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Isola

Review by Melissa Brown

Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval lived in 16th-century France until she set sail with her guardian, who aimed to establish a colony near what is now Quebec. The facts of Marguerite’s true story are tantalizingly few, but, by all accounts, she and her maid, Damienne, traveled to New France along with a man who was or became Marguerite’s lover on board. Allegra Goodman’s eighth novel, Isola, celebrates this lesser-known historical figure in an exciting, imagined narrative.

When Marguerite’s tryst with her lover, Auguste (her guardian’s secretary), is discovered, her guardian banishes the couple and Damienne to an island, where they must survive the winters and wild beasts however they can. Goodman takes elements from 16th-century tales, including an account in The Heptameron, and fills in the many blanks in Marguerite’s story with exquisitely rendered imaginings of her inner turmoil, capturing all the longing and fiery will to survive that Marguerite finds within herself when her life and the lives of those she loves are at stake.

Goodman effectlively dramatizes the precarious position of a female orphan in the 1500s, even one of means, making Marguerite’s anguish and powerlessness palpable. Though she starts as a naive and untested child, she grows in tenacity and faith in herself throughout her ordeal, her anxiety maturing into a determination and defiance that engages the reader’s sympathy and respect. The intertwining of Renaissance religious beliefs and superstitions supplies an irresistible atmosphere of foreboding to Goodman’s tale, while the first-person point of view immerses the reader in what Marguerite is feeling and learning. “I understand what it is to be a man,” Marguerite says after tragedy has struck the island. “To be a man is to have your way.” Damienne, horrified by this unbecoming attitude, responds, “And is that good? . . . Is it right?” to which Marguerite truthfully replies, “It is satisfying.” 

As a novel of adventure and redemption and as a story of a woman coming into her own, Isola is a rewarding read.

As a novel of adventure and redemption and as a story of a woman coming into her own, Allegra Goodman’s 16th-century tale, Isola, is a rewarding read.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionClassics

Plucked from the ashes

Interview by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

This book was nearly lost to history: It was burned with other papers of Hurston’s after her death, and only rescued, remarkably, by a friend of hers (Patrick Duval), who passed by the fire and was quick enough with a garden hose to save the manuscript. How, from there, did The Life of Herod the Great come to be in your hands? What condition was the manuscript in when you first read it?

From there, Hurston’s friend and neighbor Marjorie Silver deposited the manuscript, along with other items, at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1961. The “Life of Herod the Great” manuscript was placed in the George A. Smathers Special Collections library. Over the last several years, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust has worked to publish Hurston’s unpublished materials. Once the trust was ready to go forward with the publication of the Herod manuscript, I submitted a proposal to edit it for publication.

Overall, given that the manuscript had been pulled from a fire, I’d say that the manuscript was in surprisingly good condition. Yes, sections of several concluding chapters were lost or missing or, likely, simply burned. And a good many pages were singed or burned around the edges. But a major portion of the manuscript was intact. The several hundred pages that survived were a combination of typescript and longhand drafts.

As an editor, how did you approach what was missing in the manuscript, either because of damage or because it was a work in progress?

In instances where a page was singed or burned around the edges, and a word, a part of a word or a phrase was missing, the remaining letters of a word, the remaining words of a phrase, or the context of a sentence or paragraph indicated how I should complete the word, phrase or sentence. This, I would do only if Hurston’s intention was clear.

When I could not discern Hurston’s intentionality, I used ellipses to indicate missing words. One thing I did not want to do was to insert my thoughts or ideas into her work. I wanted only Hurston’s voice to speak, throughout. Whenever extensive passages or sections of a chapter were missing, asterisks indicate missing text or pages. This was the case mainly with the concluding chapters, which are shorter by comparison.

The last chapter, which would have told of the nature and circumstances of Herod’s death, did not survive. However, Hurston wrote about Herod’s death in various letters to her editor and to friends. So I extracted the events of his death from Hurston’s letters and edited them in the epilogue. This way, the readers would have the satisfaction that comes with a clearly stated ending. And Hurston’s interpretation of the events of Herod’s death would be preserved, in her own voice.

