Category: Past Tense

In a family saga that spans generations, two identical twin sisters find their lives diverging radically as one moves back to the hometown she always tried to escape with her Black daughter while the other passes as white with a husband who knows nothing of her past or her racial identity.

Another tale of twins awaits in The God of Small Things. Raised in an affluent Indian family, Rahel and Esthappen’s world is shaken by the arrival of their young cousin and by a growing tide of unrest. Amidst it all, the complicated shambles of their family provide some comfort. But soon, the arrival of Sophie and her English mother prove that all that they thought they knew can change in a day.

A down-and-out former policeman is brought in to help investigate the death of a reclusive family’s matriarch in the 1950s. Irene Lamontaine was notoriously secretive about her soap recipes, but that wasn’t the only secret she held dear. She and her family stayed hidden to protect themselves, but now they must let someone in. And Evander Mills is beginning to see that there might be more to life than nightclub trysts and desperate lies. But certain members of the Lamontaine family are hiding darker secrets. And Mills is beginning to think he might be on the hunt for a killer after all.

In 1920s Bombay, Perveen Mistry has just become one of the first female lawyers in India. When she comes across a strange amendment to a will, she suspects the three widows living in seclusion after their husband’s death are being taken advantage of. When her investigation results in a murder, Perveen knows her suspicions were right. What exactly is happening on Malabar Hill? And will her skills as a lawyer and a women’s rights activist help her make it right?

An unsolved murder haunts the town of Pluto, North Dakota, generations after it changed the lives of the Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation forever. And in a reckoning during the present day, a part-Ojibwe girl, her grandfather, and a local judge come together as a wrenching truth is finally revealed.

Aiyi Shao, a young heiress and owner of a Shanghai nightclub, hires a Jewish refugee to play piano at her club. His hiring causes a sensation, but it’s their shared love of jazz and a burgeoning feelings for one another that change things for good — especially as the war worsens and circumstances threaten to tear them apart.

Siblings working for the war effort stateside discover a mysterious woman hiding underneath their back stairs. This woman, who has a penchant for poisons, quickly draws Maggie and Will under her spell, but she may be hiding deadly secrets. Is she a friend or a foe? And will befriending her become Will and Maggie’s downfall?

Two women, one the American wife of a Frenchman, the other a crack shot with dual citizenship recruited by the British Special Operations Executive, become enmeshed in clandestine operations during WWII only to find their endeavors brought to a jarring halt when they’re caught and brought to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

At the Glendale Park Zoo in 1920s Nashville, a young Cherokee horse-driver on loan from a Wild West Show must help her fellow employees get to the bottom of strange happenings going on at the zoo as lingering vestiges of the ancient past begin to manifest in the present.

A prosperous farmer and mother to five boys in the Cherokee Nation West decides to take a stand as she watches the violence in the frontier community around her escalate. People are missing, her son is caught up in a murder case, and guns and gold are going missing. In order to save her community, Cherokee America Singer will have to help her community come together and face these issues — even if it means expelling one of their own.

Rue inherited her knowledge of healing from her mother, but it’s a gift that brings her close to life and death in her community. When a child she helps bring into the world is labeled “cursed,” the superstition of those around her threatens to bring her to ruin — especially as certain questions about her past and her connection to the white family who once owned them come to light.

Tituba, an enslaved woman of Indigenous descent, was one of the first people accused of witchcraft during the infamous Salem Witch Trials. In this fictionalized account, Condé creates a richly imagined take on her life and the choices and events that led to her fateful place in Salem.

The author of The Year of the Witching is back with a historical vampire novel about a young girl raised in the slums who finds a dangerous way out: by answering an ad in the papers for a bloodmaid. In her new position at the notorious House of Hunger, she is swept into a world of darkness and debauchery where bloodmaids go missing in the night. These halls could become home, but that’s only if she can learn the rules to the dangerous games the elite play before she goes missing, too.

This classic of 20th century lesbian vampire fiction follows a woman who escapes from slavery and finds a community of benevolent vampires who take her in as one of their own. It’s a radical exploration of Blackness, family, and queer identity.

A girl who died in the 15th century and has been haunting the Mallorcan monastery ever since falls for a visiting author and her strange, unconventional family in this beautiful historical fiction novel.

Haunted by her past as an enslaved woman, Sethe is still trying to make peace with the horrors she’s endured, particularly those from her time at Sweet Home. Even 18 years after her escape to Ohio, her house is haunted by the spirit of her baby who died nameless with a grave marker that read only “beloved.” But when a teenage girl shows up calling herself Beloved, secrets from Sethe’s past come bursting into the present in this wrenching, heartfelt novel.

A chorus of ghosts — including the young son of Abraham Lincoln — narrate their time in purgatory together in this strange, genre-defying novel by George Saunders.

This gorgeous historical thriller has been compared to Mexican Gothic, probably because both books feature young women facing supernatural events in historic Mexican manors. But believe me, The Hacienda stands on its own. It’s full of Mexican history, a husband with a dark–and secretive–past, a conniving sister-in-law, and a priest who also deals with the supernatural in spite of the wishes of the Catholic Church.

With a new Apple TV miniseries, it’s the perfect time to read this atmospheric novel about science, myth, and modernity. Newly widowed Cora Seaborne escapes with her eleven-year-old son to the Essex coast, where she begins hearing rumors of a serpent claiming lives. A naturalist, Cora feels this may be a previously undiscovered species. Alongside a local vicar, who is also suspicious of these rumors, she is drawn into an intense relationship that will change them both for good.

An aspiring photojournalist in Los Angeles follows her Kurdish boyfriend home to northern Iraq for a wedding where she hopes to acquire a better understanding of his childhood and heritage. But the reality of a town patrolled by the military and under constant threat takes her by surprise. Still there is so much love and beauty here, and when she captures a tragic moment on film, she must find the courage to stand up even with all their lives upended and on the line.

Note: This book takes place in Iraq, not Iran, but deals with Kurdish history, which is inextricably tied to the ongoing protests in Iran as Jina Amini was a Kurdish woman.

Amidst the upheaval of 1950s Tehran, a dreamy teenager finds reprieve–and love– in Mr. Fakhri’s neighborhood stationery shop, full of books and pens and colorful ink. But just before Roya is to marry her betrothed, Bahman, violence erupts, the result of a coup that changes the course of the country irrevocably. Sixty years later, after moving on and immigrating to New England, Roya finally comes face to face with the man she once loved and can ask the questions she has always held in her heart: what happened to you, why did you leave, and how could you forget me?

On an orchard in the small Iranian city of Naishapur, a former judge and his wife tend to their fruit and generations of family on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, watching first hand as corruption and extremism change the face of their country.

In the 1970s, iconic interracial rock duo Opal and Neville Charles become a sensation. But one bold, antiracist protest and the violent repercussions that follow tear the duo apart just as Opal is reaching her peak. Years later, their attempt at a reunion is still haunted by the past, and as music journalist S. Sunny Shelton curates an oral history of her idols, she discovers there’s far more to the story than anyone has uncovered before.

Another oral history about a fictional musical group, Daisy Jones and the Six follows the tumultuous rise and fall of a 1970s rock band. Their story is the stuff of legend, and everyone knows how a producer realized the only thing that could make hot new singer Daisy Jones and upcoming band the Six even bigger is bringing them together. But what they don’t know is why the band broke up at the height of their success. Until now, that is.

Told through the eyes of the people whose paths they crossed is the story of two realist poets — Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima — and their search for the vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero that turned into a life on the run after a violent showdown in the Sonora desert. Funnily enough it’s also set in the 1970s. The seventies are clearly a hot setting for fictional oral histories.