Category: Past Tense

Madeline is only seventeen when she attracts the attention of Jack Astor of the New York Astors, falling head over heels in love with the recently divorced war hero despite their twenty-nine-year age difference. Their relationship is highly publicized, and soon Madeline becomes a favorite new target for the press. It’s only on their honeymoon to Egypt that she finally finds some peace with her new husband. But on their journey home aboard the state-of-the-art ocean liner, the Titanic, the unthinkable happens. And soon, Madeline finds herself a widow with a newborn son and difficult choices to make about the future she wants to make for herself as the new Mrs. Astor.

On the night of the Titanic‘s sinking, one ship looked on. Onboard the deck of the SS Californian, Second Officer Herbert Stone watches eight distress rockets fired from the sinking ship. Despite raising the alert, Captain Stanley Lord does not come to the bridge. The Californian does not go to the Titanic‘s aid. The next morning, as the extent of the tragedy is laid clear, the two men do everything in their power to hide their role in what happened. But a determined journalist sets out to get the truth and expose the Californian‘s deliberate inaction, whatever the cost.

The author of The Downstairs Girl brings us a novel about a plucky heroine determined to convince her twin brother to join her in America and give up his life on the sea, even as she hides her true identity from fellow first class passengers. Spending time with her brother below decks, Val sees the sharp disparity between the wealthy passengers and the lower classes and crew, particularly for those of Chinese descent like herself and her brother’s team. But when the unthinkable happens late one night, all of Val’s dreams of a life with her brother in America fade into one desperate aim: to survive.

Only one ship answered the distress call sent out by the Titanic on the night of April 15, 1912. And even she was still four hours away when Captain Arthur Rostron got word that the Titanic struck an iceberg. Pushed to untested speeds and the very limits of its capabilities, Captain Rostron sets the Carpathia on a course toward the Titanic. But with freezing temperatures and not nearly enough life boats, will there even be any survivors left by the time the Carpathia gets there? Told in alternating views between the captain of the Carpathia and a third class passenger aboard the Titanic, A Brilliant Night of Stars and Ice takes a new perspective on a terrible tragedy and an incredible rescue.

You’ll have to wait a little longer to read this heist novel set on the Titanic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add it to your TBR in anticipation of its December release. A thief, an artist, an acrobat, and an actress team up to steal a jewel encrusted book that could be the key to solving all their problems. But when disaster strikes, they have a new objective in mind, maybe even more challenging than the first: survival

Release: December 13, 2022

I mean, how could you not be obsessed with this book already? Like Moreno-Garcia’s bestselling Mexican Gothic, the novel is set in historical Mexico and blends together elements of horror, historical, and Gothic fiction. This time, though, she’ll be recreating scenes of the nineteenth-century Yucatán peninsula as part of this reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. I truly can’t wait to see what she does with the story.

Set against the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s American West, a girl named Daiyu–named after a tragic heroine–is kidnapped, smuggled into America, and forced to leave the life she knew behind. Year after year, she is forced to reinvent herself, from a calligraphy school to a brothel, outrunning tragedy and desperate to survive even as anti-Chinese sentiment grows. As violence against Chinese immigrants grows, Daiyu is forced to drawn on all the pieces of herself to claim her name and her story.

Release date: April 5, 2022

Based on a true story, The Lives of Diamond Bessie recounts the life of Annie Moore, who became one of the sought after demi-mondaines in the United States. As a teenager she’s sent off to a convent for fallen women when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, eventually turning to prostitution to survive. She garners many gifts from her admirers and even meets the son of a wealthy jewelry, who becomes her husband. She expects to find her salvation in him, but instead suffers the ultimate betrayal. But in this story set against the backdrop of the burgeoning Women’s Movement, how can a woman find redemption? And is the answer ever revenge?

Release date: April 5, 2022

Three generations of Arab women, from 1920s to present day, face triumphs and failures as they forge lives for themselves in Lebanon, Iraq, India, the United States, and Kuwait. In 2013, a philosophy professor returns to Kuwait only to find herself facing accusations of blasphemy and the threat of execution after teaching Nietzsche. As she grapples with her place in the world, the stories of her grandmothers and mothers, whose fierce and fearless lives brought her to where she is today. It’s an intergenerational story of the personal and the political, but always, at its heart, a story of family.