Like his life, the fact of Herod’s death had been buried under centuries-old untruths. Hurston found that historical accounts, which echoed the account documented by Flavius Josephus, were unfounded. As she wanted to set the record straight in relation to the biblical account of Herod’s reign, she also wanted to restore his dignity in death. In the absence of her narrative rendering of Herod’s death, Hurston’s letters give us insight into Hurston’s thoughts about the end of Herod’s life, and we can then imagine what she might have written.

“Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to . . . our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want.”

You’ve spent a great deal of time with Hurston’s writing, as the editor of Hurston’s posthumously released Barracoon (2018), and the author of several books about her (Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom). I’m curious how your relationship with her work began. How did you decide to make such a deep study of her?

My relationship with Hurston’s work began when I browsed the bookshelves in the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore in Atlanta one day and glimpsed a cover that caught my eye. The green leaves and yellow pears of a tree in the foreground and a shack of a house in the background was the cover art that graced Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I skimmed a few lines and was compelled to purchase the book.

I had never seen myself, my community, my culture captured so perfectly. I had never read the sounds we make when we talk and joke and pray and fuss rendered so true in written language before. Reading Their Eyes was like looking in a mirror. I was in grad school at Atlanta University, then. I hadn’t known about her, but she seemed to know so much about me. It was uncanny, to me, that she knew me so well. I thought the least I could do was to learn something about her. The Shrine happened to also have a copy of [Hurston’s memoir] Dust Tracks on a Road. I found in her life story so many incidents and events that accorded with my own. My interest in Dr. Hurston and her work would only intensify when I discovered that to study Hurston was to study myself, my culture, American society, the nature of humankind and Creation, Itself.

What would you say to those who might wonder how relevant Herod’s story is to contemporary readers?

Two things:

1. Many contemporary readers still subscribe to the story of Herod as told in the New Testament. As Hurston points out in her preface to the novel, there is much that Herod’s story has to teach about the 1st century B.C.E. which is especially important to understand, given that our culture was influenced by the ideas that were born then, and we’re still embodying and living those ideas now.

2. The sociopolitical dynamics at play in Herod’s day are being played out as we “speak.” Hurston’s work dramatizes the efforts of the West in the domination and control of the peoples of the East. In Herod’s day, we’re talking about Rome’s domination of Persia and Syria and Judea, among others. And today, the conflicts in the Middle East are continuing these ancient wars of domination and resistance to domination. It’s like the names—of the people and the nations—have changed, but the insatiable energy of war has continued throughout the centuries. Hurston bemoaned that history—of war, and death and destruction—continues to repeat itself. But history doesn’t so much repeat itself as it simply continues—until there is a conscious intervention and a commitment to create what we prefer. Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to our knowledge about the world that we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit us, our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want, and our courage to live in the world authentically.

Where will your work take you next? Will you be working with more of Hurston’s writing, or could we expect another book of your own, like 2024’s Of Greed and Glory?

Well, we’ll see about “more of Hurston’s writing.” I don’t know whether there are more writings, but there is more to say about what we do have. And I know that whatever is next, even a book of my own, it will be inspired by the same ideals that I find compelling in Hurston’s work—a love of freedom, a respect for political and personal sovereignty, the evolution of humanity, and justice.

Read our review of The Life of Herod the Great.

Deborah G. Plant author photo by Gloria Plant-Gilbert.

In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf

Review by Eric A. Ponce

Recently, I was talking with a stockbroker about success. She said that she could never take the risk that actors take: While this sad, cold world will always need stockbrokers, as an actor, it is entirely possible that no casting director will ever call you back. Isa Arsén’s novel The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf shows a group of actors and theater producers trying their best to beat the odds and find success on the stage—or at least avoid absolute failure.

