Author: Rachel Brittain

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.

A chef kidnapped by a pirate for some five-star cooking on the high seas? Now that’s my kind of historical fiction! In 1819 renowned chef Owen Wedgwood is kidnapped Mad Hannah Mabbot, a ruthless pirate who promises to spare his life in exchange for the most delicious meals ever served. It’s a swashbuckling adventure as Wedgwood tries to create masterful meals for a pirate captain under siege.

Four mothers. Four daughters. Four families. In the late 1940s, four Chinese women, recently immigrated to San Francisco, meet weekly to reminisce over mahjong and food. Their daughters believe their mothers’ stories and advice don’t apply to them and their American lives, but as they grow older, they begin to see how much they’ve inherited from their mothers’ pasts. It’s a tale of the complicated and beautiful relationship between mothers and daughters, but food also plays a central role as a linchpin of love and culture.

In the late 1920s, a Vietnamese cook flees Saigon, answering an ad for a live-in chef at a Parisian household. He soon finds himself employed in the literary salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But when his enigmatic employers decide to return to the U.S., Binh must decide whether to once again relocate, return to Vietnam, or make a new home for himself in Paris.

Food Network and historical fiction fans alike will love this book about a BBC radio program to help with rationing ideas during WWII. Two years into the war, Britain is feels the effects of the Blitz and food shortages as U-boats cut off their supply line. To help the struggling homemakers, a BBC program called The Kitchen Front is putting on a cooking contest, and the grand prize is no small thing: a job as the show’s first ever female co-host. The book follows four women giving their all for a chance at the job of a lifetime.

Described as “Louise Erdrich meets Karen Russell” and one of my most anticipated releases from this fall, When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky follows a young Cherokee horse-diver on loan from a wild west show to the Glendale Park Zoo in highly segregated 1920s Nashville.

The Night Watchman is inspired by the real-life experiences of Eldritch’s grandfather as a night watchman who brought the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota to Washington, D.C. Following a cast of characters, from the eponymous night watchman to recent high school grad saving every penny she makes to search for her older sister who went missing in Minneapolis, the story unfolds like oragami, revealing layer after layer of life in the Turtle Mountain Reservation in 1950s North Dakota.

The debut novel from internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer, Tanya Tagaq, is a story as fierce as it is tender. Split Tooth moves effortlessly between fact and fiction, poetry and prose as it tells the story of a girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s, navigating the divide between the harsh realties of life in a small artic town and the electrifying world of wildlife nearby alongside an unexpected pregnancy.

Five residential school survivors struggle to survive in 1960s Vancouver, haunted by the horrors of their past and searching for a way forward to a meaningful future. Some find hope and purpose in activism and motherhood, while others are unable to escape the abuse they experienced in the past. But for all five, it is the bonds of friendship that sustain them.

Saul Indian Horse is pretty sure none of the other residents at this treatment centre for alcoholics will understand him or what brought him to this place, but he grudgingly comes to realize that he can only find peace through telling his story. He journeys back through his life as a northern Ojibway, with all of its joys and sorrows, from being forcibly taken from his parents and put in a residential school the life-saving power of hockey and the racism and displacement he experienced in 1960s Canada.

Banished from court by Eleanor of Aquitaine and sent to become prioress of an English abbey, seventeen-year old Marie de France finds the life of a nun to be a dreadful existence. The same coarseness and determination that caused her to be cast out of court are exactly what it takes to create a stable life for herself and her sisters in the midst of poverty and royal dismissal. But with so much shifting in the world around them, can the bulwark of one woman and her unnerving passion and faith stand up against waves of religious and societal pressure?

In the years leading up to the Great War, the daughter of a lexicographer working on the first Oxford English Dictionary finds a scrap of paper with a wayward word, one the lexicographers no longer seem interested in. That word is the beginning of Esme’s interest in what words the lexicographers ignores–words most often pertaining to women–and her own version of the dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. I can think of few things more comforting to a reader than a book about words.

A nostalgia-filled book about girlhood friendship and the 1970s. Running into an old friend sends August down a mental journey back to her childhood in Brooklyn, where friendship was everything and the streets were their playground. Brooklyn was a place where anything seemed possible, but beneath that veneer of perfection, lie the dark realities of being a young girl in the city.

An aging English butler reflects on his life after three decades in service of “a great gentleman,” though he is beginning to have doubts about just how great that gentleman is. On a motoring trip that turns into a six-day journey into the past, he considers a life lived through two world wars and an unrealized romance between the butler and his housekeeper.

The lives of three women intersect in the lead up to one of the most devastating hurricanes Florida has ever seen: the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. One is searching for a lost brother, possibly stationed in one of the work camps full of WWI vets. One, newly married to a man she doesn’t know, is determined to do what is necessary to protect her family back in Cuba. And one flees a dangerous marriage, trying to find a better life for herself and her unborn child. But none of them realize the storm on the horizon will change the landscape of their lives forever.

Four siblings estranged from their famous father find relief and fame of their own through surfing in 1980s Malibu. But this isn’t just a story about surfing. It’s also a story about family in all its complicated glory and a house party for the ages. Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party is a legend in Malibu. It hosts everyone from her friends to Hollywood elite. There’s only one rule for getting in: if you know where to go, you’re invited. And this year’s part is not to be missed. None of them know it yet, but the night will end in flames, with all of Malibu burning around them.

