New Books In Historical Fiction

The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human nature remains the same in her historical novel series Son of a Preacher Man and Greenwood and Archer. Son of a Preacher Man takes place in 1920 Tulsa, Oklahoma, a strictly segregated oil boomtown. The preacher’s son, Billy Ray Matthias and Benny Freeman, daughter of an oil-rich rancher, befriend each other when both want to escape the shadows of their past. Billy Ray’s heart is open for love but Benny’s is fearfully shut. After the devastating race riot, Banks continues the narrative of restoration in the sequel Greenwood and Archer. Lives have been drastically changed since the riot and its citizens defiantly rebuild their piece of prosperity. Tulsa, Oklahoma is as segregated as ever but doesn’t want the whole nation watching. Additional tension festers as prohibition brings Chicago gangster

Journalism, history, biography, memoirs, and historical fiction overlap to some degree. The first two focus on provable facts, but the facts must be arranged to form a coherent story, and that requires an element of interpretation, especially in history. Biography and memoirs demand even more of a story arc, although still devoted to a specific person who once lived or still lives. And historical fiction, although it departs from that fundamental reliance on what can be documented or evidenced by creating imaginary characters or putting words into the heads and mouths of real people, nonetheless relies on creating a you are there sense of authenticity that cannot exist without considerable research into how people in a given time and place dressed, talked, ate, traveled, and socialized. Finding Billy Battles and its sequels, The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles (Xlibris, 2016) and the forthcoming The Lost Years of Billy Battles (title not set), occupy this space between journalism and fiction. William Fit

Once in a while, a novel comes along that is just extraordinary, in the best sense of that word. Bren McClain’s One Good Mama Bone (Story River Books, 2017) falls into this category. In little more than 250 pages, McClain brings to life in spare but lyrical prose an unforgettable cast of characters struggling with poverty, family, and reputation against the backdrop of the early 1950s rural US South. Perhaps her most remarkable creation is Mama Red, a cow near the end of her useful life whose dedication to her calf becomes a symbol of mother love. In the summer of 1944, Sarah Creamer helps her best friend deliver a child fathered by Sarah’s own husband. Out of fear and shame, her best friend kills herself shortly after the birth, leaving Sarah and her husband to raise the boy, whom they name Emerson Bridge. Over the next seven years Sarah’s husband drinks himself to death, at which point Sarah inherits a farm mortgaged to the hilt and a child she can’t afford to feed and fears that she

The term historical fiction covers a wide range from what the mystery writer Josephine Tey once dubbed “history with conversation” to outright invention shading into fantasy. But behind every story set in the past lies the past itself, as re-created by scholars from the available evidence. This interview features Helen Rappaport, whose latest work reveals the historical background behind the Masterpiece Theater miniseries Victoria, due to air in the United States this month. Rappaport served as historical consultant to the show. The Queen Victoria who gave her name to an age famous for a prudishness so extreme that even tables had limbs, not legs, is nowhere evident in Rappaport’s book, the television series, or the novel by Daisy Goodwin, also titled Victoria, that gave rise to the series. Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen (Harper Design, 2017) explores in vivid, compelling prose the letters, diaries, and other documents associated with the reign of a strong-minded, passionate,

Here at New Books in Historical Fiction, we don’t often interview the same author twice. Bernard Cornwell is an exception. As I note in my introduction to this podcast, since I last interviewed him in June 2014, he has published three new Saxon Stories (now renamed the Last Kingdom series) and a nonfiction history of the confrontation between Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo. Meanwhile, the BBC and Netflix have released his first two Last Kingdom novels as a hit television series, again under the title The Last Kingdom. With so much new material to discuss, a second interview seemed like the least we could do. The Flame Bearer (Harper, 2016) is the tenth novel narrated by Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Uhtred’s story, which began at the age of ten in 866, is tied up with the drive of King Alfred the Great and his children to create a single English kingdom out of four warring principalities–three of them, at the beginning of the series, under the control of Danish invaders. Uhtred–descendant

