New Books in Historical Fiction

The Thread Collectors (Harper Collins, 2022) by Shaunna J Edwards and Alyson Richman takes readers to 1863, where, in a small Creole cottage in New Orleans, an ingenious young Black woman named Stella embroiders intricate maps on repurposed cloth to help enslaved men flee and join the Union Army. Bound to a man who would kill her if he knew of her clandestine activities, Stella has to hide not only her efforts but her love for William, a Black soldier and a brilliant musician. Meanwhile, in New York City, a Jewish woman stitches a quilt for her husband, who is stationed in Louisiana with the Union Army. Between abolitionist meetings, Lily rolls bandages and crafts quilts with her sewing circle for other soldiers, too, hoping for their safe return home. But when months go by without word from her husband, Lily resolves to make the perilous journey South to search for him. As these two women risk everything for love and freedom during thebrutal Civil War, their paths converge in New Orleans, where an unexpected encounter leads them to discover that even the most delicate threads have the capacity to save us. Loosely inspired by the authors' family histories, this stunning novel will stay with readers for a long time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

With the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America fast approaching, a small flood of novels set in the early days of colonization and statehood seems likely. Anneke Jans in the New World (She Writes Press, 2026) stands out because, rather than focus on the Puritans or the revolution and the founding of the nation, it explores the life of the author’s ancestor, who joined the fledgling Dutch colony known as Fort Amsterdam between 1630 and 1663. This is New York City as you can’t imagine it, an outpost on the mighty Hudson, surrounded by forest and mountains, with not a skyscraper or even a paved street to be seen. Anneke crosses the ocean with her husband, Roelof Jans, under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company, which in the seventeenth century was expanding across the globe. Roelof, a former sailor, sees the opportunity to settle down as a landowner in the New World, and Anneke joins him at the urging of her mother—who both wants to see her daughter settled and establish a beachhead for herself as a future midwife to the new colony. Eventually, the whole family emigrates, and the novel follows Anneke through numerous personal upheavals and joys amid the gradual disintegration of Fort Amsterdam’s relationship with the Native American nations surrounding the fort. This is classic historical fiction in its focus on one central character and the many evolving relationships that define her life. It works because Anneke herself is such a well-thought-out and appealing person, and that—as well as the richly portrayed and, to me, relatively unfamiliar world that surrounds her—kept me turning pages as fast as I could. After a long career in academe, an interest in genealogy led Sandra Freels, a specialist in Russian language and literature, to the Council Records of New Netherland and the delicious stories of the people who once lived there. She claims descent from Anneke Jans and sixteen other major and minor characters in her debut novel, Anneke Jans in the New World.  C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025. Sandra's website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Three people—two enslaved, one indentured—living beside each other, struggling against their circumstances, trying to bend destiny. As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America’s character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom. Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother’s only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the boundaries of love. David is a helping child and a solace to his parents, and he gave a purpose to their trials. His survival hinges on his mother’s shrewd intellect and ferocious fight, but his sustenance is his freed Black father’s dream of emancipation for the entire family. Jack Dane, a Scots-Irish boy, sails to Britain’s colonies when his father sells him into indentured servitude as an escape from poverty. There Jack learns from the rich the value of each person’s life. A breathtaking, haunting, and epic saga, This Here Is Love (W.W. Norton, 2025) intimately intertwines us with these beautifully drawn, unforgettable American characters. Bless, taken to serve the slaveowner’s daughter, must decide where she belongs: with the enslaved or above them. David, sold away from his people, retreats into himself even as he yearns to unite with others. Jack, acting impetuously, changes his fortune, but will doing so sacrifice his humanity? All three come together on Jack’s land. As they face and challenge each other, they will relinquish and remake beliefs about family and freedom, even as they confront the limits of love. Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia. You can find her on Instagram. Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Princess went to continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

