New Books In Historical Fiction

Set against the backdrop of coal-rich, hard-scrabble West Virginia and "civilized," segregated Virginia, W. Jeff Barnes' Mingo (Little Star, 2021) reveals the deep divide between corporate might and those seeking a fair wage for an honest day's work. The novel plumbs the depths of brotherly love, betrayal, and the power of reconciliation amidst the deadly struggle to unionize America's coalfields. The Matney brothers are tragically fated to divergent paths: fourteen-year-old Bascom to the coal mines with his father, and younger Durwood to the care of distant family in far-off Richmond. Shaped by circumstances and time, the brothers form deeply held, conflicting beliefs about the world and their places in it. Bascom is resolved to a life underground but dreams of escape and a reunion with his brother; Durwood thrives in a life cushioned by wealth but disciplined by the promise of returning home as soon as things "settle down." Things rapidly unsettle in Mingo. The Matney brothers find themselves separated by m

Jason Redmond, a US Civil War surgeon, never expected to step into his father’s shoes as the heir to an English earldom. When he first shows up to claim his inheritance, with a scrawny twelve-year-old former drummer as his ward, Jason plans to inspect the property, then return to his home in New York. But the discovery of an obviously murdered body in the local church first casts suspicion on Jason, then involves him—in performing the postmortem and helping the parish constable, Daniel Haze, solve the crime. By the end, Jason has decided to stay in England for a while. Six books and as many cases later, Haze has moved to London for reasons explained in Murder at Ardith Hall. When the corpse of Blake Upton, a renowned Egyptologist, shows up on a ship in the London Docks, it seems only natural that Daniel should involve his friend Jason in finding out who among the potential suspects had the means, motive, and opportunity to dispatch the Egyptologist to his eternal rest in the arms of Osiris. And in this variat

Jean-Luc Guéry is a man down on his luck. Middling journalist, gambling addict, alcoholic. Yet when news of his brother’s murder in Saigon reach him in France, Guéry drops everything and travels to French Vietnam to investigate. Guéry is not the kind of main character you’d think would star in a detective novel like Bede Scott’s Too Far From Antibes (Penguin Random House, 2022)—something that many other characters in Bede’s novel remark on several occasions. Yet Scott drives Guéry through a murky plot of corruption and colonialism in a tense Saigon near the end of French colonialism. Bede Scott is Associate Professor of World Literature in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has been teaching in Singapore since 2006, when he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. Scott is the author of On Lightness in World Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2019). Today,

In this rebroadcast, John and Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (an occasional host and perennial friend of Recall this Book) speak with Madeline Miller, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Circe. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

The Lamps of Albarracin tells the story of Sarita, who looks back on her life before and after the Inquisition arrived in her town. It’s 15th century Spain, and Sarita is the daughter and assistant of the town’s Jewish doctor. She recalls living in a warm, loving household with her sisters and brother and Torah lessons taught by Solomon the Aged. She was raised with several languages and always looking forward to the next holiday. In the kingdom of Aragon, Albarracin was a town in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews still lived mostly in harmony, although the winds of change have started blowing across the Iberian Peninsula. We watch Sarita grow up – she’s skilled with healing, which helps her survive the punishment she receives from the Spanish Inquisition. She hadn’t known that she’d been baptized at birth. Rooted in Judaism, Sarita finds ways to live as her true self even when confined to a convent or masquerading as Muslim to escape the Inquisition. Edith Scott Saavedra was born in California to an Americ

Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. I spoke with novelist Ardythe Ashley about her meticulously researched historical novel that breathes new life into a writer who continues to charm and fascinate readers and audiences to this day. Ardythe Ashley is the author of The Return of the Century: The Death and Further Adventures of Oscar Wilde. While doing research for the novel, she found herself in the Library of the British Museum reading the letters Oscar Wilde wrote in his dank cell in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), later published as De Profundis. “I’m sorry, Madam,” came the firm-but-not-unkind voice of a white-gloved librarian, “but it is not permitted to weep upon the manuscripts.” In ad

From the years leading up to and into the French Revolution, we move forward in time to 1926. In Danger on the Atlantic (Kensington Publishing, 2022), Jane Wunderly, who left her home in the United States earlier in the year on a journey that took her first to Cairo, then to the English countryside, is heading back home in the company of Redvers, the enigmatic businessman she first met in Egypt. In fact, she is posing as Redvers’ wife—or should we say, he is posing as her husband, because they go by the name of Mr. and Mrs Wunderly—even though Jane has decidedly ambivalent views of matrimony, the result of bad experiences in her past. Despite her doubts, Jane enjoys being included in Redvers’ current mission: to identify a spy reported to be traveling on the Olympic, the magnificent sister ship of the Titanic. The settings are luxurious, the gig comes with magnificent clothes supplied by Redvers’ employer, and the biggest threat to Jane’s peace at first appears to be Miss Eloise Baumann, a loudmouthed New Yor

