New Books In Historical Fiction

In a town in eastern Gallia, circa 65 AD, an old woman learns that she has lost the last of her siblings, a man she has not seen for thirty years. The news propels her back into memories of her past as Mariam, the rebellious young daughter of a carpenter in Galilee and her experiences with her family, including her oldest brother, Yeshûa–the New Testament’s Jesus of Nazareth. Yeshûa struggles to find his place and his mission in Roman-occupied Judah, a hotbed of unrest where Galileans are especially suspect. For a while, he lives among the Essenes, where he masters their medical knowledge, but after a year he realizes that his low social standing limits his advancement within the order. The Essenes’ philosophy is, in any case, too restrictive for him. Yeshûa returns home, determined to aid the poor as a healer and a teacher. But his neighbors, and even his own family, have little sympathy for Yeshûa in this new role. So he sets off on a journey that will lead him to the Sea of Galilee an

From sixteenth-century Venice we move back a century and travel north to Mainz, Germany, where a “madman” named Johannes Gutenberg has invented a radical new method of making books. Like any technological genius, Gutenberg needs venture capitalists to finance his workshop and skilled craftsmen and designers to turn his ideas into reality. He finds a financier in Johann Fust, a wealthy merchant and seller of manuscript books. Indirectly, this relationship also brings in a new craftsman when Fust calls his adopted son, Peter Schaffer, back from Paris, where Peter is making his name as a scribe, and forces him to become Gutenberg’s apprentice. Like many people in the early days of printing, Peter is initially repelled by the ugliness and the mechanical appearance of books produced using movable type, an invention that to him seems more satanic than divinely inspired. But Fust will not release Peter from his apprenticeship, and the young scribe is soon learning to man the press and cut type as G

As the son and heir to the workshop of sixteenth-century Venice’s premier gondola maker, Luca Vianello has his career, his marriage, and his place in society mapped out for him. True, his stern father still grieves for Luca’s older brother who died in childhood. And Luca’s left-handedness–viewed in Renaissance Europe as sinister, even demonic–provokes blows from his father even as it causes him to lag behind his younger brother in developing his skills. But it is only when tragedy shoots Luca out of his family’s boat-building business altogether that he can envision the possibility of change. Through luck, Luca lands a position in another Venetian boatyard, far less prosperous than the workshop to which he was born. He loads boxes, succeeds as an errand boy, and befriends an older, more experienced gondolier determined to introduce Luca to the charms of wine, women, and on-the-side deals. Before long, Luca has become the private boatman of Master Trevisan, painter to Venice

The year is 1860, months before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. Officially, slavery does not exist in Oregon, but the brand-new U.S. state has no compunction about driving most African-Americans out of its territory and violating the civil rights of the few permitted to remain. Worthy Brown, once a slave, has followed his master from Georgia on the understanding that he and his daughter will receive their freedom in return for helping their master establish his homestead near Portland. Indeed, the master, Caleb Barbour, does emancipate Worthy Brown as agreed. But he refuses to let go of Worthy’s fifteen-year-old daughter. Worthy’s options for securing his daughter’s release are limited, but he obtains support from Matthew Penny, a recently widowed young lawyer just arrived from Ohio. Alas, Caleb Barbour is also a lawyer, wealthier and better connected than Matthew, and their clash of personalities unleashes a series of events that threatens not only their own lives but those of Worthy an

Women in the Western world take many things for granted: the right to an education and a career, to walk in the street unaccompanied, to make personal decisions, to choose a marriage partner–or whether to marry at all. Female characters in historical fiction seldom enjoy such control over their own lives. Even today, as Nadia Hashimi shows in The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (William Morrow, 2014), the lives of women in rural Afghanistan remain as constrained by traditional demands as they were centuries ago. Afghanistan is far from the only place where such a statement applies. Yet this restricted cultural space includes customs that temporarily allow girls to live as boys or women as men. Male dominance of society can, it seems, withstand the cross-dressing of individual females. Through the lives of two young women living a century apart–Rahima, whose family turns her for a while into the son her mother did not have, and her great-great-grandmother Shekiba, ordered to don men’s clothes and