In The Mozhaisk Road (Austin Macauley, 2025) the time is 1978 and Moscow is still the capital of a Communist country. The political police continues to suppress the protests of dissident leader Alexander Razumovsky and his tiny group of supporters. Western observers Howard Wilde and Gels Maybey face an uncertain Christmas after a public rally is roughly broken up in the city's Pushkin Square. But when the elderly Razumovsky suddenly steps down in the New Year and a new young leader emerges, the whole world sees a sign of hope. Can this sluggish, downtrodden Russia, despised by its own leaders, suddenly change, inspired by the courage of one Boris Marlinsky?As the Kremlin responds behind the scenes, how close can Western reporters come to grasping the hidden ways of power which seem to seal Russia's troubled fate? This forcefully imagined prequel to the real events of 1991 changes the lives of Howard Wilde and Gels Maybey, and their American friends Arthur and Harriet. But what then of their Russian friends? Is it only Western hearts and minds that long for freedom along the Mozhaisk Road? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Cornwall, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was best known for its smuggling. The combination of an insular and impoverished countryside, a rugged coastline characterized by numerous inlets and coves, and price hikes caused by the ongoing wars between Britain and France—played out in high tariffs and embargoes—created the perfect conditions for people desperate to make a living to defy what they saw as an unfair law. Over the years, those same characteristics have appealed to novelists from Daphne du Maurier to the present day. The Sea Child (Ballantine, 2026)—which takes place in an isolated village in Cornwall, although on a river leading to the sea rather than the coastline itself—certainly dips into the long and contentious struggle between Cornish villagers and the British Crown. But at the heart of the story we find Isabel Henley, a young woman who, as a child of four, was plucked from the sea with no knowledge of her parents or her home. Adopted by local landlords, Isabel has grown up, moved away, married a naval man, and, following his death at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), returned to her childhood village. There she discovers that the legend surrounding her—that she is not entirely human but a daughter of the Sea Bucca, a merman who haunts the waters of the Cornish coast—survives and thrives. Isabel discounts the locals’ tale, but she can’t deny that the river calls to her as she strolls along its banks at twilight … Linda Wilgus—a former bookseller, knitting pattern designer, and writer of short stories, many of which have been published in literary magazines—lives in Cambridge, England, with her family. The Sea Child is her debut novel. Website here C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the second quarter of 2026. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

For our Pandemic-era Books in Dark Times series, RTB spoke in 2020 with Carlo Rotella of Boston College. Rotella is the author of such gems as Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt and most recently has come out with What Can I Get out of This? along with some sparkling related pieces about AI in the classroom. Carlo is always worth listening to, in dark days... and darker ones, too. He starts by praising sagas, makes a case for stories of disagreeableness and plugs a remarkable book about preaching, deception, and the urge to belong. Tacitus, Germania Njal’s Saga Egil’s Saga Prose Edda Poetic Edda Haldor Laxness, Iceland’s Bell Mitch Weiss, Broken Faith Lawrence Wright, Going Clear (2013) P. G. Wodehouse My Man Jeeves (indeed, 1919) The Wizard of Id Robert E. Howard, Conan (first appearance 1932) Read transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Amateur detectives come in many forms. Owning a bookstore or a bakery, running a charming country inn, working in a library—even owning a cat or a dog—puts a character into the category of potential sleuth. But few creators of amateur detectives can top S.J. Bennett, whose Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series turns Queen Elizabeth II herself into a solver of crimes. Today we are discussing The Queen Who Came in from the Cold (Crooked Lane Books, 2025) The first three books take place in 2016, when the queen is ninety years old. Even these days, those don’t qualify as historical fiction. But they set the tone of the series, which is at once respectful and warm, even charming. The mysteries are challenging, the queen’s role believable, and the family relationships well portrayed. Certain constraints on the queen also appear here. For example, she can solve mysteries, but she can’t be seen to solve them, because she is the queen. Similarly, she relies for help on other women, who serve as her private secretaries (a job that goes far beyond typing), because the men spend far too much time worrying about upsetting their monarch and far too little time trusting her to know what she needs and wants. Obviously, even if one is the queen of England, only so many mysterious deaths can take place nearby without raising eyebrows. So book 4, A Death in Diamonds, moves back in time to 1957 and a scandal possibly involving Prince Philip. The latest novel, The Queen Who Came In from the Cold (Crooked Lane Books, 2025), as the title suggests, takes place during the Cold War, specifically 1961, and involves Soviet spies and double agents, including the infamous Kim Philby. To say more would be to give too much away, but it’s yet another engrossing tale with a twist at the end that turns the entire story on its head. And yes, there are Corgis—racehorses, too! S.J. Bennett, the author of the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series, has written over a dozen novels for both adults and children. She also teaches creative writing and, with her brother, hosted Prepublished, a podcast for aspiring writers. The Queen Who Came in from the Cold is her latest novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

