Category: Past Tense

During the Civil War, a formerly enslaved woman with an eidetic memory returns to the South to work as a spy for the Union. A Pinkerton agent, meanwhile, faces his toughest mission yet as he tries to infiltrate a Rebel enclave in Virginia. The two undercover agents join forces to take on a plot that could turn the tide of the war, while also facing their attraction to each other–and the fact that doing whatever it takes to win the war, might mean losing each other.

Shooting your intended isn’t the traditional way for a mail-order bride to greet her future husband, but for Regan Carmichael, it’s a genuine mistake. Colton, her intended, claims he’s only looking for someone to care for his daughter, not his heart. But soon, the idea of a bold, independent woman like Regan, willing to travel to Wyoming Territory for a widower and his child, begins to seem like something to long for, rather than deny.

Reformed thief Molly Wilkins is now a lady’s maid, which means she should really keep her hands to herself. But despite her best efforts, she can’t seem to keep herself from being tempted by her employer’s prim companion. Alice, for the first time in her life, has nothing to occupy her. Nothing, except a desire to find out the secret’s behind a lady’s maid with a sharp tongue and strange manner.

War: Mexican American War (1846-1848)

In 1846, just after the annexation of Texas, a Mexican nurse loses her husband and her dreams to the guns of Texas Rangers who storm her land. She vows to defend her country in her late-husband’s honor. An Irish immigrant fighting with the Yankees swims over the Rio Grande to switch sides in an act of defiance after witnessing atrocities against his own countrymen. He creates a battalion of Irishmen willing to fight and die for Mexico’s freedom. Grande weaves together the stories of Ximena and John in a spellbinding tale of war and love, illuminating a forgotten moment in history that continues to impact Mexico and America to this day.

Release date: March 15, 2022

War: World War I (1914-1918)

Bestselling historical fiction author Kate Quinn turns her eye to WWI in this novel about a young woman who joins a network of spies in 1915 occupied France. Many years later, haunted by the betrayal that tore the Alice Network apart, Eve is approached by a young American looking for answers about her cousin, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France. Their search for answers launches Alice and Charlie on a mission to find answers–no matter the cost.

This book does deal with the aftermath of WWII, but it also focuses heavily on WWI, so I’m going to count it.

War: Korean War (1950-1953)

Yu Yuan is just one of many of the Chinese soldiers taken prisoner by U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. His skill with the English language soon leaves him acting as an intermediary between his fellow prisoners and their American guards. But in a place where kindness and unspeakable cruelty can often be found hand in hand, Yuan finds he has just as much to fear outside the camp as inside it.

War: Vietnam War (1955-1975)

Viet Thang Nguyen won the Pulitzer for his novel about the Vietnam War and for good reason. With all the tension of a well-told thriller, The Sympathizer comes to us from the perspective of a communist double agent reporting back to his superiors in Vietnam after coming to America. It’s a story of espionage and identity as well as love and friendship.

War: The Cold War (1947-1989)

An intelligence officer for the FBI is tasked with joining a shadowy taskforce working to undermine the revolutionary new president of Burkina Faso whose Communist leanings have made him a target for American intervention during the Cold War. She agrees and becomes a key figure in the coup that would eventually take him down, despite admiring the work he’s doing for his country. It’s a face of the Cold War you’ve never seen before, inspired by true events.

False dictionary entries plague a digitization effort for the two employee’s of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary in present day London. Between trying to sort out the fake words, Mallory has to contend with threatening phone calls and bomb threats. More than one hundred years before, in Swansby’s heyday, a lexicographer named Peter Winceworth adds words of his own invention to the dictionary, finding creative freedom and purpose in the small rebellion. Getting to see the creation of the dictionary–and the false entries–alongside the modern day efforts to keep it going make this book particularly engaging.

Divorced, childless, and godless, Aaliya Sohbi is merely tolerated by her family. She lives alone in a Beruit apartment, surrounded by books. But Aaliya has a secret: every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic and stockpiles it away. No one else has ever read them. An Unnecessary Woman is equal parts portrait of an aging, reclusive woman with incredible talent and a love letter to literature.

Esme, the only daughter of a lexicographer working on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, grew up alongside words and definitions. She loves and treasures them as other children might fallen trinkets. And as she becomes a woman alongside the fight for women’s suffrage in England and the First World War, she begins to see the bias of a dictionary written by white, middle- and upper-class men. But Esme has been collecting and transcribing her own words–the ones deemed too crass or unimportant for the OED–and she knows they are just as worthy of documentation as all the rest.