Today I talked to Joan Schweighardt about her novel River Aria (Five Directions Press, 2020). It’s 1928 and Estela Euquério Hopper, of Manaus, Brazil, is the star vocal pupil of a world-renowned musician who’d come to revive a magnificent opera house. It had been erected during the heady years when rubber seemed likely to change Brazil’s fortunes. Those days ended, and most of the population is poor and struggling. Estela has grown up among the “river brats,” but she was fortunate to have a magnificent voice, a stellar musical education, and an American father. She’s got a job offer from the Metropolitan Opera House, but it’s only to work in the sewing room. And her cousin JoJo, another river brat and a talented artist, is going to accompany her across the ocean. But secrets threaten to destroy her plans, the heady days of Prohibition are about to come to an end, and the stock market is about to crash. Joan Schweighardt studied English Lit and Philosophy at Suny New Paltz, NY and is the award-winning author o

This is a story of America! Lynden Hoover, a young man on the brink of a new beginning, cannot embrace it without confronting the traumas of his past. Help comes from The Duke, an old loner who calls America's landscape his home. He clings to an honor code, but in fleeing from Short Arm, his merciless enemy, his code is being tested. At the end of the 20th century few Knights of the Road still cling to their vanishing lifestyle. The Duke mentors Lynden, enlisting old traveling friends to keep himself and his apprentice just ahead of Short Arm's relentless pursuit. When two of those friends are murdered, the stakes become life or death. Bonds are formed, secrets exposed, sacrifices made, trusts betrayed - all against a breathtaking American landscape of promise and peril. Three unforgettable characters, hurtling toward a spellbinding climax where pasts and futures collide, and lives hang in the balance. With The Last Professional (Artemesia Publishing, 2022), Davis has done for American railroads what Kerouac

Today I talked to Leslie T. Grover about her book The Benefits of Eating White Folks (Jaded Ibis Press, 2022). The Sickness, a disease with unknown origins, is killing white children in the antebellum South, but Perpetua, a Black enslaved woman, is facing something much more devastating: Her daughter Meenie is missing. What she finds in her search for her child will change her life forever. By fusing the past and present with the power of prose and poetry, Leslie T. Grover poignantly explores the ripple effect of history and the nature of love and family and the ties that bind. Leslie T. Grover is a Black History writer and community scholar-activist. She is the founder of a small nonprofit, Assisi House, Inc., which uses the power of story to build the capacity of vulnerable communities. Her work in Narrative Medicine, social justice, and Black History has inspired this book. A native of Charleston, Mississippi, she is an unapologetic Black Southern woman, and this extends itself into her writing. Leslie’s w

France in 1755 is a country of extremes. The streets of Paris are filled with the poor and downtrodden, whereas just a few miles away lies the Palace of Versailles, with its renowned Hall of Mirrors where courtiers under the eye of Louis XV while away the hours amid endless extravagance. Once known as Louis the Well-Loved, the king has steadily lost ground with his people, and even his long-term relationship with Madame de Pompadour has entered a new phase. To retain her power and appeal to the king’s changing appetites, Madame enlists the help of Dominic-Guillaume Lebel, Louis’s valet de chambre. He sets up a school in Deer Park (le Parc des Cerfs), near the palace, where carefully selected thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls from poor families can master basic literacy, painting, music, dance, embroidery, manners, and court protocol. Those who succeed in pleasing the king leave with a dowry and an income for life. Even those who fail receive some kind of financial settlement. Véronique Roux, a printer’s d

Ruta Sepetys is an acclaimed “crossover” author (read by both young people and adults) of historical novels. In her latest novel I Must Betray You (Philomel Books, 2022) published by Philomel Books in 2022, she dramatizes the last days of the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania in 1989. A 17-year-old boy, Cristian Florescu, feels compelled to become one of the legions of civilian informants in the service of the regime to help his family. Young Cristian becomes involved in the violent revolution against the regime in December 1989. Sepetys’ story reveals the real tensions among Romanians in this closed society and the angst that drove so many ordinary people to risk their lives in revolting against the totalitarian regime. Sepetys interviewed many who lived through the last days the Ceausescu regime in order to recreate, through the use of historically informed imagination, the inherent suspicion and fear of Romanians of not only their government but also their fellow countrymen. Ian J. Dra

