Category: Past Tense

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.

Told in a dual timeline narrative, a young couple faces the beginning of Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s, while, twenty years later, their daughter searches for answers about her parents’ past. But her search into a time when many people in Argentina were being disappeared by the state, may put both her parents–and her–in danger.

Release date: March 1, 2022

In the 1940s, Bright Leaf, North Carolina was the tobacco capital of the South. When Maddie Sykes arrives there to join her aunt’s thriving sewing empire as a seamstress, she has no idea that she will soon be thrust into a terrible conspiracy being hidden by the tobacco industry, which could ruin the lives of the women in Bright Leaf who she’s grown to admire and trust.

Release date: March 1, 2022

An Algonquin of the Weskarini Deer Clan marries a white Frenchman in the 1600s at the behest of her chief, hoping to cement a much-needed alliance with the French against the British and Iroquois. Marie does what she feels she must for her people, but her new husband’s Catholicism blinds him to her own culture and beliefs. And when it becomes clear that their daughter is two-spirited–a blessing according to Algonquin culture–his unmoving prejudice endangers everything their marriage was meant to build and everything Marie holds dear.

Release date: March 8, 2022

On the eve of the Japanese invasion of China in 1938, a woman and her young son flee to the countryside in search of safety. Many years later, after settling in America, that young boy has grown into a man, and his daughter is desperate to understand her family and heritage, though her father refuses to speak about any of it. How can they move forward with the weight of the past dragging them down? It’s a generational story of survival and the power of the past as well as what it means to be home.

Release date: March 15, 2022

An epic charting one woman’s journey from West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century and across the Atlantic, surviving enslavement and learning the skills of midwifery, even living through the Civil War. The book was inspired by a 112-year-old woman in the 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio as well as the author’s own female ancestors.

Release date: March 15, 2022

Shining a light on 1960s Australia and the devastating government policy of removing Indigenous children from their home, Tony Birch’s The White Girl follows a grandmother and granddaughter just trying to get by. When a new policeman arrives in their small, country town, determined to enforce the letter of the law, Odette realizes she’ll have to risk everything to protect her granddaughter and the people she loves.

Release date: March 15, 2022

In this debut novel, Ponnambalam tells the story of Teha’amana, the thirteen year old girl sold to artist Paul Gauguin during his time in Tahiti. Teha’amana appears in Gauguins work, like in the painting, “”The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch,” as well as his journal. I Am No Your Eve is her story.

Release date: March 24, 2022

The author of The Rose Code and The Alice Network is back with another incredible story of courage during wartime. The life of a librarian and mother in Kiev finds her life forever altered with the start of WWII and Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Handed a rifle and sent to fight, Mila Pavlichenko becomes known as Lady Death, feared by Nazis and beloved by her people. But her wounds from the war are more than skin deep, and it’s not until a goodwill tour to America and an unlikely friendship with the First Lady, that she begins to find herself again.

Release date: March 29, 2022

Everyone knows the story of Princess Diana. But in this novel set behind-the-scenes at Buckingham Palace, we get not just Diana’s story, but that of another beloved princess: Charlotte. Chaffing against the rules and expectations of royal life, the new Princess of Wales discovers the diary of Princess Charlotte, written in the 1800s, and the many parallels of their lies that lie within.

Release date: March 31, 2022

A lost story. A forgotten history. In late 1863, a newly formed group of formerly enslaved soldiers were tasked with tracking down the lingering threat of rebels in east North Carolina, newly taken by the Union. The African Brigade, led by an impassioned abolitionist general, hopes to prove that these men can be trusted as soldiers. But soldiers of the African Brigade like Sergeant Richard Etheridge are fighting for much more than that. They’re fighting for their future, and, for many of them raiding the very plantations which they so recently escaped, a chance to secure the future of their loved ones, too.

Release Date: February 22, 2022

In the court of Louis XV, teenage girls from all over France are sent to a secretive villa where they are trained as courtesans for the king. They are told the man they meet is a Polish noble, a cousin of the queen. But when one girl discovers the man’s true identity, she is sent away to give birth to a daughter in secret. A daughter who grows up to become a midwife, with no knowledge of her royal birth. And by the time she discovers the truth, Louis XVI rules France. And it is a dangerous time for anyone with royal blood.

Release Date: February 22, 2022

A delicious sauce. A stolen recipe. The exploitation of Black people. Those are the ingredients at the heart of The Rib King in which a down-on-their-luck family decides to market their cook’s delicious rib sauce using an awful caricature of their groundskeeper, August Sitwell, on the label. But neither August nor the cook, “Miss Mamie,” will ever see a dime, leading to a rage in August that will eventually explode into tragedy.

After the Civil War, a family wracked by the loss of their son hire on two brothers freed by the Emancipation Proclamation to work on their farm, hoping the friendship will help staunch their grief. Parallel to their story, a pair of Confederate soldiers meet for secret trysts in the woods. But when they’re caught, the repercussions wreak havoc through the entire community. In the aftermath, it is the farmer’s wife, Isabella, who emerges as an unlikely leader, trying to bring a sense of community and healing to the land and the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

Carolina Built is a novelization of real-life real estate magnate Josephine N. Leary building an incredible legacy for herself in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. Alongside tending to her husband, daughters, and extended family, Josephine becomes a self-taught businesswoman, determined to build herself a legacy from the ground up.

Rue inherited her mother’s gift for healing, something she witnessed first hand growing up on a plantation and has now started practicing for herself as a midwife in a community celebrating their newly-won freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. But not everyone appreciates Rue’s work, work that can be dangerous when you’re dealing so closely with life and death. Whispers and suspicion begin to spread in the aftermath of a child born that the townspeople believe to be cursed. Rue is no witch. But she is hiding a secret that could destroy everything if anyone were to find out, a secret that goes all the way back to her childhood.

Part heist novel and part love letter to 1960s Harlem, Harlem Shuffle follows Ray Carney, a man descended from a long line of crooks trying to make it as an upstanding salesman of furniture. But when he’s volunteered as the fence for a heist on the Hotel Teresa that doesn’t go as planned, his business goes from being on the up-and-up to a clientele of shady cops and gangsters. There might not be any way out of this mess, but Ray is determined to find one that keeps him–and his furniture store–alive and well.

Disowned by her family and with nowhere to go, sixteen-year old Mattie Banks boards a bus hoping to ride away from disaster. Instead, she witnesses a landmark moment in Civil Right’s history as Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat. It’s a moment that will change the course of her life forever and send ripples through the generations, as, many years later, her granddaughter uncovers shocking secrets and must reckon with keeping the peace or honoring her grandmother’s wishes.

During the Civil War, a formerly enslaved woman with an eidetic memory returns to the South to work as a spy for the Union. A Pinkerton agent, meanwhile, faces his toughest mission yet as he tries to infiltrate a Rebel enclave in Virginia. The two undercover agents join forces to take on a plot that could turn the tide of the war, while also facing their attraction to each other–and the fact that doing whatever it takes to win the war, might mean losing each other.

Shooting your intended isn’t the traditional way for a mail-order bride to greet her future husband, but for Regan Carmichael, it’s a genuine mistake. Colton, her intended, claims he’s only looking for someone to care for his daughter, not his heart. But soon, the idea of a bold, independent woman like Regan, willing to travel to Wyoming Territory for a widower and his child, begins to seem like something to long for, rather than deny.

Reformed thief Molly Wilkins is now a lady’s maid, which means she should really keep her hands to herself. But despite her best efforts, she can’t seem to keep herself from being tempted by her employer’s prim companion. Alice, for the first time in her life, has nothing to occupy her. Nothing, except a desire to find out the secret’s behind a lady’s maid with a sharp tongue and strange manner.

War: Mexican American War (1846-1848)

In 1846, just after the annexation of Texas, a Mexican nurse loses her husband and her dreams to the guns of Texas Rangers who storm her land. She vows to defend her country in her late-husband’s honor. An Irish immigrant fighting with the Yankees swims over the Rio Grande to switch sides in an act of defiance after witnessing atrocities against his own countrymen. He creates a battalion of Irishmen willing to fight and die for Mexico’s freedom. Grande weaves together the stories of Ximena and John in a spellbinding tale of war and love, illuminating a forgotten moment in history that continues to impact Mexico and America to this day.

Release date: March 15, 2022

War: World War I (1914-1918)

Bestselling historical fiction author Kate Quinn turns her eye to WWI in this novel about a young woman who joins a network of spies in 1915 occupied France. Many years later, haunted by the betrayal that tore the Alice Network apart, Eve is approached by a young American looking for answers about her cousin, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France. Their search for answers launches Alice and Charlie on a mission to find answers–no matter the cost.

This book does deal with the aftermath of WWII, but it also focuses heavily on WWI, so I’m going to count it.

War: Korean War (1950-1953)

Yu Yuan is just one of many of the Chinese soldiers taken prisoner by U.S. POW camps during the Korean War. His skill with the English language soon leaves him acting as an intermediary between his fellow prisoners and their American guards. But in a place where kindness and unspeakable cruelty can often be found hand in hand, Yuan finds he has just as much to fear outside the camp as inside it.

War: Vietnam War (1955-1975)

Viet Thang Nguyen won the Pulitzer for his novel about the Vietnam War and for good reason. With all the tension of a well-told thriller, The Sympathizer comes to us from the perspective of a communist double agent reporting back to his superiors in Vietnam after coming to America. It’s a story of espionage and identity as well as love and friendship.

War: The Cold War (1947-1989)

An intelligence officer for the FBI is tasked with joining a shadowy taskforce working to undermine the revolutionary new president of Burkina Faso whose Communist leanings have made him a target for American intervention during the Cold War. She agrees and becomes a key figure in the coup that would eventually take him down, despite admiring the work he’s doing for his country. It’s a face of the Cold War you’ve never seen before, inspired by true events.

False dictionary entries plague a digitization effort for the two employee’s of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary in present day London. Between trying to sort out the fake words, Mallory has to contend with threatening phone calls and bomb threats. More than one hundred years before, in Swansby’s heyday, a lexicographer named Peter Winceworth adds words of his own invention to the dictionary, finding creative freedom and purpose in the small rebellion. Getting to see the creation of the dictionary–and the false entries–alongside the modern day efforts to keep it going make this book particularly engaging.

Divorced, childless, and godless, Aaliya Sohbi is merely tolerated by her family. She lives alone in a Beruit apartment, surrounded by books. But Aaliya has a secret: every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic and stockpiles it away. No one else has ever read them. An Unnecessary Woman is equal parts portrait of an aging, reclusive woman with incredible talent and a love letter to literature.

Esme, the only daughter of a lexicographer working on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, grew up alongside words and definitions. She loves and treasures them as other children might fallen trinkets. And as she becomes a woman alongside the fight for women’s suffrage in England and the First World War, she begins to see the bias of a dictionary written by white, middle- and upper-class men. But Esme has been collecting and transcribing her own words–the ones deemed too crass or unimportant for the OED–and she knows they are just as worthy of documentation as all the rest.

In 1660s London, an immigrant from Amsterdam is permitted to scribe for a blind Rabbi just before the plague overwhelms the city. In present day, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history attempts to solve one last mystery: the identity of a mysterious scribe from a cache of newly discovered seventeenth-century Jewish documents. The lives of these two women of incredible intellect intertwine, despite existing hundreds of years apart.