New Books in Historical Fiction

Here at New Books in Historical Fiction, we don’t often interview the same author twice. Bernard Cornwell is an exception. As I note in my introduction to this podcast, since I last interviewed him in June 2014, he has published three new Saxon Stories (now renamed the Last Kingdom series) and a nonfiction history of the confrontation between Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo. Meanwhile, the BBC...

So far, this podcast has focused on straight historical fiction rather than historical romance. Although love stories have a way of creeping into novels whatever their genre, books that focus on instantaneous passion don’t always give equal weight to the historical element in historical fiction. The series written by the mother/daughter team that publishes under the pen name Ursula LeCoeur, howeve...

Paris, 1676. At the house of the fortuneteller Catherine Montvoisin (La Voisin), while two hooded forms watch, a wayward priest burns a piece of parchment in a spell designed to awaken the passions of Louis XIV of France. Three years later, those performing the ceremony become the target of a police investigation into the so-called Affair of the Poisons. Through interrogation, strategic imprisonme...

It’s 1921, and Prohibition is in full swing, but you wouldn’t know it from the nightclubs and speakeasies of Chicago, where bathtub gin mingles with homemade bourbon distilled from trainloads of corn sugar shipped up from Southern farms. A young man named Al Capone is on his way up, the bar owners squabble over control of the sugar trade, and the police know to turn a blind eye. So when a drive-by...

Although the Holocaust inflicted extreme brutality wherever it occurred, the specific events associated with the violence differed from one place to another. In Tasa’s Song (She Writes Press, 2016), Linda Kass weaves stories of her own mother’s life in eastern Poland under Soviet and Nazi occupation to create a universal story of suffering and survival. Tasa Rosinski is a violinist, a child prodig...

For more than three centuries after the Mongol conquest of 1240, the rulers of the Golden Horde played a major role in Eurasian politics, both directly and indirectly. One of the states most affected was Russia, where the ruling house of Moscow played the post-conquest political game so successfully that it made itself the center of the resurgent Russian tsardom. In her Legends of the Five Directi...

Cypress Island, September 1896: a tragedy has left a young widow, mourning her child, living alone in a cabin on this isolated spot near Bellingham Bay in the very new state of Washington. Once a month or so, Eliza Waite rows two hours each way to the general store on the mainland for supplies. Otherwise, she supports herself through hard work: chopping wood, maintaining a vegetable garden, fishin...

In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, the grip of European knights on the Holy Land has begun to loosen. The Muslim forces under Saladin have won a major victory, and the crusaders have so far forgotten themselves as to besiege, then sack, the imperial Christian city of Constantinople their nominal allies. In the confusion thus created, two warring clans the Lusignans and the Ibelin sat times co...

It’s May 1945, and a pair of American GIs in occupied Germany find themselves at what appears to be an abandoned estate. When they enter, they discover a resident, reduced to burning valuable books for fuel. Within an hour, the resident is dead and the GIs are speeding back to their camp, a few souvenirs in their rucksacks. So begins And After the Fire (Harper, 2016), the new book from bestselling...

Sara Thibault and her new husband, Philippe Lemieux, grew up in Vouvray, amid the French vineyards that dot the Loire Valley. But when the phylloxera blight of the 1870s devastates their families business, Philippe decides to try his luck in California. Sara soon follows, driven by a tragic series of events detailed in The Vintner’s Daughter. The California Wife (She Writes Press, 2016),the stand-...

A hundred years before Ellis Island became a processing center for immigrants wishing to enter the United States, Philadelphia had the Lazaretto, a quarantine hospital where every ship entering the harbor from June to September had to stop while those aboard were checked for signs of infectious disease. In a city already known for its diversity by the mid-nineteenth century, the Lazaretto represen...

A ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theatre, near Times Square in New York. She wears a green outfit in flapper style, and she’s just a little annoyed to realize that no one is scared of her, even though she mostly rearranges the scenery rather than clanking chains or leaping out and scaring people. Her name is Olive Thomas, and she is one of the first silent movie stars, although her early death mea...

