The Avelrow shelf
These books match the feeling and story ingredients you chose. Adjust the mix whenever you like.
Historical
Cormac Ashdown
In 1879 Emerald Harbour, schoolmistress Eleanor Vale is pulled into a murder investigation when Lord Bellweather is shot during Harbour Day and a missing child’s pageant crown conceals a note in her dead brother’s hand. With a dockside stranger warning her that respectable power has buried more than one truth, Eleanor must choose between the obedience that preserved her family name and the evidence that could save a child, expose a town, and burn every reputation built on silence.
Jacobite Historical
Mairi Douglas
The key was still warm from the dead woman’s hand when Eilidh Cameron understood that loyalty had a sound: iron against bone, small as a breath, final as a kirk bell. She stood in the back passage of Harbour House with her apron streaked in lampblack and rain, while the dining room beyond the green baize door roared with men pretending history was something they could drink into obedience.
Medieval Historical
Fergus MacAlpin
The bell from the iron chapel rang once before dawn, though every man in Emerald Harbour knew the chapel had no bell. It had not had one since the old raid, when fire took the roof, sea-wind took the ashes, and Lord Bradan's men swore the saints themselves had gone silent rather than bless the blood that soaked the flagstones. Fergus MacAlpin heard that single impossible note while standing ankle-deep in the tidal mud with a stolen child under his cloak and his own clan's oath-stone warm against his breast.
Irish Historical
Branna O'Dwyer
Emerald Harbour, 1882. Schoolmistress Nóra Friel turns a respectable charity concert into an act of rebellion when she sings the forbidden final verse of her father's ballad, exposing the hunger and evictions powerful men prefer unnamed. Arrested into the uneasy custody of Cormac Ó Dálaigh—a childhood friend now working among the very ledgers the town distrusts—Nóra discovers the song may point to proof of stolen relief, illegal evictions and a conspiracy her father died carrying.
Irish Historical Fiction
Branna O'Dwyer
Before the Scarlet Season lives in the uneasy space before change, when ordinary routines begin to carry a different weight. An Irish historical novel about family loyalties, private choices and what people sense before they are ready to name it.
Scottish Historical Fiction / Historical Romance
Alina MacRae
When Eilidh Ross splits the king’s seal and refuses an order for winter evictions, one act of defiance turns the Scottish town of Inverglass into the beginning of a republic. With soldiers closing the roads and ordinary families forced to choose between obedience and survival, Captain Fraser becomes an uneasy ally in a cause neither of them can control—and a dangerous intimacy neither expected.