New Books in Historical Fiction

By Marshall PoeArts

New Books in Historical Fiction episodes

May 19, 2017 Assaph Mehr, “Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic” (Purple Toga Publications, 2015)
Assaph Mehr‘s Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic (Purple Toga Publications, 2015) is Egretia, a town in a fantasy world modeled on the Roman Empire, and the occasion is the crime of murder. Felix the Fox, our narrator, is a detective with some extra talents. Not only is he good at winkling out information, watching people and drawing conclusions, but he’s also familiar with magic–both the kind thats allowed in his homeland, and the more dangerous, forbidden kind. Magic can be dangerous. Felix’s former best friend, now an uncanny beggar with frightening eyes, was a talented sorcerer, before things went wrong. When Felix investigates a secret ring of sorcerers that he suspects are responsible for the horrific death of a rich mans son, he is forced to rely on his old friend, as well as a network of associates, his loyal servant, and an alluring damsel or two.
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22 min
April 23, 2017 Tiffany Reisz, “The Night Mark” (Mira Books, 2017)
So many people hope to find the perfect soul mate, but suppose you do, only to lose the person you love just as your life together is getting off to a beautiful start? Faye Morgan reacts by tumbling into a new marriage with her first husband’s best friend. After all, the bills pile ever higher, and her husband’s unborn child can’t come into the world without health insurance. The best friend is eager to help, but as time goes by, they both realize it takes more than need and a shared but unexpressed grief to make a partnership. Faye leaps at the chance to resume her career as a photographer, and as she travels around South Carolina’s coastal island, her mourning finds an outlet and hope creeps back into her life.
In the old town of Beaufort, she encounters the legend of a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who drowned as a young woman. Compelled to learn more, Faye finds a photograph in the town archives and discovers that the lighthouse keeper looked just like her first, lost husband. She feels drawn to the lighthouse, and while visiting it at night, she is literally pulled into the past. But the year 1921 poses many challenges to a girl from the future accustomed to buying her food in plastic packages from the supermarket, storing it in a refrigerator, and cooking it on modern appliances. No antibiotics, no traffic laws, no electricity on the island, no equal treatment for women or people of color. Yet there is the lighthouse keeper, with his resemblance to Faye’s lost love. Will she stay? Can she stay? And what difficult tasks must she perform before she really has a choice?
In The Night Mark (Mira Books, 2017), Tiffany Reisz has created a beautiful tale of love, loss, and recovery when life seems to offer nothing but shoals except for that steady, pulsing beam of light in the dark.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her here.
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58 min
April 05, 2017 Marlene Banks, “Son of A Preacher Man” and “Greenwood and Archer” (Lift Every Voice, 2012)
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 gangsters to settle in wealthy Tulsa. Now, Benny and Billy must navigate hurdles in their relationship. Marlene Banks is Kingdom writer/novelist with a unique style of storytelling. She blends engaging plots, standout characters, and memorable events from a Kingdom perspective. Although known for her historical romances, she likes to write multiple genres including contemporary, mystery, and nonfiction. ind out more about Banks’ novels here.
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35 min
March 20, 2017 Ronald E. Yates, “The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles” (Xlibris, 2016)
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 Fitzroy Raglan Battles, a centenarian in an old soldiers home when his reluctant great-grandson makes his acquaintance, turns out to have lived a rich and varied life that has taken him through the American Wild West, the Philippines, late nineteenth-century Saigon, the Spanish-American War, and other places, not to mention many of the tamer regions of the United States. A reporter by inclination and training, Billy typically observes and records, but the areas he visits often draw him into their conflicts, blurring the line between participation and journalism.
Ronald Yates, himself a journalist and professor of journalism who has visited many of the destinations where he sends his main character, brings each of these venues to life in a way that is both vivid and true to the time period. And in Billy Battles, based on a veteran of the Spanish-American War whom Yates interviewed in the same old soldiers home where we first meet his hero, Yates has created a multilayered portrait of a man of integrity who just cant resist a good fight.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
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49 min
February 17, 2017 Bren McClain, “One Good Mama Bone” (Story River Books, 2017)
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 doesn’t know how to love. Her sole talent is dressmaking, but times are tough throughout rural South Carolina and the bills continue to mount. When she comes across a newspaper article celebrating a local boy who earned $680 for his champion steer, she purchases a calf on credit from a local farmer and enters Emerson Bridge in the next years championship.
But the calf belongs to Mama Red, who breaks out of her corral and follows her baby to Sarah’s farm. Watching cow and calf activates the mama bone that Sarah’s own mother insisted Sarah did not have. Only then do she and Emerson Bridge discover what happens to the cattle when the championship ends. Love and respect clash with need, and Sarah and Emerson Bridge must decide whether the costs of success are too high.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
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51 min
January 10, 2017 Helen Rappaport, “Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen” (Harper Design, 2017)
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, eager, inexperienced girl who took the throne just after her eighteenth birthday. This Victoria loved to ride, resisted marriage, fought to separate herself from her mother, detested her mother’s close adviser, and became infatuated with her prime minister before transferring her affections to Prince Albert, who initially did not impress her. Wildly devoted to her husband, she bore nine children but hated being pregnant and regarded newborn infants as ugly. Even her name caused controversy: christened Alexandrina, she switched to Victoria on taking the throne, overriding critics who insisted that Elizabeth or Charlotte were more suitable appellations for a British monarch. By the time she died sixty-three years later, entire generations understood the word “queen”as synonymous with “Victoria.”
Although the most powerful woman in the world, Victoria here makes some serious mistakes, as any eighteen-year-old thrust into the center of politics would. If she had no social media to record every misstep, she also had no publicity managers or image brokers to spin her rash remarks or misjudgments. As Daisy Goodwin notes in the foreword to this book, Victoria had to grow up in public, and she left a precious record of that journey in her own exquisite handwriting. But since this is the official companion volume to a television show, it also includes details about casting and costuming, as well as numerous photographs of the actors and background information about the times. It makes a perfect starting point for a discussion of history and historical fiction, their differences and similarities, and how to observe the requirements of one without violating the precepts of the other.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
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56 min
December 09, 2016 Bernard Cornwell, “The Flame Bearer” (Harper, 2016)
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 of kings, Saxon ealdorman by birth, Dane by adoption, and warrior by both temperament and training–becomes Alfred’s secret weapon. A pagan lord never quite accepted by Alfred’s Christian court, a fighter for the Saxon cause who at heart prefers the Danes, Uhtred has one unchanging goal: to recover Bebbanburg, stolen from him in boyhood by his uncle and held in later years by his cousin, who refuses to recognize Uhtred’s prior claim.
By 917, when The Flame Bearer begins, the situation portrayed in The Last Kingdom has reversed itself. The one remaining Saxon kingdom, Wessex, has expanded through alliance and conquest to include Mercia and East Anglia. Now the last kingdom is Northumbria, still largely under Danish control despite the existence of Saxon-held Bebbanburg. Sensing weakness, King Constantin of Scotland pushes south, pincering Northumbria between Saxons and Celts. And Uhtred must again choose between observing his oath of allegiance and recapturing his home.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

