Category: Past Tense

In the heat of the summer of 1518, a plague strikes the women of the city: a plague of dancing. As more and more women join the frenzy and the city declares a state of emergency, a pregnant woman tends to the bees that are her livelihood just beyond city limits. When her sister-in-law returns from a six-year penance, Lisbet’s life is turned upside down. And soon, Lisbet along with her best friend Ida and the sister-in-law she just met, are dancing to a tune perhaps even more dangerous than the one consuming so many others in the streets.

In post-Communist Albania, friends Bujar and Agim struggle with the state of their worlds, both personal and political. They flee to Italy, but while Bujar finds new opportunity to live life authentically, Agim is lost somewhere along the way. And Bujar is haunted by the loss of the one person who meant the most all these years.

A young dairy maid in 1740s Essex follows the lure of the sea despite warnings of its danger in this lush historical novel. Moving to a naval port to work as a lady’s maid for wealthy sea captain’s daughter, she finds her new mistress to be haughty, headstrong, and unexpectedly fascinating. Intertwined with her story, is the story of Luke, pressganged at fifteen into the Royal Navy and forced to learn fast how to survive in this harsh new environment. And when their stories meet, it changes all of their lives irrevocably.

Ijeoma comes of age along with her nation, born in the years before Nigeria’s independence and only 11 when civil war breaks out in the new republic. Sent away to safety, she falls in love with another child. But they are from different tribes. And they’re both girls. Okparanta draws inspiration from war and folklore to paint a beautiful and heart wrenching novel about the challenges of living and loving openly.

Two women in early twentieth-century Vienna find solace in the city’s Jewish quarter, where they are more free to be themselves. They fall in love with each other and their newfound independence, but Julia’s longing for a baby threatens to derail the lives of all those closest to her. Through an exploration of queer characters against the backdrop of a changing city, Hitchman explores how people live through oppression and fight for those they love.

Okay, this one you can’t read quite yet, but you should definitely be pre-ordering it / requesting it at your library / adding it to your TBR. A mixed-race heiress flees Haiti in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, only to find herself in Paris on the verge of another revolution. Soon, she finds herself enamored with the budding movement and the revolutionaries themselves, particularly Robespierre and his mistress, Cornélie Duplay. But her heart is torn between the man whose ideals she loves and the woman who has become her safe harbor.

As the daughter of a rich planter and an enslaved woman, Sylvie de Rosier is able to enjoy the comforts of a lady in 1791 Saint-Domingue society, though she’s never fully accepted by the island elites. As a rebellion sets off the Haitian Revolution, Sylvie and her brother flee to Paris, unwittingly moving from one society in turmoil to another. There, she catches the eye of Robespierre, who sees in her race and her abandonment of her aristocratic roots a perfect example of his ideals. But as Sylvie watches another deadly empire rising in France during the Reign of Terror, she is torn between Robespierre’s ideology and the love and freedom of thought she has found in another.

A Black couple fleeing persecution in 1960s America travel to Ghana where they hope to start a new life without the threat of an FBI agent constantly on their trail. But the country is in a state of political turmoil, and what Melvin and Bernadette hope will be their safe haven soon becomes a place of chaos, where their own relationship begins to crumble. The story is an intimate look into the lives of this couple as well as a tale at the intersection of the American Civil Right’s Movement and postcolonial West Africa.

The story of a nation is told through three generations of families on the banks of the Zambezi River. A single mistake entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy that will ripple throughout the generations in this sweeping novel of past, present, and future that blends fact with fiction and truth with magic.

Yitian has been estranged from his family for years when he gets an urgent phone call from his mother telling him his father has disappeared from their rural Chinese village. Struggling to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an American outsider and blindsided by his mother’s secrecy, Yitian has to call on the help of a childhood friend to try to discover how his father’s past during the Cultural Revolution could be connected to his disappearance today.

Goh Junja is trying to survive as the latest in a long line of haenyeo–deep sea diving women–as Korea struggles following the Japanese occupation of World War II. The new political climate, with an influx of U.S. troops and a creeping paranoia of communism, is almost as treacherous. Still grieving her mother’s death, Junja can scarcely keep up, but when her lover is accused of harboring communist sentiments, she must finally learn to adapt to the ever-changing world around her.

Following the bombing of Pear Harbor, racial tension grows in Vancouver, British Columbia. The RCMP round up “suspicious” characters and the creation of internment camps in the interior is only months away. Narrated by a young reporter for the New Canadian, the only Japanese-Canadian newspaper allowed to continue publishing during the war, and told from the perspective of three people in Vancouver’s Japanese community, The Three Pleasures is a depicts a painful period of Canada’s history.

Lilith, born into slavery in eighteenth century Jamaica, becomes a powerful force among the Night Women, a group planning to revolt against the plantation owners enslaving them. But on a sugar plantation rife with secrets, a powerful woman like Lilith won’t go unnoticed. And as she pushes against the bounds of what’s expected–and allowed–for an enslaved woman, she risks becoming a weak link in this desperate conspiracy for freedom.

In 1990s Colombia, a sheltered girl safe in a gated community outside of Pablo Escobar’s reach becomes determined to befriend her family’s new maid, Petrona, whose life has not been so easy. But both Chula and Petrona are caught up in a web of secrets, and as the conflict in Bogotá escalates, they will have to choose between sacrifice and betrayal.

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