So far, this podcast has focused on straight historical fiction rather than historical romance. Although love stories have a way of creeping into novels whatever their genre, books that focus on instantaneous passion don’t always give equal weight to the historical element in historical fiction. The series written by the mother/daughter team that publishes under the pen name Ursula LeCoeur, however, takes place in the richly detailed, lavishly imagined, deeply researched world of 1880s New Orleans. The Devious Debutante (Royal Street Publishing, 2015), third in the series, follows its hero and heroine through docks and bayous, ballrooms and opium dens, back streets, taverns, and Mardi Gras floats. Maureen Collins, the daughter of a wealthy cotton merchant, should be focused on her trousseau and on attracting a scion of an old New Orleans family. Instead she spends time in her greenhouse, searching for a way to graft red camellias onto white stems. When by accident she runs into Ben Merritt, an attorney

Paris, 1676. At the house of the fortuneteller Catherine Montvoisin (La Voisin), while two hooded forms watch, a wayward priest burns a piece of parchment in a spell designed to awaken the passions of Louis XIV of France. Three years later, those performing the ceremony become the target of a police investigation into the so-called Affair of the Poisons. Through interrogation, strategic imprisonment, and selective executions, the police gradually close in on La Voisin. But because of confessions exacted through torture, the widening scandal sweeps up more than four hundred suspects, including some of France’s most prestigious aristocrats. When a zealous young officer goes after La Voisin’s daughter and threatens to implicate Louis XIV’s official mistress, the marquise de Montespan, the police chief gets cold feet. But the young officer remains determined to bring those he considers guilty to justice, until in the end only the intervention of the Sun King himself can sort things out. In Charl

It’s 1921, and Prohibition is in full swing, but you wouldn’t know it from the nightclubs and speakeasies of Chicago, where bathtub gin mingles with homemade bourbon distilled from trainloads of corn sugar shipped up from Southern farms. A young man named Al Capone is on his way up, the bar owners squabble over control of the sugar trade, and the police know to turn a blind eye. So when a drive-by shooting ends in murder, two young women–Eve, a black jazz pianist, and Lena, a white nurse–band together to find Eves missing stepsister and the killer of Lena’s brother in Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery (Noontime Books, 2016) a fast-paced, twisty, riveting journey through the seedy back alleys of the Windy City, where the Great Migration has only just begun to break down the barriers of racial segregation. Out of these disparate elements Martha Conway–the winner of numerous awards for her previous historical novel, Thieving Forest–blends a scintillating cocktail set to the

Although the Holocaust inflicted extreme brutality wherever it occurred, the specific events associated with the violence differed from one place to another. In Tasa’s Song (She Writes Press, 2016), Linda Kass weaves stories of her own mother’s life in eastern Poland under Soviet and Nazi occupation to create a universal story of suffering and survival. Tasa Rosinski is a violinist, a child prodigy living in the Polish village of Podkamien, when Adolf Hitler is elected chancellor of Germany in 1933. At ten, her world revolves around school, music, and play–secure amid a loving family, friendly neighbors, and a teasing older cousin who has become her best friend. But as Tasa matures into adolescence and moves to the nearby town of Brody for schooling, the influence of antisemitism on her native Poland grows steadily. Life becomes increasingly unsafe for a Jewish girl, however gifted. In 1939, just before the outbreak of war, the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact transfers Tasa’s r

For more than three centuries after the Mongol conquest of 1240, the rulers of the Golden Horde played a major role in Eurasian politics, both directly and indirectly. One of the states most affected was Russia, where the ruling house of Moscow played the post-conquest political game so successfully that it made itself the center of the resurgent Russian tsardom. In her Legends of the Five Directions series, C. P. Lesley explores the dramatic potential of that distant and often conflict-ridden world. The Swan Princess (Five Directions Press, 2016)–third in the Legends series–returns to the story of Nasan, heroine of book 1, The Golden Lynx. Despite her high standing as a Tatar khan’s daughter and two years of marriage to a husband she has learned to love, Nasan has yet to bear a child. As a result, her status within her in-laws’ household is compromised. Her husband has been sent faraway; her snippy sister-in-law seldom misses a chance to score a point; and her mother-in-law, the mains

