Past and Present - Great Reads with Dual Time Periods

Do you enjoy fiction that has a mix of the past and present?  Here's some fun reads that feature a timeline that utilizes both, often giving the reader interesting insight that the present day character in the novel doesn't necessarily have.

The Secret Keeper

At a family party in their farm in the English countryside Laurel witnessed a shocking crime that challenges everything she knows about her family and her mother, Dorothy. Years later she has become an actress in London. When she returns for her mother's 90th birthday, long forgotten questions come back to light.  This story goes from pre-WWII England through the Blitz and to the fifties and beyond.




Those Who Save Us

Alternates between the present day, a daughter dealing with her aging and often closed off mother who refuses to discuss her past, and goes back  50 years to her mothers point of view and her harrowing experiences in Nazi Germany and her forbidden romance with a Jewish man.







The Historian

A daughter tries to find out more about her fathers past and her mother's mysterious fate through old letters and an ancient book.
Alternates between the historical, the point of view of the father, and the point of view of his daughter.








The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

In the present day Eloise travels to England to further research her dissertation on a pair of spies,  only to discover one that history seems to have missed. Story alternates between Eloise and the past following the tale of the Pink Carnation, a spy who helped save England from Napoleon.







Russian Winter: A Novel 

An aging former Soviet-era ballerina now living in Boston is auctioning off her jewelry.  Selling it awakens memories of her past in Soviet Russia, bringing the reader back in time to her former life, revealing her dark secret.