TEST: July’s New Historical Fiction For Your TBR

In 1947, Eva Cardon is the owner of DC’s most famous Black-owned restaurant, with plans to open another diner soon to serve Southern comfort food to the working class. The last thing she needs is to fall in love with a white politician. Her mother and grandmother fell for white men, and their family paid the price. But when her equal rights activism puts junior senator Courtland Hardiman Kingsley IV in her path, neither of them are able to resist their feelings for each other despite the potential consequences.

The acclaimed author of Island Queen is back with another historical fiction novel, this time about the extraordinary true-life stories of two women during the Haitian Revolution. One, a warrior kidnapped and sold into slavery from West Africa, is at the forefront of the rebellion on the French colony of Saint Domingue. The other, a free woman of color raised in privilege and security because of her white grandfather, falls in love with a revolutionary despite her marriage to a Frenchman. The paths of these two very different women cross when war breaks out, pitting the French, Spanish, and enslaved people against each other. And both of them has a pivotal role to play.

Blanca has been hanging around the fifteenth-century monastery she died in since her untimely demise at only fourteen. Now, four hundred years later, a woman arrives in the village with her two children and lover. Blanca is immediately enchanted with George, but even as the woman and her lover find themselves in growing trouble with the village for their unconventionality, the ghost of a girl longs for a woman who doesn’t even know she exists.

In medieval Britain, two sisters live in the shadow of the abandoned ruins of Londinium, the once-glorious Roman settlement on the banks of the Thames. For years, the sisters have run wild, one secretly learning her father’s blacksmithing trade, forbidden to women, and the other communing with animals and plants. But when their father dies, the two face enslavement at the hands of the warlord who imprisoned their father. Forced to flee into Londinium, they discover a community of rebel women living secretly amid the ruins. But with men still hunting them, the sisters will have to rely on their ingenuity and all the magic of their foremothers to protect themselves and fight back.

Who else is as excited for this new Silvia Moreno-Garcia book as I am? In The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, nineteenth-century Mexico comes to life as the backdrop for this retelling of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Carlota Moreau is the only daughter of either a genius or a madman, isolated in a manor from the strife on the Yucatán peninsula. Carlota lives in relative peace alongside her father, his assistants, and their hybrid human-animal experiments. But when a stranger arrives, he threatens to overturn the delicate balance that’s been created.

A former nuclear scientist in a Siberian gulag in the 1960s knows that the right connections with guards will get him access to food and cigarettes and the right pair of boots will keep him from losing toes to frostbite. But when Valery’s university mentor steps in to take them from the prison camp to a mysterious unnamed town, he’s told he will serve the rest of his sentence studying the effects of radiation on animals. But why exactly is there so much radiation in this town? And what is being hidden from its thousands of inhabitants?