The Best Historical Fiction of 2021

The daughter of a lexicographer working on the first Oxford English Dictionary grows up with a passion for words in this atmospheric historical fiction novel set at the end of the 19th century and dawn of the 20th. But not all words are recorded, and as Esme grows older and grows to better understands the ways of the world, she begins collating her own collection of words being left out and forgotten by the men in charge of the official dictionaries.

In the highly segregated society of 1920s Nashville, Tennessee, a young Cherokee horse-driver, a land-owning Black family, a WWWI veteran zookeeper, and eclectic cast of performers are drawn into a strange web of circumstances after lingering spirits and ghosts of the past begin to wreak havoc on the park and the zoo.

An all-women expedition sets out for the Arctic to search for the lost Franklin Expedition in 1853. But when not all the women return from their hazardous trek, the leader of the expedition–an experienced trail guide named Virginia Reeve–is put on trial, accused of murdering one of the women in her charge. Told in a thrilling dual-narrative, the story unfolds across the Arctic ice as well as the courtroom.

On a plantation in the Deep South, two men find comfort and refuge in their love, tending to the animals and each other in the barn. But when a fellow enslaved man begins preaching the religious teachings of their violent master, what was once simple and unquestioned, becomes dangerous and sinful as the enslaved people they’ve long lived and toiled among turn against them. Full of pain and suffering, but also hope and lyrism, the writing has been compared to the likes of Toni Morison.

August Sitwell has worked for the upper-class Barclays for fifteen years, taken in by them from an orphanage as a boy. He’s not the only Black boy the family has brought in to “civilize.” But the Barclays aren’t the same as they once were. Their fortune has fallen, and in order to make ends meet they decide to sell the cook’s famous rib sauce as their own, using an awful grinning caricature of August’s own face to sell the sauce. But neither he nor the cook will ever see a dime, a fact that leaves August simmering until one day his anger explodes into a shocking tragedy.

Four siblings, the grown-up children of a musician, find fame in their own right as surfers after struggling to get by with an absent father and alcoholic mother. Told without linear constraint, the book falls forward and backward in time to cement the bond the siblings share as well as show the stability they make from a tumultuous childhood. A beautiful exploration of fame, as Taylor Jenkins Reid is becoming known to create.

Across the United States and Cuba, three women’s lives become boiling points in the lead up to the Spanish-American War. A young woman with dreams of becoming a stunt reporter like Nellie Bly treads between the favor of two warring newspaper tycoons in New York, reporting on the terrors taking place in Cuba from far and near. At the center of the newspapers focus is another woman wrongfully imprisoned by the Spanish, while another Cuban woman’s role in the resistance goes overlooked and unknown.

You might be tricked into believing the famous 1970s rock duo behind this fictionalized oral history are real, but Afro-punk musician Opal and singer / songwriter Neville Charles are just part of this stunningly imagined story that never happened. Decades after their heyday and as Opal considers getting back together with Nev one last time for a revival, a music journalist interviews the two to create an oral history of the band that unveils shocking truths.

Two brothers–freedmen in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War–seek refuge with a farming couple still grieving the loss of their son. Prentiss and Landry hope to make enough money through their work to be reunited with their mother in the north. Running parallel to their story, two Confederate soldiers hide a forbidden romance, that, when exposed, results in turmoil. It’s a story of beauty and terror in the violent days of Reconstruction.