Release date: April 12, 2022

A Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama, fresh out of nursing school and looking to make a difference, becomes a whistleblower to make known the terrible wrongs done to her patients in this historical fiction novel inspired by true events. When Civil Townsend begins working at Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she knows she’ll be making a real difference for women, helping make choices about their own bodies and their lives and what they want to do with them. But on her first week at the job, she’s shocked to find her new patients are children. And as she reflects on her career many years later, with her own daughters grown, she realizes that history is bound to repeat itself unless we force everyone to remember.

Release date: April 12, 2022

A teenager living through the 1960s Cultural Revolution in China becomes a poster child for the movement as well as a protegee and lover to Mao Zedong in this epic novel of modern history. At first, being a confidant and favorite of the Chairman seems like a dream for a girl like Mei, who dreamed of becoming the ideal revolutionary. But when a mission from Mao himself shows her the darker side of the latest stage of the revolution, she begins to question everything she thought she knew.

Release date: April 19, 2022

The author of Wild Women and the Blues is back with a new historical fiction novel, this time set during the height of the Civil Right’s Movement in the 1960s. Frankie Saunders has always known her Aunt Daisy as a reckless and profane woman full of mysteries, but right now she doesn’t care what secrets her aunt is keeping, only that the woman is her best chance of escape from an abusive husband. But Daisy’s past as a journalist in Los Angeles in the twenties comes roaring back, and both women will have to decide what’s worth keeping of the past and looking forward to in this dual-narrative historical fiction novel.

Release date: April 26, 2022

The House of Impossible Beauties highlights the 1980s Harlem ball scene in New York City, which offers a safe space for LGBTQ youth searching for family and acceptance. Angel is new to the world of drag and ball culture, but after falling for a dancer named Hector, the two decide to form the first ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit: the House of Xtravaganza.

A trans woman living in New Mexico begins writing letters to the mysterious leader of a quintessential sixties band, the Get Happies, that Gala is obsessed with. Her letters shed light on the band and the intersecting lives / identites of Gala and BB—- as the story unfolds in the present, with biographical retellings of the past.

With little else to drive him, an increasingly obsessive professor races to authenticate a eighteenth-century manuscript, possibly the only written confessions of an infamous thief named Jack Sheppard. Within its pages, the manuscript tells the story of an orphan named P, who longs to live as “Jack” instead and clashes with the newly established London police. P, who will eventually become Jack Sheppard, one of history’s most notorious thieves.

Described as part Mulan, part Song of Achilles, and often compared to The Poppy War, this historical novel with touches of fantasy reimagines the rise to power of the Ming Dynasty’s first emperor. In a time when the Mongols ruled China, a girl fated for nothingness takes up the identity of her dead brother who was said to be fated for greatness. Taking on his name, she decides to chart a new fate for herself: to take up arms against the Mongols and chase the greatness she was always meant to achieve.

This short story from the Amazon Original Stories collection Trespass tells the story of two siblings on a farm in 1917 Mexico. Revolution has thrown the country into turmoil, but an escaped tiger poses an even more pressing danger.

One of my all-time favorite short stories by an author I consider an absolute must-read, “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” tells exactly the story you think it will. It’s also hauntingly beautiful and available to read for free on Fireside Fiction.

A single mother in 1950s suburbia may–or may–not be a witch. Her daughter isn’t sure. But what else could the strange plants in the garden be for? And why else would her mother be having all these hushed, mystical conversations with neighborhood women?

After being told to never say a word by her mother, Adeline makes a vow of silence. But when a woman vanishes without a trace, leaving Adeline as the only witness, she must learn to find her voice in the coming of age story set in 1900s Massachusetts.

The author of Goliath and Riot Baby tells the story of a nineteenth-century British missionary on a trip to Africa. When his preaching is interrupted by encroaching slavers, the missionary experiences a crisis of faith that leaves him questioning his very humanity.

The woman who discovered the double helix structure of DNA never won the Nobel Prize. Instead, that went to the men who used her research and claimed it for themselves, men whose names are written down in history books. Many people now know that Rosalind Franklin was the true genius behind the discovery of DNA’s structure, but in this historical novel, Benedict show just how relentless this pioneering scientist was in her experiments. And how her contributions were erased by the men around her.

Sisters in Arms tells the true story of the first and only all-Black battalion of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. Grace Steele and Eliza Jones may come from very different backgrounds, but they’re going into the WAAC on equal footing, as the first class of female officers the army has ever seen, and the first group of Black women allowed to serve as part of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. Overseas, the women of the Six Triple Eight will ensure that American servicemen receive world from their loved ones back home. But first, they’ll have to make it through bootcamp, and prove that in this experiment so many are determined to see fail, that they are tougher and more perfect than anyone.