Historical fiction, by definition, supplements the verifiable documentary record with elements of the imagination. Otherwise, it is not fiction but history. These elements often include invented characters, made-up dialogue, the filling in of vague or unknowable events and personalities. Through the more or less careful manipulation of historical truth, the novelist seeks to uncover a deeper emotional truth that speaks to both the reality of a past time and the needs of the present. Before and During (Dedalus Books, 2014)–Vladimir Sharov’s exploration of Soviet life and the revolutionary movement that preceded it, skillfully translated by Oliver Ready–pushes historical invention to its limits. Set in a Moscow psychiatric hospital circa 1965, the novel follows a patient identified only as Alyosha as he pursues his self-assigned quest to create a Memorial Book of the Dead, à la Ivan the Terrible, by recording the life stories of those around him and people of importance in his own past. One f

No fan of Renaissance history can ignore the far-reaching influence–or the legendary corruption–of the Borgia family. From Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, to his scheming, possibly murderous sons, to his daughter Lucrezia whose reputation for debauchery still follows her ghost to this day, the Borgias were certainly one of the most memorable families of their time. A key figure in the family’s infamy was Giulia Farnese, the young mistress of the powerful pope. With floor-length golden hair and looks that inspired artists, Giulia was certainly beautiful. But she must have been much more than merely a stunning woman: she was the only person to escape the orbit of the cunning and destructive Borgias and live to tell the tale. In The Serpent and the Pearl (Berkeley Trade, 2013) the rise of the Borgias is examined through the eyes of three unforgettable characters: Carmelina, a cook with a life-or-death secret to keep; Leonello, a knife-wielding dwarf on the trail of a serial killer

In North America, the year 1492 is inextricably linked to Columbus’s discovery of the West Indies, funded by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. But in Spain itself, the year brought two events that at the time appeared more vital to the health and spiritual purity of the kingdom: the conquest of Granada from the last Muslim rulers of Andalusia, and the expulsion of the Jews whose families had inhabited Iberia since the height of the Roman Empire. Against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, The Mapmaker’s Daughter (Sourcebooks, 2014) tells the story of Amalia Riba–child of a converso family whose father embraces Christianity to save his family and whose mother pays lip service to the new religion even as she teaches her daughters to observe Jewish ritual in secret. During Amalia’s long and varied life, she travels from her childhood home in Sevilla to Portugal and to Castile, to Granada and to Valencia–accompanied by the exquisitely decorated atlas painted by her gre

From the Saxons and Danes warring in the British Isles, this month’s interview skews dramatically eastward and dives back two centuries in time, although the circumstances of war and unrest will seem remarkably familiar. Nanidat, head of the Maniakh trading house, has just returned from two years in Chang’an, the capital of Tang Dynasty China–three months’ away along the Silk Road from his home in Samarkand. It is 749 CE. The House of Maniakh–like Samarkand and the surrounding lands–is slowly recovering from a recent invasion by the Arabs, who have striven to impose their rule and their religion on the Zoroastrian and Buddhist Sogdians. Nanidat looks forward to a relaxing visit filled with wine, women, and poetry before he again mounts his camel to return to his beloved Chang’an. Instead, he is less than halfway through the opening reception before a pair of strangers try to murder him. The next morning, his knife wound still raw, Nanidat finds himself bundled out of

As fans of Uhtred of Bebbanburg know, England in the ninth and tenth centuries is just an idea–a hope held by the kings of Wessex that they may someday unite the lands occupied by the Angles and Saxons, most of whom then lived under the control of Danish invaders. Not only England’s future hangs in the balance: spurred by King Alfred the Great of Wessex, Christianity has spread rapidly among the Saxons, but that early success threatens to crumble if the pagan Danes complete their conquest as planned. Enter Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a Northumbrian lord of Saxon descent, raised by the Danes and defiantly pagan, a warrior and leader of men. The rulers of Wessex can’t decide what to make of him, but they grudgingly admit that they need his help. As victory follows victory, Uhtred gains and loses estates, marries and buries wives, takes lovers both peasant and royal, and goes from battle to battle, dragging his sons in his wake. Uhtred has a cherished dream of his own, to reclaim Bebbanburg–his

Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty seems both impossibly distant in time and disconcertingly present. Over 250 years, the dynasty produced several of the rulers best known to modern Western culture: Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, Tutankhamen (Tut), and Hatshepsut, the most famous of the handful of women who ruled Egypt as pharaoh. The Sekhmet Bed begins a few years before Hatshepsut’s birth, with the death of Pharaoh Amenhotep I in 1503 BCE. He leaves two daughters, Mutnofret and Ahmose, to marry–and therefore legitimate–the next pharaoh. The marriage surprises neither of them, but in an unexpected twist the thirteen-year-old Ahmose is proclaimed Great Royal Wife while her older sister has to settle for second place. Mutnofret does not take her perceived demotion lying down, and she uses her greater maturity to seduce the pharaoh. She is soon fulfilling the main obligation of a queen: to bear royal sons. But Ahmose, a visionary, has the ear of the gods–the reason she received the title

Lina Sparrow can’t believe her luck when the boss at her fancy New York law firm offers her a once-in-a-lifetime chance: find a suitable plaintiff for a class-action suit to be lodged against the U.S. government and fifty rich corporations that profited from slave labor before the Civil War. The wealthy technocrat intent on pushing this suit for reparations claims he has a deal that will protect Lina’s law firm from going head to head against the government, and the case seems guaranteed to generate lots of publicity and a lovely bag of cash for the law firm. But the pressure is on: Lina has only a few weeks to find the right person and convince him or her to play along. Luck again appears to favor her when a friend of her artist father alerts her to a recent controversy surrounding the paintings of Luanne Bell, a plantation lady from the 1850s whose art portrays her slave laborers with extraordinary complexity and compassion. Are the paintings Luanne’s, or the work of her house girl Josephi

It seems fair to say that a large proportion of the English-speaking reading public has encountered Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice, either on the page or in one of the many adaptations for stage, screen, and television. At the same time, the number of avid Austen readers who remember much about Mary, the third of the five Bennet sisters, is almost certainly small. Mary rates so little time on the page that scholars have questioned the need for her existence: could Austen not have made her point with three daughters, or at most four? Mary is the sister in the middle–solemn and unattractive, liable to put her foot in her mouth at any moment, more enthusiastic than skilled at the piano. She is, in modern terms, the perfect subject for a makeover–which she receives to great effect in The Pursuit of Mary Bennet (William Morrow, 2013). Three years after the events in Pride and Prejudice, Mary is dwindling into spinsterhood, in her own mind and that of her mother–a grim futur

The chivalric society of medieval Europe resembled a pyramid, with each man sworn to serve the lord above him in a social hierarchy that reached up to the king. A warrior without a lord had no future, no means of support, no identity. So when Tancred, a Breton knight sworn to defend the newly appointed earl of Northumbria, loses his lord in an English raid, the loss not only deprives him of a leader as close as a father but threatens his entire sense of himself. No matter that Tancred is away on another mission when the raid begins, that he fights nobly to defend his embattled lord, that he loses his sweetheart and almost his life in the raid. He has broken his oath, despite his best efforts, and no other lord trusts him to fulfill the terms of his service. It is England in 1069, three years after the Battle of Hastings, and Tancred is fighting for the Norman invaders in hostile territory, where the English forces have rallied under the leadership of Edgar, the last Saxon prince. The earl of Northumbria and m

In March 1912, a college student at the University of Illinois takes time away from his usual pursuits–painting the dean’s horse blue, climbing dorm walls with a sack of squirrels, reading Huckleberry Finn–to write a letter to a Scottish poet living on the remote Isle of Skye. As the young man, David Graham, notes in his first paragraph, poetry is not his usual literary fare, but something in this book has touched his soul. A few weeks later, his poet, Elspeth Dunn, responds, initiating a conversation that will flourish as friendship and eventually as romance, with consequences that reach across the first world war and into the next. To sustain a novel entirely through the exchange of letters poses a challenge to any writer, although the epistolary novel itself has a long tradition: the earliest novels adopted this form. Here David and Elspeth emerge as two distinct personalities, drawn to each other across the cultural divide symbolized by the Atlantic Ocean and the greater divide that prop

On the night of March 9, 1948, fire consumed the Central Building at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Although people at the time recognized that the fire had been set, the local police department never identified the arsonist. Among the nine women who died on a locked floor at the top of building was Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife (by then, widow) of the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda’s storybook life had led her from the Beauty Ball of Montgomery, Alabama, to marriage at seventeen and the joys and excesses of the Jazz Age (a term coined by her husband). But the early 1930s brought repeated hospitalizations for schizophrenia. Whenever possible, Zelda wrote and painted and danced, yet she remains known to history primarily as the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan and other rich, spoiled, shallow Fitzgerald heroines. In Guests on Earth (Algonquin Books, 2013), Lee Smith sets out to correct our images of Zelda. In doing so, she raises questions of what it means to be “crazy,

London, December 1563. Elizabeth I–Gloriana, the Virgin Queen–has ruled England for five years, but her throne is far from secure. Even though Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister Mary, the idea of a woman sovereign still troubles much of the populace. And although the burnings of Protestants at Smithfield ceased with Elizabeth’s accession, religion remains a source of dissatisfaction and uncertainty. Catholics, once protected by the crown, find themselves subject to unwarranted search and seizure, to having their ears nailed to the pillory or sliced from their heads, to arrest and confinement in the Tower on the merest suspicion of intent to foment unrest. Not all the plots are imaginary, either: several rebellions with religious overtones punctuate Elizabeth’s reign. Amid this atmosphere of mistrust, William Harley, Clarenceux King of Arms, sits in the light of a single candle, listening to the rain outside his study window, his robe pulled tight against the December chill. A knock on

In 476 CE, according to the chronology most of us learned in school, the Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages began. That’s how textbook chronologies work: one day you’re studying the Romans, and next day you’re deep in early feudal Europe, as if a fairy godmother had waved a magic wand. Reality is more complex. The Fall of Rome affected only the western territories of that great world power, which had in fact been weakening for some time. The Eastern Roman Empire–later known as Byzantium or the Byzantine Empire–survived for another thousand years. Recast under Turkish rule as the Ottoman Empire, it lasted five hundred years more. But the Eastern Roman Empire endured shocks and fissures of its own, and its survival was far from assured. Under the rule of Emperor Justinian I and his empress, Theodora, it entered a crucial phase. Justinian began life as a swineherd, Theodora as a bear keeper’s daughter, yet they fought their way to the pinnacle of power in Constantinople and,

Malaya, 1893. Pan Li Lan, a beautiful eighteen-year-old, has watched her Chinese merchant family decline since the death of her mother from smallpox during Li Lan’s early childhood. Her father lives in isolation and smokes too much opium: bad for business, as anyone can see from the decaying surroundings of their Malacca estate. Li Lan knows that her prospects of finding a husband are poor. Still, she does not expect her father to offer a dead man as bridegroom–even one whose family promises to keep her in luxury for the rest of her life. When Li Lan’s would-be husband begins to haunt her dreams–and she falls for his cousin in reality–her desperation to escape leads her on a journey through the Chinese afterlife, searching for the key that will free her from a marriage she dreads. But she slowly realizes that to succeed, she must uncover the secrets of her past … and her prospective groom’s. The Ghost Bride (HarperCollins, 2013) opens a window on a fascinating and lit

Few possibilities terrify parents more than the kidnapping of a child. Guilt, grief, helplessness, anger, and immobilizing fear mingle to create an emotional stew with a mix of ingredients that varies just enough from person to person to reveal the cracks in once-solid relationships, leaving individuals struggling alone–and often against each other. If the parents are, in addition, early twentieth-century missionaries in a great and ancient land hidden from them as much by their own cultural arrogance and misperceptions as by the unfamiliarity of the terrain, such a crisis raises additional questions: Has my God forsaken me? Have I sinned against Him? Is the husband I considered the master of my soul capable of guidance, or does he in fact require my assistance to find his way home? Virginia Pye in her luminous debut novel, River of Dust (Unbridled Books, 2013), explores these questions and more through the reactions of Grace Watson and her husband, the Reverend John Wesley Watson, to the abduction of t