In 1955, Margaret Wolf has moved to New York City and made it, at least in Shakespearean-actor terms. She performs off-Broadway (not off-off Broadway, mind you) in a company of Shakespearean players who take their craft very seriously. Her main friend is also her mentor, Edie Bishop, a bona fide theater impresario who helps Margaret get jobs and navigate the scene. When a new actor, Wesley Shoard, joins the company, the two women do some digging and find out that he is a former film star from the U.K. Margaret and Wesley become fast friends and even better stage partners. Their chemistry in Twelfth Night draws large audiences and lands them the lead roles in the company’s production of Macbeth, the cursed Scottish play. Before rehearsals start, though, Wesley, a gay man, begs Margaret to marry him to protect him from McCarthy-era suspicion. She agrees, and the two begin a life together, helped by the financial support of Edie (who buys them an apartment) and Ezra, their director. However, a mental breakdown after opening night sends Margaret into forced convalescence, and her marriage with social butterfly Wesley starts to get rocky. When Wesley gets an offer to perform in an experimental production in the New Mexican desert, Margaret leaps at the chance to leave the city with him, sending the couple into an even more calamitous unknown.

In the complicated, dramatic theater sphere detailed delightfully by Arsén, Margaret is often caught between the roles she plays and the life she wants to live. She struggles to find authenticity. Arsén beautifully captures the strange kind of love of Margaret’s marriage with Wesley, showing the challenge of caring for someone while letting them be who they are. Though the actor’s life is a risky one, Arsén shows us how richly rewarding the world of theater can be for those who brave it.

Isa Arsén delightfully details the dramatics of the 1950s theater sphere in The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf, which follows the lavender marriage between two Shakespearean players.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionClassics

The Life of Herod the Great

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A trained anthropologist and writer, Zora Neale Hurston worked on a novel about Herod the Great for much of her life. Planned as a companion to her 1939 book Moses, Man of the Mountain, it was unpublished when she died in 1960. The manuscript, part of the Hurston archive at the University of Florida, has now at last been released in a comprehensive edition that includes commentary from editor (and Hurston biographer), Deborah G. Plant and excerpts from letters Hurston wrote to friends and family as she researched the novel. 

The Life of Herod the Great tells the story of the Judean king who lived during the first century B.C.E. and may be best remembered as the man responsible for the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. He is also sometimes said to have ordered the execution of all male children in Bethlehem who were 2 years or younger, although many historians do not believe this event occurred.

Hurston did not either. Her novel begins with Herod as a young man assuming the governorship of Galilee under the direction of his father, Antipater. Hurston’s Herod is not only a canny political mind and brilliant strategist, but also a thoughtful man, drawn to the philosophy of the Essenes—a Jewish sect whose piety and devotion to peacemaking had much in common with early Christianity. Herod was ruthless to his enemies, but fiercely devoted to his family and loyal to the Roman leaders who controlled all the Judean kingdoms. His visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar in Rome are the highlights of Hurston’s novel; her familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes this a thought-provoking read. 

Hurston died before The Life of Herod the Great was finished, and though the novel is cohesive, there are some gaps in the narrative. Herod’s first wife, Doris, and their baby son, Antipater, disappear from the book early on, and there are a few undeveloped plot points that the reader imagines Hurston would have tidied up if the novel had been completed in her lifetime. However, there is much here for any reader to enjoy, whether they are fans of Huston’s fiction or eager for a deep dive into a subject rarely seen outside religious texts or histories.

Read our Q&A with Deborah G. Plant about The Life of Herod the Great.

Zora Neale Hurston’s familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes The Life of Herod the Great a thought-provoking read, particularly in her depiction of Herod’s visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Homeseeking

Review by Thane Tierney

Zhang Suchi and Wang Haiwen, the protagonists of Karissa Chen’s epic debut novel, Homeseeking, have a star-crossed romance that waxes and wanes over decades and continents. Suchi and Haiwen’s story begins when they are children in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the 1930s; their relationship blossoms into romance in their teens, but is abruptly interrupted in 1947 when Haiwen enlists in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army. Suchi and her older sister are then sent to Hong Kong to escape the civil war, in which Mao Zedong’s Communists ultimately prevail. Separated by conflicts both internal and external, Suchi and Haiwen sacrifice their youthful dreams to build parallel, albeit occasionally intersecting, lives.