A sweeping historical coming-of-age novel set against India’s 1948 takeover of Hyderabad, The Sirens of September (India Penguin, 2025) shifts between the palaces of princely Hyderabad, the refugee camps of post-Partition Bombay, army command rooms and the seedy lanes of London’s Piccadilly. Farishteh Ali Khan, an aristocratic teenager who enjoys a gilded existence, tumbles into a web of international espionage, political intrigue and dark family secrets. A few chance meetings between her and an air force pilot, Saleem El Edroos, lead to them striking up a long-distance courtship. When Hyderabad falls, the new regime makes the Ali Khans and the Edrooses answer for their old loyalties. The one person who can come to their aid can also tear Farishteh’s family apart. Author Bio Note: Zeenath Khan is a writer who divides her time between Hyderabad, India and New York City. The Sirens of September is her debut novel. She has written about history, travel and current affairs for Scroll, Mint Lounge, Siasat and Literary Traveler. Aside from writing, she enjoys reading, working out, baking, and spending time with her friends and three grown-up children. The article mentioned in the podcast can be found here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Despite the long-held perception that medieval and early modern women were as quiet, pious, and obedient as society expected them to be, the truth is more complex. The Bailiff’s Wife (Cuidono Press, 2025) builds on a historical event recorded in a seventeenth-century English broadsheet to create a picture of a society in flux, the result of far-reaching political and religious changes that found expression in the English Civil War and its aftermath, the Restoration of King Charles II. Sarah Kidd, a woman whose husband has gone missing, along with the small fortune with which he intended to support her and their infant son, sets out—defying the demands of social convention—to find out what happened to her missing Nathaniel. She tracks him to the Cotswold village of Chalfont St. James, where despite relentless hounding, the local constable and magistrate refuse her requests for an exhumation of the body discovered in the village three years before and never identified. After annoying pretty much everyone in town by her refusal to take no for an answer, Sarah finds support from the unlikely combination of Frances Bright, a relatively well-off Quaker widow with two daughters, and Arthur Brunskill, the local vicar whose Puritan religious sympathies have fallen out of favor with the Restoration. As the tale unfolds, it develops into a classic murder mystery. Someone in Chalfont St. James caused the death of Nathaniel Kidd, and Sarah will not let matters rest until she sees the killer brought to justice. And this small, insular setting turns out to harbor plenty of suspects anxious to avoid drawing notice to themselves … Maren Halvorsen is a historian of medieval and early modern Europe and lifelong writer of fiction. The Bailiff’s Wife is her debut novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025. Maren's website here Cuidono Press's website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Donald Rumsfeld was a major player in American history. In this riveting alternative history, he's put on trial for his role in the United States 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Trial of Donald H. Rumsfeld (Dlnp, 2025) charts Rumsfeld's rise to fame and power, the fight with President Donald Trump that leads to his prosecution, and his spellbinding trial at the International Criminal Court. Told through the eyes of a mysterious narrator whose identity-and pivotal role in Rumsfeld's downfall-are eventually revealed, The Trial of Donald H. Rumsfeld is a tale of politics, betrayal, and the explosive mix of unbridled ambition and absolute power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

When we meet Maple Bishop in the first book in her series, Death in the Details, she is reeling from a series of life-changing circumstances. Rural Vermont in 1946 doesn’t have much use for a childless widow with limited means of support and even less interest in knitting, baking, and chitchat. Maple ruffles feathers, including those of Ginger Comstock, the leader of local female society in Elderberry, the very small town where Maple moved two years before with her doctor husband, Bill. That’s another strike against her, in fact: Elderberry is the kind of town that accepts newcomers slowly, if ever. It doesn’t help when Maple, who builds dollhouses to fill her empty days and decides to sell them to supplement her income, uncovers a murder. Even the local sheriff barely tolerates what he sees as her interference in an open-and-shut case. Fast forward a few months, and Maple’s situation has improved—a little. In Murder in Miniature (Crooked Lane Books, 2025), she’s still something of a social outcast, but her dollhouses have acquired a new purpose and she has a few more friends in town. Even the crotchety sheriff has developed respect for her abilities. So when a cabin fire on the outskirts of town creates an opening for Maple’s particular gift for re-creating a crime scene, he doesn’t hesitate to ask for her help. Neither of them could have predicted that this case will bring them into contact not only with big city criminals but also with a mystery from Maple’s past. Katie Tietjen—an award-winning writer, teacher, and school librarian—lives in New England with her husband and two sons. Murder in Miniature is the second book in the Maple Bishop series, following Death in the Details, which came out in 2024. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Eleanor of Aquitaine is best known as the wife of England’s Henry II, the mother of his numerous children—including two kings, Richard the Lionheart and his infamous brother John, of Magna Carta fame—and perhaps for her long incarceration at Henry’s insistence after their burning romance turned to ashes. What is often forgotten is that Eleanor, before she ever met Henry, ruled as queen of France for fifteen years. About a decade into her marriage, Eleanor accompanied her husband, King Louis VII, on the Second Crusade to re-establish Christian control over Jerusalem. In The Queen’s Companion (Cuidono Press, 2025), this is where her story intersects with that of Lucy Pick’s narrator, Lady Aude, who has her own reasons for traveling from Europe to the Holy Land. Interspersed with the events of the Second Crusade, told from the point of view of the crusaders and witnessed by Aude as Eleanor’s lady-in-waiting, is Aude’s own history, which she presents in the form of stories to Eleanor and her women. Aude is ruthlessly honest in revealing her own flaws and errors as well as her triumphs, and through her voice Lucy Pick creates a character—at times unlikable, but always indomitable and even admirable, much like Eleanor herself—who shines a spotlight onto medieval life in all its complexity. Lucy Pick, a historian of the thought and culture of medieval Spain, taught for over twenty years at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The Queen’s Companion is her second novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Kavya is an Indian-American professor and single mother struggling with debilitating panic attacks. Bombarded by flashbacks of cruelty and violence that disrupt her everyday life, she is left with no choice but to confront the intergenerational trauma tormenting her. At first, Kavya finds some relief in piecing together the legacies of her family's experiences with colonialism, colorism, and casteism. But just as she starts to recover, explosive confessions threaten to bring her world crashing down. Tilt: A Novel on Intergenerational Trauma (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) is an unflinching feminist novel about the devastating histories that haunt us and the unexpected beauty of facing our pasts. Meghana V. Nayak is Professor of Political Science and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University-NYC. Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Moscow Underground (HarperCollins, 2025) by Dr. Catherine Merridale is a sweeping novel of life, death and politics in the quicksand world of Stalin's tyranny. Moscow's glittering new subway is under construction at last. The first line will run through the centre of the city, cutting deep through Moscow soil. But futures cannot be created without digging up the past. Though Russia's leaders want to build a glorious Soviet capital, what holds them in a fatal grip is history: old mud and bones. Anton Belkin is an Investigator at the Procuracy, a sensitive job at a dangerous moment on the road to the Show Trials. He is also someone who needs to keep his head down. His artist father was once the darling of the revolutionary avant-garde, a painter whose work could inspire devotion and great sacrifice. But now his dreams are out of place, too loud and red in Stalin's world of sterile rules and rubber stamps. Anton is dragged into a murder case. A prominent archaeologist, working alongside the subway dig, has been killed in a deserted mansion. Though Anton doesn't want the job, his former lover, Vika, who is now a powerful member of the secret police, browbeats him into paying a visit to the site with her. Against his better judgement he is drawn to follow though, embarking on investigations that will almost certainly get him killed. Deep underground, he finds a priceless secret that could genuinely unlock the future but links him to a vicious internecine fight for power in the young Soviet state. In the process, he is forced to reconsider the history he shares with Vika and the bonds that bind them both. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

