Widge is an orphan with a rare talent for shorthand. His fearsome master has just one demand: steal Shakespeare's play "Hamlet"--or else. Widge has no choice but to follow orders, so he works his way into the heart of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare's players perform. There he discovers the meaning of friendship and loyalty.  (M)

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.  (A/YA)

Sixteen year-old Griet, a servant in the house of Dutch painter Vermeer, is the fictional subject of his famous painting, 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. The household is turned upside down when everyone questions whether Griet is more than a model to Vermeer.  (A/YA)

As the child of two musicians, twelve-year-old James has no interest in music until he discovers a portal to seventeenth-century London in his uncle's basement, and finds himself in a situation where his beautiful voice and the fact that he is biracial might serve him well.  (M,J)

In the summer of 1665, Hannah travels to London to live with her older sister, Sarah, the owner of a sweetmeats shop. But the bubonic plague begins taking hold, and although Hannah enjoys the excitement of big-city life, the realities of the epidemic soon become impossible to ignore.  (M,J)

Mary's grandmother is executed for witchcraft, and Mary is forced to leave her home to avoid the same fate. At first she flees to the English countryside, but when the atmosphere of superstition and suspicion becomes all consuming she leaves on a boat for America in the hope that she can start over and forget her past. But during the journey, she realizes that the past is not so easy to escape.  (M,J,S)

Eighteen-year-old Agnes, a Mohawk Indian who is descended from a line of shamanic healers, uses her own newly-discovered powers to uncover the story of her ancestor, a seventeenth-century New England English healer who fled charges of witchcraft to make her life with the local Indians. Sequel to Witch Child.  (M,J,S)

In England in 1662, a time of religious persecution, fifteen-year-old Susanna, a poor country girl and a Quaker, and seventeen-year-old William, a wealthy Anglican, meet and fall in love against all odds.  (M,J,S)

Cast out by his father for becoming a Quaker, the newly independent Will travels from the countryside to London to earn a living. He and his beloved Susanna wait patiently to be reunited and, at last, married. But life is difficult, and the young couple face jail, plague, and the horrifying London Fire of 1666, in this sequel to No Shame, No Fear  (M,J,S)