Homeseeking is primarily a love story, set against some of the most monumental events of modern Asian history. Its narrative hopscotches back and forth across seven decades, until the estranged sweethearts rekindle their relationship in the unlikely locale of a 99 Ranch Market produce section in Los Angeles. But it’s also a political story, tracing the diaspora of post-World War II mainland Chinese who never expected to wind up in Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or America. Finally, it’s a family story, of the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”

Over a decade in the making, Homeseeking embodies the ambitious scope of James Michener’s historical novels or (while not nearly as long) Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Chen’s ability to navigate effortlessly across cultures and eras reflects not only the depth of her research, but also her natural gifts as a storyteller. 

There is one potential stumbling block for a more casual reader: Chen transliterates Chinese words differently under different circumstances. For instance, the character Suchi is also referred to as Suji at different points in the narrative. Chen addresses this in a forward, explaining that her choices reflect different regional pronunciations and romanization styles, and asking readers to empathize with the linguistic challenges her characters, and immigrants across the globe, must navigate. While it may take a few detours to Google to clarify the occasional word or phrase, the book settles into a compelling narrative that fills in most of the blanks contextually. It’s a small price to pay for admittance to such an auspicious debut.

Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaDebut Fiction

Confessions

Review by Sydney Hankin

One abandoned schoolhouse, decades old, stands on the coast of Ireland. Shunned by neighbors, the focus of many a ghost story, and home base for a commune called “the Screamers,” it has also housed three generations of Dooley women, each of whose lives have been knowingly and unknowingly defined by the choices of the others.

The family saga opens with Cora, a 16-year-old left orphaned in New York City after her father is killed at the twin towers on 9/11. In her disorienting grief, with little left tethering her to the city, a letter from her mysterious aunt Róisín in Ireland comes as a surprising relief. Cora leaves all she’s ever known and hops on a plane to join her aunt in County Donegal. From here, author Catherine Airey jumps into Cora’s late mother Máire’s history, and the novel thereafter opens up into an expanse of alternating narratives that stretch back to Ro and Máire’s early childhood.

Airey’s technical ability in Confessions is thoroughly impressive. She writes one section completely in the second person and another solely in letters; she exquisitely captures the attitudes, atmospheres and language of communities spanning five decades and two coasts of the Atlantic; and she tackles mental health, rape, exploitation, abortion rights and political imprisonment with serious and heartfelt tact that never edges into preachiness. The range of what Airey takes on in Confessions is astonishing, and every element is carefully woven together.

Confessions recalls the structural uniqueness of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the generational intertwining of Tara Stringfellow’s Memphis, and the emotional complexity of Sally Rooney’s Normal People; it feels in some way reminiscent of each. This is a firecracker of a debut novel that never gives up any slack.

Catherine Airey excavates the intertwining stories of three generations of Irish American women in Confessions, a firecracker of a debut novel that never gives up any slack.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Another Man in the Street

Review by Michael Magras

The 1960s may have been swinging for London’s Carnaby Street crowd, but elsewhere in the city, change of a very different sort took place: Caribbean immigrants came to Britain to fill job vacancies in hope of a better life. One such immigrant is Victor Johnson, the central figure in Caryl Phillips’ Another Man in the Street. The novel traverses half a century, and, like much of Phillips’ work, is a thought-provoking examination of colonialism and its repercussions.

Like Phillips, Victor left the Leeward Island of Saint Kitts to move to England. In Victor’s case, he leaves his parents, two older sisters and his wife, Lorna, when he’s 26 to endure two weeks packed onto a rumbling banana boat. Not content to be a cane cutter like his father, Victor has dreams of becoming a journalist and craves “a chance to start over without people judging me.”

That plan doesn’t go as Victor had hoped. When journalism jobs prove hard to find, he takes a gig as a handyman at a Notting Hill pub where he suffers racist comments from a white waitress, while living in a run-down hostel whose owner hates Black people.

Things appear to improve when Victor gets a job as a rent collector for a property owner named Peter Feldman, work Victor describes as “bullying people.” In the spare, formal prose typical of his style (“She closed her eyes, for she could see it all too clearly now.”), Phillips charts Victor’s dealings with Peter. Victor also begins a relationship with Peter’s secretary, Ruth, a woman desperate to figure out “what on earth she might do to make life more tolerable.”