In 1660s London, an immigrant from Amsterdam is permitted to scribe for a blind Rabbi just before the plague overwhelms the city. In present day, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history attempts to solve one last mystery: the identity of a mysterious scribe from a cache of newly discovered seventeenth-century Jewish documents. The lives of these two women of incredible intellect intertwine, despite existing hundreds of years apart.

My all-time favorite piece of time traveling historical fiction and definitely the one that inspired the topic of this newsletter: Kindred. In the mid 1970s, Dana finds herself wrenched back in time to a plantation, where she saves a drowning white boy. Reliving the experiences of her ancestors on the plantation is painful and horrifying, but the truth about why she is being drawn back there and called to save the same boy again and again may prove even more so.

We’re already discussing the crossover of speculative elements into historical fiction, but this book brings in another: mystery. Historical mystery is actually a pretty popular subgenre in and of itself. A rogue FBI agent is mistaken for a maid when she suddenly finds herself in 1815 England. She was on the hunt for a murderer in present day, but when a young girl shows up dead in the past, Kendra must use only the tools at hand as well as her years of experience, wit, and cunning to unmask a madman.

Heartbroken by her grandfather’s death, Anne Gallagher travels to his childhood home of Ireland to spread his ashes. But instead of finding closure there, she is drawn into the past, transported to the year 1921, when her grandfather was just a boy. It’s a dangerous time, with tensions rising as Ireland struggles for its independence. Anne knows she should be searching for a way back to her time, but as she’s drawn into the conflict, she struggles to decide whether to follow her head or her heart.

A film student interviewing 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour, a woman he believes rubbed elbows with Louis Armstrong and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux in her time as a dancer in 1920s Chicago. But the Chicago of one hundred years ago wasn’t just full of flappers in glittering dresses and strong drinks, it was also a time of mobsters and murder. And Honoree isn’t sure she ready to let go of all her old secrets.

Based on the life of legendary performer, activist, and spy, Josephine Baker’s Last Dance brings her incredible story to life. The novel begins with her early years impoverished in America and follows her rise to fame as a showgirl, showcasing her enduring spirit and passion for equality.

In 1921, mobs of white residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma attacked Black residents and destroyed more than 25 square blocks of one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the United States at the time, so wealthy, in fact, it was also known as “Black Wall Street.” When a seventeen-year-old girl in present day discovers a skeleton on her family’s property, she has no idea the history it will reveal. Told in a dual timeline, following a twenty-first-century biracial Black teen and a white and Native teen, forced to make difficult choices on the night of the Tulsa massacre.

Murders are happening left and right in 1920s Harlem, and young Black girls like Louise Lloyd are ending up dead. She’s doing her best to stay alive, though, spending her days working at a café and her nights at Manhattan’s hottest speakeasy. But then a body is found at the café and Louise is arrested with an ultimatum: help the police solve the murders or be made an example of by the judge. Now Louise is stuck between the law and a murderous mastermind in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

I love a good retelling, and this story reimagining the life of a character from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is exactly the kind I like to see: giving a underserved and / or maligned character a voice. In this version, Eleanor gets to tell her own version, from a childhood as a cast-off farm girl to friend of social-climbing poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Danielle Daniel envisions the lives of her ancestors in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s in this groundbreaking historical fiction novel. Marie marries a French man at the behest of her chief, hoping to strengthen their relations. But his Catholicism blinds him to the ways of the Weskarini Deer Clan. And their daughter, a two-spirited child, who would’ve been revered by her people, is considered unnatural by the French and by her own father. It is a profound story of women who have fallen through the cracks and of the long history of violence against Indigenous women.

In the 1880s American West during the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a kidnapped girl is forced to reinvent herself over and over again to survive. Smuggled across the ocean and thrust from calligraphy school to brothel to a shop in the Idaho Mountains, Daiyu eventually comes to realize that each part of herself is exactly what she needs to survive–especially in the wake of growing anti-Chinese sentiment.

Based on the true story of the bookish woman who became history’s deadliest female sniper, The Diamond Eye follows Mila Pavlichenko, whose life changes course forever when the Nazis invade Russia. Her skill with a rifle earns her the name Lady Death, but news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national hero and leads to a good will tour in America, even as Mila contends with the wounds this war has left her.

In 1973 Alabama, Civil Townsend has just graduated nursing school and has big plans. Civil wants to make a difference, especially in the African American community. She expects her job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic will allow her to do just that. But when her first two patients are little more than children, and she’s told to put them on birth control simply because the people in control of the young girls’ welfare demand it, Civil gets a queasy feeling in her gut. And things only get worse from there, as she realizes no one else is going to blow the whistle on the terrible things being done to her patients.

