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Historical Fiction Highlights
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The reformatory : a novel
by Tananarive Due
In the Jim Crow South, 12-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., who can see ghosts, is sent to The Reformatory where boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, while his sister Gloria rallies everyone in Florida to get him out before it's too late.
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The Paris Express : a novel
by Emma Donoghue
Set on a fateful 1895 train journey to Paris, a diverse group of passengers—including politicians, a medical student, an inventor, and an anarchist—navigate personal ambitions and hidden motives, culminating in a disaster that forever changes their lives.
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Hungerstone
by Kat Dunn
Lenore and husband Henry travel to the British moorlands for a hunting party where an accident brings into their lives the mysterious Carmilla, who is weak during the day but vibrant at night, and Lenore must choose between her husband's affection and cravings that Carmilla has awakened.
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James : a novel
by Percival Everett
Describes the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the enslaved Jim, who decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island after learning he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans.
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Some strange music draws me in : a novel
by Griffin Hansbury
It's the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel's dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia's presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
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This other Eden : a novel
by Paul Harding
Inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast, this novel brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters who struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.
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The seventh veil of Salome
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
In 1950s Hollywood, when an unknown Mexican ingenue is cast as Salome, a star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary heroine, she becomes the object of envy of Nancy Hartley, a bit player who will do anything to win the fame she believes she richly deserves.
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My beloved life : a novel
by Amitava Kumar
Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. And this is only the first of many challenges in store for Jadu. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He becomes a historian. He has a daughter, Jugnu, who grows up to be a television journalist and then escapes her marriage for a career in the United States. And he sees currents of huge change sweep across India--from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham--in ways that Jadu is both apart from and can't help but represent.
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Women's hotel : a novel
by Daniel M. Lavery
In a funny and poignant debut novel about the Beidermeier, a women's hotel in 1960s New York City, residents Katherine, Lucianne, Kitty, Ruth, and Pauline are aware that their days as an institution are numbered, and they'd better make the most of it while it lasts.
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Red harvest: A Graphic Novel of the Terror Famine in Soviet Ukraine
by Michael Cherkas
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin waged a brutal war against the Soviet peasantry leading to the Holodomor, the terror-famine that killed at least 4 million Ukrainians during the fall and winter of 1932-33. This previous Russian aggression in Ukraine is lamentably relevant as we witness the horrors unfold in the current Ukrainian war. Red Harvest is based on the tragic events that took place in Soviet Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1933. Stalin and the ruling Communist Party began their program of forced large-scale collectivization of individual farms and farmers, including the seizure of livestock, farm implements, crops, seed stock, and other property. Red Harvest is the fictional story, based on true stories as related to the Ukrainian-Canadian author, of Mykola Kovalenko, a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada, who was the only member of his family to have survived the famine. Through his memories, we witness the horrors of what happened to his family and fellow villagers in the "breadbasket of Europe" as they struggled--not only to make sense of the war that was being waged against them--but, ultimately, to survive.
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