy galley. Now he seeks nothing more than a menial job in the kitchens of the Dowager Provincara, in the noble household where he served as page in his youth.
But the gods have greater plans for this humbled man. Welcomed warmly, clothed and fed, he is named, to his great surprise, secretary tutor to the Royesse Iselle—the beautiful, strong-willed sister of the impetuous boy who is destined to be the next ruler of the land. But the assignment must ultimately carry Cazaril to the one place he fears even more than the sea: to the royal court of Cardegoss, rife with intrigues and lethal treacheries.
In Cardegoss, the powerful enemies who once placed Cozoril in chains and bound him to a Roknori oar now occupy the most lofty positions in the realm, beneath only the Roya himself.…
- 1997 Agatha–1st Novel winner
- 1998 Barry-Paperback nominee
- 1998 Macavity-1st Novel nominee
- Score: 22.47
Japanese-American Rei Shimura is a 27-year-old English teacher living in one of Tokyo’s seediest neighborhoods. She doesn’t make much money, but she wouldn’t go back home to California even if she had a free ticket (which, thanks to her parents, she does.) Her independence is threatened however, when a getaway to an ancient castle town is marred by murder.
Rei is the first to find the beautiful wife of a high-powered businessman, dead in the snow. Taking charge, as usual, Rei searches for clues by crashing a funeral, posing as a bar-girl, and somehow ending up pursued by police and paparazzi alike. In the meantime, she manages to piece together a strange, ever-changing puzzle—one that is built on lies and held together by years of sex and deception.
Eight years had passed since fate left its mark on her grandfather’s ranch. Shedding her new name and identity, Amelia Rawlins came out of anonymity and back home—a place of childhood memories, a place where she could walk with her grandfather’s spirit and carry on his work. But the horrors of the past also found a home there, and her return didn’t escape the vengeful eyes of someone who thought Amelia had no right to be spared on that long-ago dreadful day.
Breathing Lessons is the wonderfully moving and surprising story of Ira and Maggie Moran. She’s impetuous, harum-scarum, easy-going; he’s competent, patient, seemingly infallible. They’ve been married for 28 years. Now, as they drive from their home in Baltimore to the funeral of Maggie’s best friend’s husband, Anne Tyler shows us all there is to know about a marriage—the expectations, the disappointments, the way children can create storms in a family, the way a wife and husband can fall in love all over again, the way nothing really changes.
A Sudden Country: A Novel
A vivid and revelatory novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, A Sudden Country follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption.
James MacLaren, once a resourceful and ambitious Hudson’s Bay Company trader, has renounced his aspirations for a quiet family life in the Bitterroot wilderness. Yet his life is overturned in the winter of 1846, when his Nez Perce wife deserts him and his children die of smallpox. In the grip of a profound sorrow, MacLaren, whose home once spanned a continent, sets out to find his wife. But an act of secret vengeance changes his course, introducing him to a different wife and mother: Lucy Mitchell, journeying westward with her family.
Lucy, a remarried widow, careful mother, and reluctant emigrant, is drawn at once to the self-possessed MacLaren. Convinced that he is the key to her family’s safe passage, she persuades her husband to employ him. As their hidden stories and obsessions unfold, and pasts and cultures collide, both Lucy and MacLaren must confront the people they have…
Blood is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Novel
Alex McKnight isn’t a man with many friends, but the few he has know they’re never alone in a fix. So when Vinnie LeBlanc asks for his help in taking a trip deep into Canada in search of his missing brother, the Ojibwa Indian knows he can count on Alex. Tom LeBlanc had taken a job as hunting guide for a rough crew of Detroit “businessmen.” The group was due back days ago, yet there’s been no sign of them, and there’s mounting evidence of something odd about their disappearing act. The trackless forests of northern Ontario keep many secrets, but none more shocking than the one that Alex is about to uncover. And the more closely Alex looks for answers, the more the questions become: where are the hunters…and who is the prey?
Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she’s nothing, a shadow: after faking her own suicide, she’s living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she’s dead. Or so she hopes.
Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased—as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa.
These clues point Paz inexorably toward the fugitive, Jane Doe, and force Jane to realize that the darkness she has fled is seeking her out, hunting her down. By the time her path intersects with Jimmy Paz’s, the two will be thrust into a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil unimaginable to the Western mind.
Tiger's Palette: A Caroline Canfield Mystery
With a habit of looking everywhere except where she’s going, thirty-one-year-old wildlife artist Caroline Canfield knows one thing for sure: accidents have a way of finding her. So after her free-spirited mentor, Anthony Chirico, plunges to his suspicious death from a scaffold, Caroline initially turns down the chance to finish his jungle mural at the Fox Valley Zoo. Aware of Tony’s penchant for leaving hidden messages in his work, Caroline starts to wonder if his fall was no accident—and when she finds Tony’s assistant with a knife in his throat, she gets the point that someone desperately wants to keep the zoo’s new exhibit from opening.
Spurred by her desire to know the truth and uncover the secrets of the mural, Caroline reluctantly accepts the Fox Valley Zoo commission. But working at the zoo isn’t a walk in the park—animals are being threatened and “accidents” start happening with alarming frequency. If Caroline doesn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together soon, she may never get out of this jungle alive.
- Works 1–10 of 52
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