This fascinating novel—dual-time historical with a fantastical overlay, based in part on the life of the author’s great-grandfather, a nineteenth-century charlatan—follows the career of a young Scotswoman named Nairna Liath. When we meet her in 1900, Nora, sixteen years old, travels the Scottish countryside at the insistence of her father, Tavish, who supports himself and his daughter by hawking her supposed skills as a medium—expressed through his own mangled Gaelic mixed with a series of parlor tricks that Nairna has mastered. But we soon find out that the joke’s on Tavish: Nairna really does have psychic talents, especially in reading Tarot cards. Her ability attracts attention from the Society for Psychical Research, setting Nairna on her path to become the spiritualist Nora Grey. Her tale is intertwined with (in fact, propelled by) that of Nairna’s grandmother, Lottie Liath, in the 1860s. Lottie has just lost her husband in a coal mining accident, and when she protests the lack of financial support provided by the uncaring mine administration, the manager has her arrested and thrown in jail. From there, the pregnant Lottie ends up in an asylum. And it’s the asylum, where she is subjected to psychic experiments, that brings her increasingly into conversation with Nora. The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey (Kensington Books, 2025) is rich in drama—both tragedy and comedy—as well as rapid switches of identity accompanied by pseudo news reports from various types of sources that illuminate Nora’s and Lottie’s stories in various ways. It’s tremendous fun and heartbreaking at the same time, and it’s best just to suspend disbelief and go with the flow. If you do, I guarantee you will love every minute of this story. Kathleen Kaufman, a native Coloradan and long-time resident of Los Angeles, California, is the author of six previous books. A University of Southern California alum, she teaches high school English and is a writing and composition adjunct professor at Santa Monica College. The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey is her latest novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in June 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

This compelling debut novel explores the interconnected lives of three acclaimed female concert pianists: Clara Bishop; her teacher, Zofia Mikorska; and their nineteenth-century predecessor, Constantia Pleyel—best known for her arrest and subsequent incarceration for the murder of her own piano teacher, a composer named Aleksander Starza. Exactly how these three women are connected becomes clear only late in the book, but two of the elements that link them are Starza’s best-known composition, known as the “Fire Concerto,” and the metronome used to kill him—once thought to have been destroyed after his death. Clara is the center of The Fire Concerto (Union Square Publishing, 2025). Once a brilliant performer, she suffered career-ending injuries during a performance of the Fire Concerto and, when we meet her, is tending bar in Austin, Texas. An unexpected summons to her teacher’s “final concert” turns macabre when she discovers that it is actually a reading of Zofia Mikorska’s will. Other beneficiaries receive instruments or documents; Clara inherits an antique metronome with the assurance that she will know what to do with it. She does not. In fact, she has no idea how valuable it is until a visit to an antiques dealer reveals the connection to Aleksander Starza. With some help from another former student, with whom she once alternated between competition and attraction, Clara is gradually drawn into a search for the truth of Starza’s murder, Pleyel’s part in it, and the connections between them and her brilliant but difficult teacher. In the process, Clara must also confront her own past and come to terms with the career she has lost. Sarah Landenwich—writer, writing educator, and classically trained pianist—is the author of The Fire Concerto, her debut novel.  C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, came out in June 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.How to Dodge a Cannonball (Henry Holt, 2025) is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler―until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate―until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle’s satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone’s definition of loyalty.Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while it’s still legal. You can find author Dennard Dayle at his newsletter. And I am your host, Sullivan Summer. You can find me online, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dennard went to talk about Cannonball spoilers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Jack Wang about his novel, The Riveter (HarperVia, 2025). In the vein of All the Light We Cannot See, a cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII. Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to make a new life for himself. The Second World War is in full swing, and Josiah, like so many Canadians, wants to prove his loyalty by serving his country. But Chinese Canadians are barred from joining the army out of fear they might expect citizenship in return. So, Josiah heads to the shipyard where he finds work as a riveter, fastening together the ribs and steel plates of Victory ships. One night, Josiah spots Poppy singing at a navy club. Despite their different backgrounds, they fall for each other instantly, and soon Josiah is spending his nights at Poppy’s small wartime house. Their starry-eyed romance lasts until Poppy’s father comes to visit and the harsh reality of their situation is made clear. Determined to prove himself to Poppy, her parents, and the world, Josiah travels to Toronto where he’s finally given the chance to enlist. Josiah rises to the occasion, but is the world changing as fast as his dreams… From the critically