Victor eventually finds his way into the world of England’s broadsheets, but life’s challenges prove as rough as that banana boat ride. Among them are health issues; a son in Saint Kitts who is often in trouble; Ruth’s adult daughter, Lucy, with whom she has an “uneasy relationship”; and the fallout from Ruth’s discovery of Lorna and Victor’s life back home.

Transitions aren’t always clear, primarily at the beginning, but Another Man in the Street builds quiet power with its deep exploration of Phillips’ characters. Like The Lost Child, his excellent take on Wuthering Heights, this book is absorbing in its investigation of the impact of the strictures of colonial rule in the Caribbean.

Caryl Phillips once again explores the impact of the strictures of colonial rule in the Caribbean in the absorbing Another Man in the Street.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

Babylonia

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Costanza Casati, author of Clytemnestra, draws on a myth inspired by the real Assyrian queen Semiramis in her mesmerizingly intricate second novel, spinning together fact and legend about the first female ruler of one of the most influential kingdoms in world history.

Babylonia begins in 823 B.C.E. in the small village of Mari, where Semiramis lives under the close watch of her adoptive father, Simmas. He is the village’s head shepherd, as well as a drunk and brute. Simmas has always ignored her courage and curiosity, and adopted her with the sole purpose of marrying her off in a gainful exchange. His abuse of Semiramis draws the attention of their new governor, Onnes, who eventually falls for Semiramis’ beauty and decides to marry her. Off she goes to the capital of Kalhu, where her welcome, as a commoner among royals, is unsurprisingly cool. But this is exactly what sets Semiramis apart and gives her the edge she needs to command attention with her wit and intelligence. Her undeniable influence eventually reaches King Ninus, then leads her to the throne.

Casati’s command of historical details and cultural norms is thorough, and her rich cast of characters, representing a range of social classes, gives a comprehensive understanding of what ancient life was like. For instance, there’s Ribat, a slave in the palace who aspires to be a scribe; Sasi, the castrated royal spymaster; and Nisat, the king’s overbearing mother, who rules from behind the scenes. The story leans in to drama, with many unexpected twists and romantic predicaments. Casati doesn’t hold back on violence, either: Scenes of war and its aftermath are brutal, as is the intense pressure on those in power to expand their reign through force. 

Captivating and historically insightful, Casati’s Babylonia is a resonant page turner.

Costanza Casati’s captivating and historically insightful second novel, inspired by a real Assyrian queen, is a resonant page turner.
FictionWesternPopular FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaComing of Age

The best historical fiction of 2024

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW
December 9, 2024

The best historical fiction of 2024

Each of these fabulous novels, our 19 best historical fiction titles of the year, will transport you to another time and place.
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Time of the Child

By Niall Williams

Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.

Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.

The Bishop’s Villa

By Sacha Naspini, Translated by Clarissa Botsford

Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.

Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.

Our Evenings

By Alan Hollinghurst

Our Evenings is a masterful accomplishment: an intricate vision of the conflict between an open, generous Britain and a clenched, intolerant one from Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst.

Our Evenings is a masterful accomplishment: an intricate vision of the conflict between an open, generous Britain and a clenched, intolerant one from Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst.

Mina’s Matchbox

By Yoko Ogawa, Translated by Stephen B. Snyder

Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is filled with wonder, conveying 12-year-old Tomoko’s enchantment with her extended family during the year she spends with them, from 1972 to 1973.

Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is filled with wonder, conveying 12-year-old Tomoko’s enchantment with her extended family during the year she spends with them, from 1972 to 1973.

Women’s Hotel

By Daniel M. Lavery

Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.

Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.

There Are Rivers in the Sky

By Elif Shafak

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Modern Fairies

By Clare Pollard

An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.

An award-winning poet and translator, Clare Pollard has great fun with these cleverly revealing fairy tales told amid gossip, flirtations and sex at the court of Versailles.

The Empusium

By Olga Tokarczuk, Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk looses her deft, dark satirical wit on the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe. The result is an enchanting, unsettling bildungsroman like nothing you’ve read before.

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk looses her deft, dark satirical wit on the rigid patriarchal world of pre-World War I Europe. The result is an enchanting, unsettling bildungsroman like nothing you've read before.