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36 min
November 23, 2016 Ursula LeCoeur, “The Devious Dubutante” (Royal Street Publishing, 2015)
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 from Philadelphia who has no obvious reason to lurk around her family estate dressed like a workman, his peace offering–an example of that rare red camellia–turns out to contain a tin of opium among its roots. More plants follow, and Maureen’s suspicions grow, especially after her attempts to investigate lead her to the scene of a murder that the local police appear to have little interest in investigating. Is she falling in love with an opium addict, or a person even more sinister? As Mardi Gras sweeps the town into revelry, Maureen strives to find out. Meanwhile, Ben races to collect evidence on the killer before he can carry out his dimly overheard threat against Maureen.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

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2 min
October 28, 2016 Kate Braithwaite, “Charlatan” (Fireship Press, 2016)
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 Charlatan (Fireship Press, 2016), Kate Braithwaite vividly brings to life the extremes of seventeenth-century French society, from the stews of Paris to the luxurious apartments of Versailles and the Carmelite convent where one of Louis’s discarded lovers has chosen to end her days. Sometimes beautiful, often brutal, her portrayal of the Sun King and his world will haunt you long after you finish reading.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

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51 min
September 30, 2016 Martha Conway, “Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery” (Noontime Books, 2016)
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 thumping rhythms of jazz, directed by a mysterious kingpin known only as the Walnut.
C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

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54 min

About New Books in Historical Fiction

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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