Author: Rachel Brittain

Described as Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca, this historical haunted house novel set in the wake of the Mexican War of Independence follows a woman looking for security after her father is executed and her home burned to the ground, so much so that she ignores the rumors about her new husband and his dead first wife. But Hacienda San Isidro is not the home she imagined. She feels watched all the time and her new sister-in-law won’t even enter the house at night. A local priest, who is more witch than man of God, is the only one who will take her fears seriously. But even his powers may not be enough to keep the darkness of San Isidro at bay.

Release date: May 3, 2022

Shyam Selvadurai’s Mansions of the Moon is a sweeping reimagining of ancient India which tells the story of Yasodhara, the wife of the man who would become the Buddha. He wasn’t the Buddha when she married him, though; he was just Siddhartha Gautama. But as his spiritual calling pulls him away from her and leaves their marriage crumbling, Yasodhara is forced to question how a woman alone in ancient India can get by–and how she might find her own spiritual enlightenment, even without her husband.

Release date: May 3, 2022

As the only female student at a prestigious medical school in the nineteenth century, Nora Beady faces constant scrutiny. Instead of bowing under the immense pressure, she teams up with the sole female doctor on-staff, and the two begin pioneering new techniques for a groundbreaking surgery: the Cesarean section. Success could mean saving countless lives and furthering the roles for women in medicine. But failure would be just one more excuse for the men in control of the medical field to keep women from practicing medicine.

Release date: May 10, 2022

The Last Queen is the story of Jindan, a commoner who would go on to become the last reigning queen of India’s Sikh Empire. When her son inherits the throne at barely six years old, she transforms herself from the role of pampered royal to warrior queen, determined to hold the British Empire at bay. And though they rob the queen of everything she has in an attempt to break her spirit and quash a possible uprising, Jindan still manages to inspire her people through two wars and fight to her dying breath.

Release date: May 10, 2022

The author of The Mercies is back with another historical novel, this time about an odd plague in 1518 Strasbourg. Women are dancing uncontrollably in the streets, but for a young pregnant woman just outside the city limits, it’s the arrival of her sister-in-law after six years of penance that changes everything. No one will tell Lisbet what crime her sister-in-law committed, so she knows it must be serious. But soon Lisbet, her sister-in-law, and her best friend find themselves pushing the limits of what is acceptable at a time when women are already dancing to a dangerous tune.

Release date: May 12th 2022

Chanel Cleeton returns to the world of the Perez family in this novel about Isabel Perez who travels to Barcelona when her younger sister, who has worked for the CIA in the past, goes missing. But apparently Beatriz and Isabel aren’t the first Perez women to spend time in the city. A mysterious picture of their mother sparks questions about their family’s past during the Spanish Civil War that could change their lives forever.

Release date: May 24, 2022

Mary Mallon was a courageous woman, an immigrant from Ireland who worked hard to climb up from the lowest rungs of domestic service into a role as a cook after discovering an uncanny skill in the kitchen. But you probably only know her as Typhoid Mary. There’s good reason for that, considering Mallon left a trail of disease in her wake. But there’s more to her story than that, and in Fever, Mary Beth Keane uncovers it alongside a fascinating look into the scientific breakthrough discovery of “asymptomatic carriers” of disease.

In this book about the life of Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, it’s the women in his life telling the story. From the tragic life of a mother forced to leave behind her son to the daughter of a former samurai who would eventually become his wife and literary collaborator. It’s the story of a migratory author whose writing about Japan offered the Western world a glimpse into a culture that was largely unknown to them, but also the women in his life who long for their own stories to be told.

You might recognize the name Tituba as that of the first woman to be accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. As an enslaved woman, Tituba’s story has often been relegated to the sidelines, and little is known for certain about her life before she was brough to colonial Massachusetts by puritan priest Samuel Parrish. Maryse Conde breathes life to her story, mixing fact with fiction and reality with the supernatural to finally give Tituba the central story she deserves.

Based on the incredible life of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, Island Queen tells a sweeping story of survival and entrepreneurialism. Born into enslavement on a small Caribbean island, Dorothy Kirwan Thomas would go on to buy freedom for herself, her sister, and her mother from her Irish slaveholding father. But that is just the beginning of this remarkable woman’s journey that would lead to her becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies.

I’ve always been fascinated by Ada Lovelace, daughter of infamous British poet Lord Byron and a mathematician mother, who would go on to become the foremother of computer programming. So no surprise, then, that a biographical historical fiction novel about her would be of interest to me. Ada Lovelace lived a truly fascinating life, from her mother’s attempts to keep her firmly away from anything that might spark the creativity of her Byron heritage to her introduction to Charles Babbage and his fascinating Difference Engine. It’s a deep dive into an extraordinary woman’s all too short life.

In the summer of 1950 in Iran, a young poet named Forugh Farrokhzhad begins to find her voice as a writer, even as tradition would try to hold her back. Farrokhzhad flees a suffocating marriage for an affair with a filmmaker, choosing to live her own life by her own rules, even as she is both uplifted and vilified for it. And as the Iranian Revolution causes upheaval across the country, Forugh Farrokhzhad uses the power of her poetry to inspire generations.

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.