A bored secretary gets wrapped up in violence and civil unrest after agreeing to watch a neighbor’s cat in this book about political corruption and student protests in 1970s Mexico City. When her neighbor never returns to take care of her cat and pay Maite for her troubles, she decided to track the art student down. Little does she know someone else is looking for her missing neighbor, too. He notices Maite. And being noticed by a criminal like Elvis is never good.

Estranged sisters Hwani and Maewol haven’t seen each other in years, the elder sister taken by her father to live in the capital city while her younger sister stayed behind at their island home. The memory of their father hangs between them as Hwani returns to their childhood home to discover what happened to him after he disappeared on an investigation. But the father Maewol remembers is a different man, a cruel man. And even with all the girls disappearing from the island, she isn’t sure she wants to get involved in solving a mystery about the father who abandoned her and the sister who went along with him and never looked back.

In New York’s Gilded Age, three women come together to use their magic to stand strong in a time when society was hell-bent on keeping them down. When Beatrice Dunn responds to a strange ad–“Respectable Lady Seeks Dependable Shop Girl. Those averse to magic need not apply”–she’s not sure what to expect. What she gets is Adelaide Thom and Eleanor St. Clair, proprietors of a teashop that deals in more than just tea leaves.

Found under a bridge covered in a blanket of bees, Simonopio seems to some the stuff of superstition, cursed by the devil. But Simonopio loves his adopted family, who see him as simply a boy in need of a home, dearly. And he is determined to use his gifts of premonition and his herd of protective bees to keep them safe from anything that threatens them.

In a world reminiscent of Parisian society where manners and reputation are everything, a young woman is swept up in the torrid love affair of a famed showman and her uncle’s unforgiving wife. Nina is dazzled when Hector Auvray arrives in town, hoping to learn more about the telekinetic powers he is known for, powers which she herself possesses. Hector helps Nina hone her gifts, but his affections are secretly withheld, already sworn to another: Nina’s aunt Valerie, his first love. But in spite of her strangeness, in spite of the powers society shuns in a woman, in spite of her love for beetles and the innocence she is soon to lose to an older man toying with her heart, Nina has greater potential that any of them realize.

When Hiram’s mother is sold away, he’s robbed of all his memories of her. But he’s also left with a rare power, one that, years later, saves him from drowning. He’s left with a determination to escape enslavement, traveling from the plantations of Virginia to the dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he becomes involved in the underground moment to free people from slavery, he never forgets his resolve to save the family he left behind.

Though half of this beautiful magical realism novel take place in present day, the other half explores Orquídea Divina’s past as part of a traveling circus in Ecuador, slowly revealing the answers her grandchildren seek in the present. The subtle magic weaved throughout makes this book even more poignant, with the gifts and curses of a family’s past stretching out into the present.

A terrible storm off the coast of Finnmark, Norway in 1617 leaves the Artic community almost entirely without men. But for the survivors, life must go on. A community almost entirely made of women, though, especially women surviving and thriving on their own, is a threat. And for the Scotsman sent in to root out witchcraft, it is surely a sign of the depravity that has taken hold of the village. In the midst of this witch hunt, his young wife and a local villager named Maren find a surprising closeness which could put both of them at risk–even as it brings them comfort in cold and difficult times.

Puritanical values have gripped the English countryside in the 17th century, leaving one small town primed for accusations of witchcraft. And especially for someone like Rebecca West, who lives alone with her mother, both fatherless and husbandless, it is a dangerous time to be different. When a newcomer identifying himself as the Witchfinder General starts asking questions about women on the fringes of society, the future Rebecca had hoped to build for herself becomes altogether uncertain. More likely, she’ll wind up imprisoned or worse with this Witchfinder General sniffing around.

Rue is not a witch. She is her mother’s daughter, raised to be a midwife and healer. And when things go wrong in the village, when a child is born differently or someone suffers, she is often blamed. The truth is, Rue is hiding a dangerous secret. But it’s not the one her neighbors are starting to believe. Rue is no witch, but she is harboring someone who could destroy their way of life forever if she–or the truth–ever came out.

Did you know that the mother of 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler was accused of witchcraft? This was likely done in retribution for his religious beliefs, and though Kepler defended his mother himself, she was arrested for fourteen months before he could secure her release.

But this is not Johannes story; this is Katharina’s. After being accused of witchcraft by a neighbor, the aging widow seeks the help of a literature neighbor to write down her tale. Determined to fight back and tell her side of the story, Katharina recounts the events surround the accusation–which she finds ridiculous–in her clever and irreverent voice. It’s one of the most fun and amusing historical fiction books about witchcraft trials / accusations I’ve ever come across, and that’s all down to the brilliant way in which Galchen depicts Katharina.

Based on true events, The Red of His Shadow takes place following Holy Week in Haitian communities of the Dominican Republic. It is a time when the sugar cane harvesters can lose themselves in the fervor of Voudon. But amidst the festival, a Voudon priestess and a rival Voudon priest begin an affair that ends in what the Dominican police would eventually rule a crime of passion.