acclaimed author of We Two Alone, Jack Wang’s gorgeous debut novel explores what one man must sacrifice to belong in the only home he has ever truly known. About Jack Wang: JACK WANG is the author of the story collection WE TWO ALONE (House of Anansi Press, 2020; HarperVia, 2021), shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award from the Writers’ Union of Canada for best debut collection in English. His fiction has appeared in Brick, PRISM international, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, and Joyland and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Journey Prize. In 2014–15, he held the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and in 2020, he was awarded a residency at Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Florida State University, and he is an associate professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College. Originally from Vancouver, he lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, novelist Angelina Mirabella, and their two daughters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Keeping details straight while writing a chronologically organized series is difficult enough. Focusing four full-length novels on the events of a single group experience in a single year, with back stories and future developments for a small group of heroines, each of whom has a chance to tell her own story of the central event and its consequences, requires even greater skill. Yet Karen Swan pulls off this mammoth enterprise in her Wild Isle series, which concludes with The Midnight Secret (Macmillan, 2025). The Last Summer, the first book in the series, opens in June 1930 with three friends sitting on a rock plucking fulmars, a kind of seabird. Effie, Mhairi (the Gaelic form of Mary, pronounced VAH-ree), and Flora already know that they will have to evacuate their island home in the Outermost Scottish Hebrides within a few months. Flora greets the change with enthusiasm, Effie with cautious pragmatism, and Mhairi with despair. From this first book and the two that follow, The Stolen Hours and The Lost Lover, we discover what drives each young woman’s response. We also delve ever deeper into the circumstances leading up to a mysterious death, highly unusual in the history of this isolated island with its tightly intertwined population of thirty-six individuals. The Midnight Secret begins in 1926 with the perspective of Jayne Ferguson, the slightly older wife of a handsome but, she soon learns, abusive man. It then jumps forward to 1930. From her mother, Jayne has inherited a particular form of second sight that shows her the faces of people in her vicinity who are destined to die soon. The visions haunt her until the death occurs, but they do not come with useful information about what will cause it or how to prevent it. Sometimes even the “who” remains murky at first. The combination of this rather disturbing gift and what Jayne sees as the necessity to conceal her husband’s abuse erect a barrier between her and those around her, especially after the transition to the unfamiliar landscape of the Scottish mainland. At the same time, Effie, Mhairi, and Flora are wrestling with the consequences of their own prior choices as well as the difficulties of adapting to a completely unfamiliar world. And as things heat up, with various characters accused of involvement in the mysterious death, Jayne’s extrasensory ability becomes ever more important to the survival of her community even as it undermines her already rocky relationship with her spouse.  Karen Swan is the bestselling author of twenty-eight novels to date, most recently The Midnight Secret and All I Want for Christmas.  C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her Song of the Steadfast (Songs of Steppe & Forest 6) appeared in June 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers—including his own ancestors—who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation.Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slave owners and prominent historical figures from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglas and Margaret Garner. Imbued with atmospheric imagery, these persona poems and more “[clarify] not only the inextricable value of Black life and labor to the building of America, but the terrible price they were forced to pay in producing that labor” (Khadijah Queen). “How do you un-orphan a people?” Walker asks. “How do you pick up / shattered black porcelain and make / a new set of dishes fit to eat off?”While carefully attuned to the heartbreak and horrors of war, Walker’s poems pay equal care to the pride, perseverance, and triumphs of their speakers. Evoking the formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: “I am America’s promise, my mother’s song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream.” Expansive and intimate, Load in Nine Times is a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry by an indelible voice in American poetry. Winner of the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective, the oldest continuously running predominantly African American writing group in the country. He is a Professor of English, and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program the University of Kentucky. You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Professor X continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction