You Dreamed of Empires offers a reimagined encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma. When history is retold in such an irreverent, unprecious manner, there are no winners—except the reader.
Maria Hummel’s Goldenseal is an inventive, immersive novel recounting the reunion of two old friends 40 years after a dramatic rupture.
Readers who found their love of pirates rekindled by the HBO superhit “Our Flag Means Death” will be enamored by this piratical retelling in which the heroes are as unlikely as buried treasure itself.
In her captivating historical novel Becoming Madame Mao, Anchee Min tells the story of Yunhe, an aspiring actress who eventually married Mao Zedong.
Inspired by historical events, The Last Queen chronicles the life of Jindan, a lowborn girl who married the Maharajah of the Sikh Empire and later defied the British Empire.
Emotionally charged and meticulously researched, We Must Not Think of Ourselves pays homage to the Oneg Shabbat’s goal of honoring the Jewish people by bearing witness to the entirety of their experience.
We sometimes forget that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey toward God. Jesmyn Ward’s portrayal of slavery is the profound manifestation of that possibility.
The Liberators is another resounding triumph for E.J. Koh: a brave exploration of the complexities of the human experience and the impossible task of making peace with the past.
Ye Chun personalizes both the fear and despair that pervaded the lives of 19th-century Chinese immigrants to the U.S. and the fortitude, hope and love that they cultivated anyway.
Tan Twan Eng’s eye for detail and understated storytelling bring a subtle edge to this thoughtfully written, atypical historical novel that searches for the emotional truth behind the facts.
The great gift of this stunning, mesmeric novel is that Blakemore never loses sight of the warm, thrumming humanity that is Tarare. He’s a man, he’s a monster, he’s a frightened boy, and he’s a living myth.
Set in Quebec, Joanna Goodman’s The Home for Unwanted Girls is a moving portrayal of family dynamics in the 1950s.
Echoing America’s dark history of settlers forcing their religion on Indigenous peoples, The End of Drum-Time will leave a lasting impression on all readers of historical fiction.
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