When almost all the men are killed during a terrible storm in an isolated village in Finnmark, Norway, the women band together to keep their society afloat. But to outsiders, like the newly appointed Scottish witch hunter Absalom, this independence is something sinister that must be stamped out. To him, women in power–women surviving and thriving without men–is an affront to God. But his new, young wife and villagers like Maren Bergensdatter, who lost her father and brother to the sea, will not bend or break that easily.

Three very different women running to and from Key West face the unbridled fury of nature over one fateful weekend that would go down in history. One woman fleeing an abusive marriage, one searching for her missing brother, and one on a honeymoon with a man she barely knows find their lives forever changes as a hurricane barrels toward Key West in the 1930s, a devastating event that would eventually go by the name of The Labor Day Hurricane.

Past and present collide when August runs into a childhood friend who brings up memories of their time as girls together in 1970s Brooklyn. It was a time of friendship and possibility, but also heartache, as they learned that being girls and growing up isn’t always easy.

In 1913 Paris, a Russian ballet incited a riot. A century later, protestors gather in Kyiv to protest the president’s decision to forge a closer alliance with Putin’s Russia instead of signing a referendum with the EU, only to face bloodshed when military police shoot live ammunition into the crowd, killing more than a hundred peaceful protestors. Blending voices of the past and present while following the lives of four very different people over the course of one volatile Ukrainian winter, I Will Die in a Foreign Land paints a picture of a turbulent Slavic history and how it has led to events today.

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is a multigenerational saga spanning sixty years of Ukrainian history. When a journalist unearths an old photograph of a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed by Stalin’s secret police, she decides it would be the perfect subject for a documentary. But opening this door to the past may affect the present as Darya discovers a painter who died under suspicious circumstances and may just be the latest victim of a corrupt political power play that stretches back to World War II.

Struggling to balance her life as a new mother, Natasha looks to her beloved grandmother Larissa, asking her to share the story of their family’s wartime escape from Nazis in Kiev. Larissa tells the story of their three years hiding out in the Ural mountains, shocking both herself and Natasha with the parallels to present.

Told in a dual timeline narrative, a young couple faces the beginning of Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s, while, twenty years later, their daughter searches for answers about her parents’ past. But her search into a time when many people in Argentina were being disappeared by the state, may put both her parents–and her–in danger.

Release date: March 1, 2022

In the 1940s, Bright Leaf, North Carolina was the tobacco capital of the South. When Maddie Sykes arrives there to join her aunt’s thriving sewing empire as a seamstress, she has no idea that she will soon be thrust into a terrible conspiracy being hidden by the tobacco industry, which could ruin the lives of the women in Bright Leaf who she’s grown to admire and trust.

Release date: March 1, 2022

An Algonquin of the Weskarini Deer Clan marries a white Frenchman in the 1600s at the behest of her chief, hoping to cement a much-needed alliance with the French against the British and Iroquois. Marie does what she feels she must for her people, but her new husband’s Catholicism blinds him to her own culture and beliefs. And when it becomes clear that their daughter is two-spirited–a blessing according to Algonquin culture–his unmoving prejudice endangers everything their marriage was meant to build and everything Marie holds dear.

Release date: March 8, 2022

On the eve of the Japanese invasion of China in 1938, a woman and her young son flee to the countryside in search of safety. Many years later, after settling in America, that young boy has grown into a man, and his daughter is desperate to understand her family and heritage, though her father refuses to speak about any of it. How can they move forward with the weight of the past dragging them down? It’s a generational story of survival and the power of the past as well as what it means to be home.

Release date: March 15, 2022

An epic charting one woman’s journey from West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century and across the Atlantic, surviving enslavement and learning the skills of midwifery, even living through the Civil War. The book was inspired by a 112-year-old woman in the 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio as well as the author’s own female ancestors.

Release date: March 15, 2022

Shining a light on 1960s Australia and the devastating government policy of removing Indigenous children from their home, Tony Birch’s The White Girl follows a grandmother and granddaughter just trying to get by. When a new policeman arrives in their small, country town, determined to enforce the letter of the law, Odette realizes she’ll have to risk everything to protect her granddaughter and the people she loves.

