Category: Past Tense

My all-time favorite piece of time traveling historical fiction and definitely the one that inspired the topic of this newsletter: Kindred. In the mid 1970s, Dana finds herself wrenched back in time to a plantation, where she saves a drowning white boy. Reliving the experiences of her ancestors on the plantation is painful and horrifying, but the truth about why she is being drawn back there and called to save the same boy again and again may prove even more so.

We’re already discussing the crossover of speculative elements into historical fiction, but this book brings in another: mystery. Historical mystery is actually a pretty popular subgenre in and of itself. A rogue FBI agent is mistaken for a maid when she suddenly finds herself in 1815 England. She was on the hunt for a murderer in present day, but when a young girl shows up dead in the past, Kendra must use only the tools at hand as well as her years of experience, wit, and cunning to unmask a madman.

Heartbroken by her grandfather’s death, Anne Gallagher travels to his childhood home of Ireland to spread his ashes. But instead of finding closure there, she is drawn into the past, transported to the year 1921, when her grandfather was just a boy. It’s a dangerous time, with tensions rising as Ireland struggles for its independence. Anne knows she should be searching for a way back to her time, but as she’s drawn into the conflict, she struggles to decide whether to follow her head or her heart.

A film student interviewing 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour, a woman he believes rubbed elbows with Louis Armstrong and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux in her time as a dancer in 1920s Chicago. But the Chicago of one hundred years ago wasn’t just full of flappers in glittering dresses and strong drinks, it was also a time of mobsters and murder. And Honoree isn’t sure she ready to let go of all her old secrets.

Based on the life of legendary performer, activist, and spy, Josephine Baker’s Last Dance brings her incredible story to life. The novel begins with her early years impoverished in America and follows her rise to fame as a showgirl, showcasing her enduring spirit and passion for equality.

In 1921, mobs of white residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma attacked Black residents and destroyed more than 25 square blocks of one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the United States at the time, so wealthy, in fact, it was also known as “Black Wall Street.” When a seventeen-year-old girl in present day discovers a skeleton on her family’s property, she has no idea the history it will reveal. Told in a dual timeline, following a twenty-first-century biracial Black teen and a white and Native teen, forced to make difficult choices on the night of the Tulsa massacre.

Murders are happening left and right in 1920s Harlem, and young Black girls like Louise Lloyd are ending up dead. She’s doing her best to stay alive, though, spending her days working at a café and her nights at Manhattan’s hottest speakeasy. But then a body is found at the café and Louise is arrested with an ultimatum: help the police solve the murders or be made an example of by the judge. Now Louise is stuck between the law and a murderous mastermind in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

I love a good retelling, and this story reimagining the life of a character from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is exactly the kind I like to see: giving a underserved and / or maligned character a voice. In this version, Eleanor gets to tell her own version, from a childhood as a cast-off farm girl to friend of social-climbing poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Danielle Daniel envisions the lives of her ancestors in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s in this groundbreaking historical fiction novel. Marie marries a French man at the behest of her chief, hoping to strengthen their relations. But his Catholicism blinds him to the ways of the Weskarini Deer Clan. And their daughter, a two-spirited child, who would’ve been revered by her people, is considered unnatural by the French and by her own father. It is a profound story of women who have fallen through the cracks and of the long history of violence against Indigenous women.

In the 1880s American West during the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a kidnapped girl is forced to reinvent herself over and over again to survive. Smuggled across the ocean and thrust from calligraphy school to brothel to a shop in the Idaho Mountains, Daiyu eventually comes to realize that each part of herself is exactly what she needs to survive–especially in the wake of growing anti-Chinese sentiment.

Based on the true story of the bookish woman who became history’s deadliest female sniper, The Diamond Eye follows Mila Pavlichenko, whose life changes course forever when the Nazis invade Russia. Her skill with a rifle earns her the name Lady Death, but news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national hero and leads to a good will tour in America, even as Mila contends with the wounds this war has left her.

In 1973 Alabama, Civil Townsend has just graduated nursing school and has big plans. Civil wants to make a difference, especially in the African American community. She expects her job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic will allow her to do just that. But when her first two patients are little more than children, and she’s told to put them on birth control simply because the people in control of the young girls’ welfare demand it, Civil gets a queasy feeling in her gut. And things only get worse from there, as she realizes no one else is going to blow the whistle on the terrible things being done to her patients.

This epic historical fantasy follows one woman from East Africa through a lifetime of hardship, oppression, and opportunity as someone captured, enslaved, and forced across the Atlantic at only eleven years old. It’s a remarkable story of a remarkable life, loosely inspired by the author’s own ancestors and the discovery of a 112-year-old woman in the Ohio census.

Chanel Cleeton continues to trace the Perez family throughout history in this new novel where Isabel chases her sister Beatriz to Spain to track her down after she went missing in Barcelona in 1964. Twenty-odd years before, Isabel’s mother Alicia arrives in Barcelona after a difficult journey from Cuba with her marriage in jeopardy and her young daughter in tow. Cleeton weaves together past and future as a mother and daughter are faced with choosing between their family and their heart.

Set in the tobacco capital of the Southern United States in the 1940s, The Tobacco Wives follows a young woman who discovers Bright Leaf isn’t the illustrious town she believed it to be. It’s a place rife with health issues. And as the new seamstress for the wives of tobacco executives, she uncovers dangerous truths that could topple the tobacco empire ruling the south.

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.