In four thousand years of Chinese history, Empress Wu stands alone as the only woman to rule in her own name. She died in her eighties after decades of successful governance, but her sons could not hold the kingdom she established for them and the dynasty she founded soon fell from power. The Confucian scholars who recorded her history—outraged by the idea of a woman ordering men—depicted a mu...

The Wild West of Zane Grey and John Wayne movies, with its clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians (never called Native Americans in this narrative), bears little resemblance to the brawling, boozy refuge for every Civil War-displaced vagabond, seeker of gold (copper, tin, silver, oil), and would-be financier that once constituted the US frontier. In two novels about Do...

In 1530, Babur the Tiger, the self-proclaimed ruler of Afghanistan, moved south and conquered the northwest section of what was then known as Hindustan. Babur, although accepted as padishah and emperor, never much cared for India, but his descendants flourished there until the British moved in more than three centuries later. Faint Promise of Rain (She Writes Press, 2014) explores the early part o...

Long before Genghis Khan set off to conquer the known world, the pattern of steppe warriors attacking–and often defeating–settled empires was well established. Only a few names of those who led these effective but mostly short-lived campaigns have become cultural references familiar to a general audience, but Attila the Hun looms large in that group–almost as large as Genghis himself. In the fifth...

The reverberations of Henry VIII’s tumultuous reign continued to echo long after the monarch’s death. England teetered into Protestantism, then veered back into Catholicism before settling into an uneasy peace with the ascension of Elizabeth I. But for the survivors of the first two shifts, the approaching death of Mary Tudor in 1558 created great anxiety. No one knew, then, that Elizabeth would c...

The year 1348 is not a good time to be a healer in Europe. Midwife Heloise lives in a cottage outside Lucie-sur-Vionne, where she walks an awkward line between villagers who need her services and others who fear that she owes more to the black arts than their medical counterparts. When she threatens an invading bandit chieftain with the power of her angel talisman, her enemies are more than ever c...

Even people who have never read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and its two sequels (Little Men and Jo’s Boys) probably have at least a vague memory of hearing about the March girls–Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy–whose father is away serving as a chaplain in the U.S. Civil War and who often struggle to put bread on the table. Meg, the oldest sister, follows a conventional life for the time by marrying yo...

Of the brutal conflicts that characterized the twentieth century, none equaled in scale the catastrophe that struck China when the Japanese occupied the northern part of the country just as the Civil War was picking up steam. According to some estimates, 22.5 million people died in these twin acts of destruction. Dreams of the Red Phoenix (Unbridled Books, 2015)  takes place during a few weeks in...

Many historical novels explore the highways and byways of Tudor England, especially the marital troubles of Henry VIII, which makes it all the more pleasant when an author approaches that much-visited time and place with a fresh eye. In her The Cross and the Crown series–which currently consists of The Altarpiece, City of Ladies, and The King’s Sisters—Sarah Kennedy looks at Henry’s roller-coaster...

Many novels look at World War II–what happened, why it happened, how the world would have changed if the war had never occurred or had taken a different course. In The Cherry Harvest (William Morrow, 2015), Lucy Sanna approaches World War II from a different perspective: its impact on farming communities in the Midwest and the little-known history of German prisoners of war brought for confinement...

Scotland, 1296: William Wallace is leading the resistance against the English while the clans fight one another as fiercely as they attack the invaders from the south. Two candidates in particular claim the throne: the Red Comyn and Bruce the Competitor. Neither can rule without support from Clan Macduff. But when Comyn secures the hand of Isabelle Macduff for his heir, his success appears assured...

From World War I, we jump back more than a hundred years and across an ocean. Napoleon, still First Consul, has convinced the surrounding nations to accept a series of treaties that he violates as it suits him. Great Britain, weary of war, clings to the Treaty of Amiens, determined to play the ostrich even as evidence mounts that Napoleon is massing an invasion fleet on the northern coast of Franc...

Boston in 1915 is a town on the move. Prohibition creates opportunities for corruption and evasion of the law. Stock scandals and political machinations keep the news wires humming. Women agitate for the vote, socialists for the good of the common man. A new sports phenomenon, the nineteen-year-old Babe Ruth, sparks enthusiasm for the local team by hitting one home run after another. A new inventi...