Release date: March 15, 2022

In this debut novel, Ponnambalam tells the story of Teha’amana, the thirteen year old girl sold to artist Paul Gauguin during his time in Tahiti. Teha’amana appears in Gauguins work, like in the painting, “”The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch,” as well as his journal. I Am No Your Eve is her story.

Release date: March 24, 2022

The author of The Rose Code and The Alice Network is back with another incredible story of courage during wartime. The life of a librarian and mother in Kiev finds her life forever altered with the start of WWII and Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Handed a rifle and sent to fight, Mila Pavlichenko becomes known as Lady Death, feared by Nazis and beloved by her people. But her wounds from the war are more than skin deep, and it’s not until a goodwill tour to America and an unlikely friendship with the First Lady, that she begins to find herself again.

Release date: March 29, 2022

Everyone knows the story of Princess Diana. But in this novel set behind-the-scenes at Buckingham Palace, we get not just Diana’s story, but that of another beloved princess: Charlotte. Chaffing against the rules and expectations of royal life, the new Princess of Wales discovers the diary of Princess Charlotte, written in the 1800s, and the many parallels of their lies that lie within.

Release date: March 31, 2022

A lost story. A forgotten history. In late 1863, a newly formed group of formerly enslaved soldiers were tasked with tracking down the lingering threat of rebels in east North Carolina, newly taken by the Union. The African Brigade, led by an impassioned abolitionist general, hopes to prove that these men can be trusted as soldiers. But soldiers of the African Brigade like Sergeant Richard Etheridge are fighting for much more than that. They’re fighting for their future, and, for many of them raiding the very plantations which they so recently escaped, a chance to secure the future of their loved ones, too.

Release Date: February 22, 2022

In the court of Louis XV, teenage girls from all over France are sent to a secretive villa where they are trained as courtesans for the king. They are told the man they meet is a Polish noble, a cousin of the queen. But when one girl discovers the man’s true identity, she is sent away to give birth to a daughter in secret. A daughter who grows up to become a midwife, with no knowledge of her royal birth. And by the time she discovers the truth, Louis XVI rules France. And it is a dangerous time for anyone with royal blood.

Release Date: February 22, 2022

A delicious sauce. A stolen recipe. The exploitation of Black people. Those are the ingredients at the heart of The Rib King in which a down-on-their-luck family decides to market their cook’s delicious rib sauce using an awful caricature of their groundskeeper, August Sitwell, on the label. But neither August nor the cook, “Miss Mamie,” will ever see a dime, leading to a rage in August that will eventually explode into tragedy.

After the Civil War, a family wracked by the loss of their son hire on two brothers freed by the Emancipation Proclamation to work on their farm, hoping the friendship will help staunch their grief. Parallel to their story, a pair of Confederate soldiers meet for secret trysts in the woods. But when they’re caught, the repercussions wreak havoc through the entire community. In the aftermath, it is the farmer’s wife, Isabella, who emerges as an unlikely leader, trying to bring a sense of community and healing to the land and the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

Carolina Built is a novelization of real-life real estate magnate Josephine N. Leary building an incredible legacy for herself in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. Alongside tending to her husband, daughters, and extended family, Josephine becomes a self-taught businesswoman, determined to build herself a legacy from the ground up.

Rue inherited her mother’s gift for healing, something she witnessed first hand growing up on a plantation and has now started practicing for herself as a midwife in a community celebrating their newly-won freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. But not everyone appreciates Rue’s work, work that can be dangerous when you’re dealing so closely with life and death. Whispers and suspicion begin to spread in the aftermath of a child born that the townspeople believe to be cursed. Rue is no witch. But she is hiding a secret that could destroy everything if anyone were to find out, a secret that goes all the way back to her childhood.

Part heist novel and part love letter to 1960s Harlem, Harlem Shuffle follows Ray Carney, a man descended from a long line of crooks trying to make it as an upstanding salesman of furniture. But when he’s volunteered as the fence for a heist on the Hotel Teresa that doesn’t go as planned, his business goes from being on the up-and-up to a clientele of shady cops and gangsters. There might not be any way out of this mess, but Ray is determined to find one that keeps him–and his furniture store–alive and well.

Disowned by her family and with nowhere to go, sixteen-year old Mattie Banks boards a bus hoping to ride away from disaster. Instead, she witnesses a landmark moment in Civil Right’s history as Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat. It’s a moment that will change the course of her life forever and send ripples through the generations, as, many years later, her granddaughter uncovers shocking secrets and must reckon with keeping the peace or honoring her grandmother’s wishes.