The Glassmaker

By Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier’s 12th book is potent, bewitching and addictive as it elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental.

Tracy Chevalier’s 12th book is potent, bewitching and addictive as it elegantly glides along the line between historical drama and something more experimental.

Malas

By Marcela Fuentes

With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), turning it into a fiery family epic teeming with rage, revenge and revolution.

With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), turning it into a fiery family epic teeming with rage, revenge and revolution.

The Safekeep

By Yael van der Wouden

In Yael van der Wouden’s mesmerizing debut, The Safekeep, Isabel lives a circumscribed life in her dead mother’s house until her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, alarming Isabel when an obsessive attraction develops between the two.

In Yael van der Wouden’s mesmerizing debut, The Safekeep, Isabel lives a circumscribed life in her dead mother’s house until her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, alarming Isabel when an obsessive attraction develops between the two.

My Beloved Life

By Amitava Kumar

Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, My Beloved Life is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.

Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, My Beloved Life is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.

Mrs. Gulliver

By Valerie Martin

In Valerie Martin’s captivating Mrs. Gulliver, she lifts the star-crossed dramatics of Romeo and Juliet but eschews tragedy, offering us instead an idyll.

In Valerie Martin's captivating Mrs. Gulliver, she lifts the star-crossed dramatics of Romeo and Juliet but eschews tragedy, offering us instead an idyll.

City of Laughter

By Temim Fruchter

Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history and storytelling that reshapes worlds.

Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history and storytelling that reshapes worlds.

The Bullet Swallower

By Elizabeth Gonzalez James

Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force presents the dynastic legacy of the Sonoro family—one that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force presents the dynastic legacy of the Sonoro family—one that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger.

This Strange Eventful History

By Claire Messud

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, and a profound understanding of the soul, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine.

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, and a profound understanding of the soul, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine.

Clear

By Carys Davies

As in her debut novel, West, Carys Davies writes exquisitely of the wilderness in Clear, telling the tale of two men who connect on a nearly uninhabited Scottish island during the Highland Clearances of the 1800s, when many rural Scots were forcibly evicted from their land.

As in her debut novel, West, Carys Davies writes exquisitely of the wilderness in Clear, telling the tale of two men who connect on a nearly uninhabited Scottish island during the Highland Clearances of the 1800s, when many rural Scots were forcibly evicted from…

James

By Percival Everett

Percival Everett’s visionary and necessary reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, is a standout in an era of retellings. Everett matches Mark Twain in voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while deeply engaging with what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.

Percival Everett’s visionary and necessary reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, is a standout in an era of retellings. Everett matches Mark Twain in voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while deeply engaging with what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for…

The Seventh Veil of Salome

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.

The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic fiction and her more fantastical work alike.

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Each of these fabulous novels, our 19 best historical fiction titles of the year, will transport you to another time and place.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Time of the Child

Review by Arlene McKanic

This reviewer has to wonder why an author as brilliant as Niall Williams, whose latest book is the resplendent, suspenseful Time of the Child, isn’t at the top of every reader’s mind. Few contemporary novelists create worlds and characters so amazingly alive and specific. Williams knows every nook and cranny of his Irish town Faha, from its weather, which is so damp that nothing ever dries out completely, to its farms and pubs and how it’s slowly losing ground to the estuary. His characters, even those we see only briefly, are unforgettable. Though the town is full of people, you’ll never mix up one with another. Even Faha’s animal citizens are memorable: Consider Harry, a dog who likes to nap in the middle of the street, making cars drive around him.

Time of the Child is a sequel to Williams’ other masterpiece, This Is Happiness, and is set around Christmas in 1962. Noel Crowe, the protagonist of that book, has moved to America, and our focus is now on the town doctor, Jack Troy, and his daughter Ronnie, who lives with him. In Faha, the doctor is a revered, stoic and necessary presence. He might as well be a granite plinth with a mustache. But within this pillar of rectitude, so many passions roil.