Cypress Island, September 1896: a tragedy has left a young widow, mourning her child, living alone in a cabin on this isolated spot near Bellingham Bay in the very new state of Washington. Once a month or so, Eliza Waite rows two hours each way to the general store on the mainland for supplies. Otherwise, she supports herself through hard work: chopping wood, maintaining a vegetable garden, fishing, cooking, doing laundry. Each day has a chore, and they repeat endlessly until a second crisis and a lucky find send Eliza northward on a boat to Alaska, where the Klondike gold rush is at its height. There the strands of her past interweave in ways she could not have anticipated. In Eliza Waite (She Writes Press, 2016), Ashley E. Sweeney creates a tough, resilient, likable heroine whose compelling story will draw you in and make you pull for her success. And if all this effort makes you hungry, have no fear: the book is filled with Eliza’s recipes, and a plate of gingerbread or miner’s snickerdoodles i

In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, the grip of European knights on the Holy Land has begun to loosen. The Muslim forces under Saladin have won a major victory, and the crusaders have so far forgotten themselves as to besiege, then sack, the imperial Christian city of Constantinople their nominal allies. In the confusion thus created, two warring clans the Lusignans and the Ibelin sat times cooperate but more often compete for supremacy, spurred on by the marital and political maneuvering of Maria Komnene, queen of Jerusalem. The conflict expands to include Cyprus, Armenia, the Levant, and the Eastern Roman Empire as a whole. The plots and counterplots sweep up Juliana de Charnais, in distant Poitou. The legitimacy of her marriage is in question, a male relative captures her daughter, and her unsatisfactory husband has chosen to obey another relatives summons to defend the Lusignan cause in the east. To reclaim her child, Juliana follows her husband. A former novice, Juliana seeks first and foremost to re

It’s May 1945, and a pair of American GIs in occupied Germany find themselves at what appears to be an abandoned estate. When they enter, they discover a resident, reduced to burning valuable books for fuel. Within an hour, the resident is dead and the GIs are speeding back to their camp, a few souvenirs in their rucksacks. So begins And After the Fire (Harper, 2016), the new book from bestselling author Lauren Belfer, whose previous forays into historical fiction include City of Light and A Fierce Radiance. Through the independent but intertwined stories of Susanna Kessler and Sara Levy, Belfer’s third novel explores, among other things, the long history of antisemitism in Europe, beginning in late eighteenth-century Berlin and ending in twenty-first-century Manhattan. The link between Susanna, Sara, and the fleeing GIs is a previously undiscovered cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, hidden for three centuries because of its offensive and inflammatory libretto. Bach’s missing cantata is ficti

Sara Thibault and her new husband, Philippe Lemieux, grew up in Vouvray, amid the French vineyards that dot the Loire Valley. But when the phylloxera blight of the 1870s devastates their families business, Philippe decides to try his luck in California. Sara soon follows, driven by a tragic series of events detailed in The Vintner’s Daughter. The California Wife (She Writes Press, 2016),the stand-alone sequel to that earlier novel, traces the later history of Sara, Philippe, and the group of wholly or partially orphaned children whose care they undertake. The California wine industry, although somewhat healthier than the French, has also suffered from the blight. Its reputation is less secure than that of its European rival, and the existence of too few outlets has driven prices down to the point where many vintners can hardly afford to harvest their crops. Meanwhile, Sara fears for the survival of the vines on her childhood estate, and Philippe worries about the cost of developing his current lands. In

A hundred years before Ellis Island became a processing center for immigrants wishing to enter the United States, Philadelphia had the Lazaretto, a quarantine hospital where every ship entering the harbor from June to September had to stop while those aboard were checked for signs of infectious disease. In a city already known for its diversity by the mid-nineteenth century, the Lazaretto represented both openness to and fear of the outsider. This deep ambivalence, to change and to the other, forms the heart of Lazaretto (Harper, 2016), the sparkling new novel by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, who already has five acclaimed works of fiction to her credit. The US Civil War has just ended. In the home of a well-respected midwife, a white attorney has brought his young black servant, Meda, to abort the child he has fathered on her. But the pregnancy is too far along for such a solution, and the child arrives that very night. The father takes the child, ordering the midwife to tell his servant that her daughter is dea

A ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theatre, near Times Square in New York. She wears a green outfit in flapper style, and she’s just a little annoyed to realize that no one is scared of her, even though she mostly rearranges the scenery rather than clanking chains or leaping out and scaring people. Her name is Olive Thomas, and she is one of the first silent movie stars, although her early death means that she is much less famous than her sister-in-law, Mary Pickford. Born near Pittsburgh, Olive moves to New York to escape a teen marriage and a life raised in poverty. After winning a contest as the Most Beautiful Girl in New York, she becomes an artist’s model before securing a position with Flo Ziegfeld, the mogul behind the Follies. Ziegfeld takes a shine to Olive, and soon she is not only dancing for him but has become a regular in the much racier Midnight Follies. Soon she and Ziegfeld are involved in an affair, but when Ziegfeld goes back to his wife, Olive takes off for Hollywood. In Santa Mon

In four thousand years of Chinese history, Empress Wu stands alone as the only woman to rule in her own name. She died in her eighties after decades of successful governance, but her sons could not hold the kingdom she established for them and the dynasty she founded soon fell from power. The Confucian scholars who recorded her history—outraged by the idea of a woman ordering men—depicted a murderous, manipulative harlot that has ever since obscured her achievements. In The Moon in the Palace (Sourcebooks, 2016), Weina Dai Randel  seeks to polish Empress Wu’s tarnished reputation, offering a new look at her and her times, the obstacles she faced and the gifts that enabled her to overcome them. Wu Mei is five years old when a Buddhist monk predicts her future as the mother of emperors and bearer of the mandate of Heaven. By thirteen, she has already entered the Imperial Palace as a Select, one of a small group of maidens chosen to serve the Taizong Emperor. But the palace is a vast and complex hierar

The Wild West of Zane Grey and John Wayne movies, with its clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians (never called Native Americans in this narrative), bears little resemblance to the brawling, boozy refuge for every Civil War-displaced vagabond, seeker of gold (copper, tin, silver, oil), and would-be financier that once constituted the US frontier. In two novels about Doc Holliday and his friends the Earps, Mary Doria Russell pulls back the curtain to reveal the social, economic, and political divides that in the 1870s and 1880s kept the land beyond the Mississippi a hotbed of lawlessness and vice mixed with occasional acts of heroism. Doc begins the story in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1878. Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (Ecco Books, 2015) continues it a few years later in the Arizona Territory, focusing on the events leading up to and the aftermath of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Tombstone, Arizona, is an example of everything right and wrong on the frontier. The silver mines

In 1530, Babur the Tiger, the self-proclaimed ruler of Afghanistan, moved south and conquered the northwest section of what was then known as Hindustan. Babur, although accepted as padishah and emperor, never much cared for India, but his descendants flourished there until the British moved in more than three centuries later. Faint Promise of Rain (She Writes Press, 2014) explores the early part of this transition. Two years before the death of Babur’s son Humayun, a girl child is born to the temple dance master near Jaisalmer, a citadel in present-day Rajasthan. Adhira’s birth is considered auspicious, because it takes place during one of this desert area’s rare rainstorms. To Adhira’s father, the divine blessing placed on his child means that she will finally be the one to carry on the kathak dance tradition that has defined his life. Adhira’s mother worries that no little girl should carry the burden of such great expectations. And Adhira’s older brother Mahendra cannot

Long before Genghis Khan set off to conquer the known world, the pattern of steppe warriors attacking–and often defeating–settled empires was well established. Only a few names of those who led these effective but mostly short-lived campaigns have become cultural references familiar to a general audience, but Attila the Hun looms large in that group–almost as large as Genghis himself. In the fifth century, the period covered by The Last Wife of Attila the Hun (Booktrope Editions, 2015), Attila kept both the eastern and the western Roman empires on their figurative toes, despite their vastly greater military and economic resources. Into this charged atmosphere comes Gudrun, a young Burgundian noblewoman determined to exact vengeance for the destruction of her people at Attila’s hands. She offers him a golden sword of magical power that, according to legend, inflicts a curse on its owner. She hopes Attila will become its next victim. But as the days turn into weeks and Gudrun becomes fir