There is a great temptation, when writing about the past, to sanitize its circumstances and attitudes to make the characters more palatable to present-day readers. Tania Bayard, who has written four mystery novels set in fourteenth-century France, does not make that mistake. Her Paris is filthy and smelly, with muddy streets and refuse lying in heaps, horrible diseases, stray dogs, and dead rats in the gutters. Her characters, too, wallow in prejudices and superstitions of all sorts. And those streets are filled with beggars, prostitutes, thieves, cheats, and would-be sorcerers and witches, ready to prey on upstanding citizens. Yet fourteenth-century France, in these novels as in real life, also contains farsighted thinkers, gifted artists of all sorts, and would-be scientists. One of the shining lights is Christine de Pizan, a scribe at the court of Charles VI “the Mad” who will soon establish a name for herself as a poet and early feminist. Contrary to the stereotypes of medieval women as passive and obedie

Interest in the events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 has only increased since the centenary of the Romanovs’ assassination in 1918. Bryn Turnbull tackles this familiar story from the perspective of Emperor Nicholas’s eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna (1895–1918). The novel opens with a prediction, apparently made on the day of Olga’s birth, that the infant grand duchess would “not live to see thirty.” From there it moves to 1907, when the young heir to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei, is on the brink of death due to uncontrolled bleeding, the result of his hereditary hemophilia. Enter Grigori Rasputin, who enacts a miracle cure, saving the boy’s life and earning himself the undying gratitude of the desperate empress. With this central conflict established—including the secrecy maintained around the nature of Alexei’s illness for as long as he remained heir to the throne—we shift forward in time to Nicholas II’s abdication in March 1917. The two stories of the revolution and the years

Guest host Chris Holmes sits down with Booker Prize winning novelist Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies, distinguished scholar of South African literature and global modernisms at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Andrew and Damon tunnel down into the structures of Damon’s newest novel, The Promise to locate the ways in which a generational family story reflects broadly on South Africa’s present moment. The two discuss how lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic invoke for some the limitations on movement during the Apartheid era in South Africa. The Promise is a departure from Damon’s previous two novels, which were peripatetic in their global movement and range. Damon describes the ways in which this novel operates cinematically, as four flashes of a family’s long history, with the disembodied narrator being the one on the move. Damon provocatively divides novels into two traditions: those that provide consolation, and those that can provide true insight on the world but must do so with a cold distan

Starting a new historical mystery series is always fun, but summarizing one at book 7 creates a certain conundrum: how to convey the essence of a character and her development without giving away too much information? Since her first adventure in 1887 (A Curious Beginning, published in 2015), Veronica Speedwell, a lepidopterist by inclination and training, has had an exciting two years. Early in that book, she leaves a family funeral only to encounter a housebreaker and would-be abductor. She evades the villain with help from an unknown rescuer who promises to reveal a decades-old secret but dies before he can fulfill his promise. Veronica is nothing if not intrepid, and she flees London in the company of the unkempt and misanthropic Stoker. Together they attempt to discover who perpetrated the murder and why without falling under suspicion themselves. By 1889, Veronica and Stoker have tackled more than a few complicated cases. In An Impossible Impostor (Berkley Books, 2022), the head of Scotland Yard’s Spec

In the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2020) explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in central Germany, where they’ll be forced to help build the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. Eli glimpses Werher von Braun and other scientists, who helped developed the V-2 rocket and were later recruited in Operation Paperclip to work in the United States on our nascent rocket program. Hicks describes Hessel’s struggle to survive the deprivations and torture by sociopathic ‘kapos’ in control of daily humiliations, cruelty, and murder at Dora. Approximately 20,000, mostly Jews, were murdered there, and very few survived. Eli survives, immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and gets recruited by the Kennedy

Season three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne Anlin Cheng, renowned scholar of American literature and visual culture at Princeton. The conversation goes small and goes big: from the shortest short story to the totalizing effects of capitalism. Chang-rae is no stranger to such shifting scales: his novels sweep through large stretches of time and space, but their attention to detail and meticulous prose makes for an intimate reading experience. Chang-rae’s latest novel, My Year Abroad, fuels a discussion about how we can form meaningful bonds in current conditions (hint: it’s often around a table) and about the specters of other, better worlds that haunt Chang-rae’

Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more. It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United),

Even for someone trained from birth to manage a farm, stepping into an inheritance at the age of twenty is not easy. Yet this is the situation facing Promise Mears Crawford when Sunday’s Orphan opens in 1930. Trouble comes at her from many directions. Her adoptive uncle, Taylor Crawford, constructed his farm according to the principles of racial equality, in defiance of the Jim Crow laws in effect all around him. Taylor had the standing to resist opposition from his neighbors, but Promise lacks both his stature and the resources she needs to fulfill the obligations he took on. Her financial constraints land her in conflict with the farm’s foreman, Fletch Hart, a long-time friend whose dreams of becoming a physician she cannot support due to lack of funds. But the potential loss of Fletch’s friendship pales in comparison to the threat posed by the arrival of Daffron Mears, a self-appointed Jim Crow enforcer whose propensity for vigilante violence is well known throughout the county. Daffron wants a job—in fact