For Jack, like Faha itself, is a dour-seeming being who is full of love. He loves his patients in his brisk and discerning way. He pines for a lost romance, even as he pushes 70. And he loves his daughters, especially Ronnie, whose unmarried state he feels responsible for. When a local boy finds a baby in a churchyard and brings her to the doctor for care, the floodgates in Jack burst. Both he and Ronnie fall in love with the child, and as the unwed Ronnie can’t adopt her, he hatches a scheme so harebrained that it warms your heart even as you think, “Are you serious?” This is where the novel’s suspense comes in, as well as Williams’ genius for making you laugh out loud while he breaks your heart. Anyone who cherishes great writing should want more and more from Williams.

Niall Williams demonstrates his genius for making you laugh out loud while breaking your heart at the same time in Time of the Child, his follow-up to This Is Happiness.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Bishop’s Villa

Review by Thane Tierney

It might seem simple, sitting on the couch with Netflix on and your belly full, to envision the heroics you’d accomplish if war broke out in your homeland: You’d join the armed forces, or whatever constituted the resistance. You’d break the chains of your oppressors, just like Star Wars, or go rogue, living off your wits and aiding the forces of good, just like Mad Max. Of course you would. Of course you would. 

But life isn’t a Hollywood movie, and as the real stories of World War II are lost to living memory, it takes someone with a sharp eye and an emotionally perceptive heart to bring the nuance of enduring an occupation into focus. Italian author Sacha Naspini has done so triumphantly in his second novel to be translated into English, The Bishop’s Villa. Naspini is from Grosseto, a town in southern Tuscany that holds a dubious distinction: It was Europe’s only Catholic diocese to have been rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust. For eight months toward the end of the war in the European theater, the Roccatederighi seminary housed about 100 Jews, many of whom were sent on to Auschwitz. 

The Bishop’s Villa’s fictional protagonist, who stands in for everyman, is a cobbler in Grosseto named René. It’s not his war; he’s just trying to keep his head down and make it through, like most of the townsfolk. But when his friend (and unrequited love) Anna flees to join the resistance, his relationship with her lands him in hot water with the local collaborators, and he finds himself an unwilling “guest” at the bishop’s villa. Though he’s beaten and interrogated, René holds out hope. “What,” he reflects, “can you do to a man who looks at you calmly when you threaten him with death? You can chew his bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

René’s gut-wrenching story of survival caroms between moments of unexpected kindness and unfathomable cruelty as the final days of the war play out. Naspini is to be commended for helping us to recall a story that played out thousands of times across a continent, a scenario that we dare not forget lest it be repeated. 

Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A lost New York City tradition

Behind the Book by Daniel M. Lavery

Like most people, I hate moving house. Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there, no matter how cramped the apartment or inconvenient the neighborhood. I never want to have to pack up my things, or unpack my things, or measure the width of a door frame to see if the couch is going to fit through it.

“Of course the couch is going to fit through it,” I say, every time. “The very fact that the couch is here now is evidence that the couch fits through the door.” Nevertheless, on every moving day it transpires that I was somehow wrong, that the couch must have been transported through the door and into the living room by acts of contortion or wizardcraft, or it has gained weight in the interim, because it certainly doesn’t fit through the door now.

“Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there.”

“Leave it, then,” is my only moving strategy. “I don’t want it now.” No matter how attached I might have formerly been to an object, be it my own bed, a box of books, an antique, or half my wardrobe, if it causes me even a minute’s extra work or mental calculation on moving day, all I want to do is get rid of it. Once I am moved into my new place, of course, the old spirits of avarice and acquisitiveness return to me in greater strength. I begin to meditate again on the pleasures of the getting of things. But ownership in all its forms is hateful to me on moving day; there is no possession I treasure more highly than lightness.

I didn’t realize just how good I had it. During my research for Women’s Hotel at the New York Public Library, I came across some old newspaper columns about the local tradition of Moving Day. For hundreds of years, well into the middle of the 20th century, all New York City leases expired at the same time on May 1st, which meant that everybody moving house in a given year did so not only on the same day, but at the same hour, as this column, “May Day,” from the April 30th 1873 New York Times describes:

“When New Yorkers celebrate the day, as they do invariably, it is, if not in sack-cloth and ashes, amid dust and piles of carpets and confused heaps of furniture. . . . The annual spectacle of a whole drove of Gothamites struggling amid pots and pans, and pictures, and rolls of carpet, to break away from the ties of place and friendship just as they are warming in their old nest, to find a new and cold home and cultivate fresh friendships, is not the kind of picture to gaze on with poetic rapture.”

