Recent Historical Fiction

I am super intrigued by this cream cheese garlic bread, which has a whole sweet and savory thing going on. I’ve never tried it, but I love stepping outside of my usual, food-wise and tend to like the flavor combinations in Korean food, so I’m looking forward to trying this. Plus, it’s a perfect kind of hand food for book club meet ups. Let me know if you like it!

For it, you’ll need the usual bread ingredients, like flour, yeast, and salt, as well as powdered milk, egg, butter, garlic, honey, sugar, and cream cheese. For a full list of ingredients and instructions, check out Taste of Home.

Ah Boon is born in beautiful coastal Singapore just as British rule on the country starts to lessen. His main concerns are simply to impress Siok Mei, a neighbor girl his age. He gets his chance once he realizes his innate talent for locating islands with plentiful fish, but it’s this talent that becomes an obligation for him as his village — and his entire country — is brought into a new era of Japanese invasion, World War II, and the longstanding effects of colonialism. Through it all, Ah Boon and Siok Mei must contend with coming of age in a quickly changing and grief-filled world.

Follow a Black American family through the years and across states as they contend with a father that goes missing. In the ’70s, as his teenage daughter Trinity and wife Deborah prepare to celebrate his 37th birthday, Oz Armstead disappears. The family have a funeral with an empty casket, and the narrative bobs and weaves through the ’60s all the way to the ’90s, as Trinity and Deborah begin to understand that Oz was not exactly the husband or father they thought he was.

Gorgeous covers aside, I’m looking forward to this one because I always appreciate these reconsidered narratives where certain characters — especially female characters who were previously thought of as villains — are given their own stories. Here, Clytemnestra, Helen of Troy’s twin sister, takes center stage. We see how the Spartan princess contends with Agamemnon killing her husband, forces her to marry him, and then sacrifices their daughter to the gods. It’s the loss of their daughter that starts the gears of revenge, and I don’t know about y’all, but I love a good “they had it coming” tale.

It’s 1915, and a big steamer trunk full of dangerous secrets follows around young Adelaide Henry. She leaves her California home in flames after her secret kills her parents. The new life she tries to make for herself in Montana, courtesy of the government’s homesteader program in which she’ll become a “lone woman,” is promising, but the territory she must conquer is very cold, both personally and literally. Soon, she finds her new neighbors are harboring secrets of their own, and she may have to do some things she doesn’t want to to survive.