New Books in Historical Fiction

Today I talked to Karen Heenan about Coming Apart: A Novel of the Great Depression (2022). Ava has always been poor, so she doesn't think the Great Depression will change anything. But when her mother dies and her coal miner husband loses his job, Ava's certainty falters. The last thing she needs is a letter from her estranged sister, asking for the impossible. Claire has everything she could ever...

Miss del Río (Graydon House Books, 2022) explores the biography of a real-life actress, Dolores del Río, who became a silent movie star in Hollywood, navigated the transition to talkies, and eventually played a role in the establishment of the film industry in her home country of Mexico. The story plays out against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, which influences the lives of the character...

In Three Muses (Regal House Publishing, 2022) by Martha Toll, John Curtin survives the Holocaust by singing for the entertainment of the kommendant who murdered his family. He’s sent to America, probably by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to be adopted by a family whose son was killed fighting the war. The nourishment, love, and kindness of his new parents allows him to thrive. Years later, John...

London, 1382. The Crown's treasury, the most secure chamber in the kingdom, has been robbed, and the five guards killed. Brother Athelstan is set to investigate, but he has problems of his own, including a body found in the nave of his parish church. Join us as we speak with Paul Doherty about his recent Brother Athelstan medieval mystery, The Hanging Tree (Severn House, 2022) Paul Doherty is the...

Today I talked to Laurie R. King about her new novel Back to the Garden: A Novel (Bantam, 2022). Inspector Raquel Liang of the San Francisco Police Department has reached a crossroads in her career. A recent incident ended with her transfer to the Cold Cases Unit and instructions to do everything by the book from now on if she wants to keep her job as the SFPD’s psychological investigator. So when...

Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation (DX Varos, 2022), Larry Sommers opens in 1853 in Norway, where only firstborn sons inherited their father’s land and estate. Other children had to fend for themselves. Anders realizes that the only way he can live a life of honor is to flee to America. He escapes his uncle’s home, hides in a boat builder’s barn, and is nearly killed by Maria,...

In R. F. Kuang’s Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (Harper Voyager in 2022), we meet Robin Swift. Orphaned by Cholera in Canton in 1828, he is brought to London by a mysterious Professor Lovell, who trains him in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, to prepare him for enrollment in Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation—also know...

Madeline (Maddie) Fairbanks has created a satisfying life for herself in Jamesville since the death of her husband, Samuel, one of the town’s leading citizens. An herbalist from a long line of female healers, she provides medical care to local residents at all levels of society, traveling into the hills and from house to house with Renetta Morgan, her young assistant. Although Ren is black and Mad...

After author Judith Berlowitz found both Gestapo and Soviet records about a relative named Klara Philpsborn, she began thinking about writing Home So Far Away (She Writes Press 2022). Set in diary form, the novel opens in 1925 with a visit from Berlin to an uncle living in Sevilla, Spain. "Onkle" Julius has not told his wife and children that he is Jewish, so his visiting family can only celebrate...

Twelfth-century Europe was not a good time or place to be born female. Even queens had few rights, garnered little respect, and were tolerated largely for their ability to produce male heirs—preferably in quantity and without exhibiting any unfortunate qualities such as independence or intelligence. One notable exception was Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of England thanks to her marriage (following...

Victory Colony, 1950 (Yoda Press, 2020) by Bhaswati Ghosh is a story of resilience about East Pakistani refugees who were forced to leave their homes in East Pakistan because of their Hindu faith. After Amala’s parent are killed in the violence following the partition of India in 1947, she and her brother manage to survive until they reach Calcutta. Within moments of disembarking from their train,...

Los Angeles in the 1870s is not the sprawling city we know today. A rapidly growing pueblo of perhaps 7,000 residents, it features vineyards and ranchos, worked by an army of transient men as likely to shoot one another up in bars as stagger home after a heavy night’s drinking. Although ethnically diverse, it is riven by racism, and its relatively small female population is relegated either to the...

London, 2017. Lucille will do anything for her beloved grandmother. So when Granny Sylvie volunteers to send her to Paris to retrieve a beloved Dior creation left in the city many years ago, Lucille accepts. Why not escape for the weekend, when home means dealing with her hostile, demanding boss and a mother so uncaring that she’s forgotten Lucille’s birthday for five years in a row? Not long afte...

Today I talked to Tracy Lawson about her novel Answering Liberty's Call: Anna Stone's Daring Ride to Valley Forge (Gray Lion Books, 2021). In 1778, war is men's business. That doesn't stop Anna Stone from getting involved in the fight. As the wife of a preacher-turned-soldier, a healer, and mother of three, Anna knows her place in this world. She tends to things at home while her husband and broth...

In Black Cloud Rising (Grove Press 2022), author and scholar David Wright Faladé tells the story of Richard Etheridge, who towards the end of the Civil War joined America’s first and only “African Brigade.” Later recognized as a state hero, Etheridge is a young man when he joins the brigade in late 1863. Led by the one-armed General Edward Augustus Wild and Captain Alonzo G. Draper, the mission is...

As we soon find out in this opener to a new series set in 1830s London, Lady Caroline Morton’s illustrious heritage has been tarnished by the financial ruin and suicide of her father a few years earlier. The economic opportunities available to young women—especially noblewomen—in Victorian Britain are extremely limited. Caroline’s family has offered to support her, but life as a poor relation does...

Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese? By analyzing representations of the fam...

Lea Roback was a feminist and labor activist who was raised in a large Jewish family in Quebec, Canada. In the novel Lea (Linda Leith Publishing, 2022), Ariela Freedman describes a strong, vibrant woman whose life spanned the 20th century. Lea Roback spoke four languages, and wherever she was in the world, she fought for workers’ rights, votes for women, access to contraception and abortion, pay e...

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....

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 Jaso...

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...

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-foun...

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 lo...

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 meticu...

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. I...