The heyday of the women’s residential hotel was very short-lived; it really only existed in a handful of major cities for a relatively small portion of the population. I knew I was trying to capture a brief phenomenon that never much resembled how most people lived most of the time. Part of the pleasure of writing historical fiction, for me, has to do with attempting to re-create the experience of an extinguished tradition, to capture a kind of urgency that no longer exists. Women’s Hotel takes place over a period of several years in the early-to-mid 1960s, and I knew I wanted to open the action with a small-scale, vestigial remnant of Moving Day at the Biedermeier Hotel.

“I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats.”

There’s a temporal lag at the Biedermeier, although not from any active attachment to the past. It’s a few years out of step, more by default than by accident, although there’s plenty of the accidental there too. The height of popularity for women’s hotels came during the 1920s and ’30s; the Biedermeier is the sort of place women are more likely to land in without meaning to than to aim for directly. Most of the hotel residents have no plans for the future, only anxieties, and half of them aren’t even able to join in with the present. They are formally unattached people; everyone who lives at the Biedermeier, lives alone.

Few of them have ever been married, but none of them is married at the time of their residence. Even fewer of them have children, but those who do either cannot or will not live with them. They are not allowed to cook in their rooms (although at least one of them secretly owns a hot plate for drinking midnight cups of cocoa in bed), and the hotel has recently stopped providing breakfast. I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats, and so Women’s Hotel begins with “It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else.”

It’s always the same way with me, whenever I have to move. Come to think of it, it’s the same way with me before I’ve had breakfast. I can never see past it and into the afternoon.

Read our starred review of Women’s Hotel.

Daniel M. Lavery author photo by Eustache Boch.

Daniel M. Lavery reveals the research that went into his delightful slice-of-life historical novel, Women’s Hotel, and discusses the universally torturous experience of moving house.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

4 can’t-miss book club picks

Feature by Julie Hale

In Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers, Ruthie, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child, disappears from a farm in Maine where her migrant family is employed during the summer. Set in 1962, the novel is narrated by Ruthie’s brother, Joe, and by Norma, a girl whose remote, unapproachable parents seem to be harboring secrets. Spanning five tumultuous decades, the novel brings these parallel narratives to a surprising climax. Peters’ sensitive depiction of family members learning to live with loss is unforgettable. Themes of loyalty, memory and guilt will spark lively conversation among readers.

Inspired by historical events, Tan Twan Eng’s atmospheric novel The House of Doors is about writer W. Somerset Maugham, who, with waning health and a declining reputation, goes to Penang in 1921 in search of material for a new book. He finds what he’s looking for after reconnecting with his friend Robert Hamlyn. Robert’s wife, Lesley, shares information with Maugham about her murky past, including her links to Chinese revolutionaries and a murder—perfect fodder for a novel. Writing with wonderful detail, Eng delivers a smart, suspenseful narrative that sheds fresh light on a fascinating era in history.

Rio and Gibraltar, a successful Black couple, leave behind the world of Boston academia to build a new life in Gabriel Bump’s electrifying book The New Naturals. With the backing of a rich patron, they start an experimental community founded on tolerance and trust. The community—based in a bunker-like space under a hill—draws a variety of wayward souls, but friction soon arises, and the couple’s dream of an ideal society is threatened. Grief, social justice and the nature of community are a few of the novel’s engaging discussion topics.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s genius reenvisioning of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, has been hailed as one of the best books of the century. Demon, the narrator of the novel, lives in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, with his mother, a drug addict. He’s creative and smart, but faces enormous challenges when his mother’s death lands him in foster care. Kingsolver portrays Demon’s difficult coming-of-age with vividness and immediacy. Featuring a sprawling plot and expansive cast of characters, the novel is an epic for our times and a modern book club classic.

Choose one of these buzzed-about novels for your book club and get set for a great meeting.

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