This epic historical fantasy follows one woman from East Africa through a lifetime of hardship, oppression, and opportunity as someone captured, enslaved, and forced across the Atlantic at only eleven years old. It’s a remarkable story of a remarkable life, loosely inspired by the author’s own ancestors and the discovery of a 112-year-old woman in the Ohio census.

Chanel Cleeton continues to trace the Perez family throughout history in this new novel where Isabel chases her sister Beatriz to Spain to track her down after she went missing in Barcelona in 1964. Twenty-odd years before, Isabel’s mother Alicia arrives in Barcelona after a difficult journey from Cuba with her marriage in jeopardy and her young daughter in tow. Cleeton weaves together past and future as a mother and daughter are faced with choosing between their family and their heart.

Set in the tobacco capital of the Southern United States in the 1940s, The Tobacco Wives follows a young woman who discovers Bright Leaf isn’t the illustrious town she believed it to be. It’s a place rife with health issues. And as the new seamstress for the wives of tobacco executives, she uncovers dangerous truths that could topple the tobacco empire ruling the south.

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.

A group of extraordinary women are tasked with journeying into the Artic to search for the lost Franklin Expedition in 1853. Experienced trail guide, Virginia Reeve, is to lead them. But one year later, she is on trial back in Boston. Not all of the woman returned from the expedition. In an alternating timeline, the perilous journey unfolds, taking readers on an unforgettable and heart-pounding adventure across the Arctic and in the courtroom as the trial seeks to answer one question: what happened out there on the ice?

At one of Stalin’s infamous work camps in the coldest reaches of Siberia, a young Lithuanian girl along with her mother and little brother are forced to dig for beets and survive in the cruelest of conditions. Lina finds solace the only way she knows how: in drawings she hopes will find their way to her father’s prison camp and show him the rest of their family is still alive. It’s a haunting tale of survival and hope.

Growing up in a small, Arctic town in Nunavut in the 1970s, a girl experiences the power of ice and nature, the ravages of alcohol in her community, and the violence around her. But the electrifying proximity of the animal world is everywhere, too, and with it all the blurred lines between good and evil, human and animal, real and imagined. This lyrical poem from internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq is a fierce and tender story unlike any other.

In Finnmark, the northernmost region of Norway, a fishing village loses almost the entire male population during a terrible storm. The women of Vardø must now fend for themselves. That would be all fine and good if not for the arrival of Absalom Cornet. Having burned witches already in Scotland, he comes now with a new mission to bring God to this place and root out evil. And all he sees when he looks at the independent women of Vardø surviving the harsh conditions on their own without the help of their men is evil.

How did Ada Blackjack, a young Inupiat woman, become the lone survivor of a doomed Arctic expedition in 1921, enduring for two years before a rescue party could break through the ice to find her? The answers lie within A Line of Driftwood. After discovering her Blackjack’s diary in the Dartmouth archives, Diane Glancy wrote this remarkable tale based on the historical record and Ada Blackjack’s own testimony. It is a story of endurance, hardship, and faith, as one woman survives where four “experts” cannot.

With his latest book a publishing failure, Charles Dickens is given an ultimatum: write a Christmas book within the month or his publishers will call in his debts and he will lose everything. Reluctant, but desperate, the famed writer has no choice but to agree in this sentimental tale of how one of the most famous Christmas stories ever came to be.

While her father works as a lexicographer for the first Oxford English Dictionary, Esme begins secretly collecting cast off words. The first word she rescues from the floor is ‘‘bondmaid’ and from there she discovered a whole world of overlooked words–mostly words describing women in a field being dictated by men.

Take a tour through the bawdy criminal underworld of eighteenth-century London as an increasingly unhinged professor tries to authenticate a mysterious manuscript that may depict the only known confession of an infamous jailbreaking criminal from the 1700s. It’s an imaginative retelling of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera all about gender, love, and liberation.

Open up an electrifying oral history of a fictional rock duo from the 1970s following their meteoric rise to fame, sensational breakup, and the highly publicized and politicized concert riot at the end of their career. As the duo considers reuniting decades later, the first Black editor of a storied music magazine jumps at the opportunity to take down an oral history of her musical idol. Sunny thought she knew everything there was to know about Opal, but full truth of the story will surprise even her.

Most of you have probably already heard of this cozy historical fiction novel about an author searching for a new book to write after WWII, but if you haven’t you’re in for a real treat. As London emerges from the shadow of war, Juliet begins exchanging letters with a community in the island of Guernsey who survived German occupation by claiming to be part of a book club.

The Glendale Park Zoo becomes the new home of Two Feathers, a young Cherokee horse-diver, in 1920s Nashville. When disaster and strange occurrences begin haunting the park and its performers, Two and an eclectic cast of characters have to dig into the past to face off against lingering spirits.