New Books in Historical Fiction

By Marshall PoeArts

New Books in Historical Fiction episodes

September 30, 2014 Oliver Ready (trans.), Vladimir Sharov, “Before and During” (Dedalus Books, 2014)
Historical fiction, by definition, supplements the verifiable documentary record with elements of the imagination. Otherwise, it is not fiction but history. These elements often include invented characters, made-up dialogue, the filling in of vague or unknowable events and personalities. Through the more or less careful manipulation of historical truth, the novelist seeks to uncover a deeper emotional truth that speaks to both the reality of a past time and the needs of the present.
Before and During (Dedalus Books, 2014)–Vladimir Sharov’s exploration of Soviet life and the revolutionary movement that preceded it, skillfully translated by Oliver Ready–pushes historical invention to its limits. Set in a Moscow psychiatric hospital circa 1965, the novel follows a patient identified only as Alyosha as he pursues his self-assigned quest to create a Memorial Book of the Dead, Ã la Ivan the Terrible, by recording the life stories of those around him and people of importance in his own past. One fellow-patient, Ifraimov, launches into a long and fantastical account of reincarnation, philosophy, revolution, free love, and incest that sweeps from Mme de StaÃ«l and Lev Tolstoy to Lenin and Stalin–assiduously recorded by Alyosha.
As Sharov’s English-language publisher puts it, “Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies–all described in a serious, steady voice–Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation, and God.” It’s quite a ride. But if you love Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, this book’s for you.
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57 min
September 15, 2014 Kate Quinn, “The Serpent and the Pearl” (Berkley Trade, 2013)
No fan of Renaissance history can ignore the far-reaching influence–or the legendary corruption–of the Borgia family. From Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, to his scheming, possibly murderous sons, to his daughter Lucrezia whose reputation for debauchery still follows her ghost to this day, the Borgias were certainly one of the most memorable families of their time.
A key figure in the family’s infamy was Giulia Farnese, the young mistress of the powerful pope. With floor-length golden hair and looks that inspired artists, Giulia was certainly beautiful. But she must have been much more than merely a stunning woman: she was the only person to escape the orbit of the cunning and destructive Borgias and live to tell the tale.
In The Serpent and the Pearl (Berkeley Trade, 2013) the rise of the Borgias is examined through the eyes of three unforgettable characters: Carmelina, a cook with a life-or-death secret to keep; Leonello, a knife-wielding dwarf on the trail of a serial killer; and Giulia Farnese, who proves, as author Kate Quinn puts it, that she “has brains under all that hair.”
Kate Quinn brings Renaissance Rome to glittering life in this, the first installment of her Borgia series. The author of five published novels set in Rome with another on the way, Quinn delights the reader with gorgeous prose and a fast-paced, intrigue-laced plot in The Serpent and the Pearl.
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37 min
August 15, 2014 Laurel Corona, “The Mapmaker’s Daughter” (Sourcebooks, 2014)
In North America, the year 1492 is inextricably linked to Columbus’s discovery of the West Indies, funded by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. But in Spain itself, the year brought two events that at the time appeared more vital to the health and spiritual purity of the kingdom: the conquest of Granada from the last Muslim rulers of Andalusia, and the expulsion of the Jews whose families had inhabited Iberia since the height of the Roman Empire. Against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition, The Mapmaker’s Daughter (Sourcebooks, 2014) tells the story of Amalia Riba–child of a converso family whose father embraces Christianity to save his family and whose mother pays lip service to the new religion even as she teaches her daughters to observe Jewish ritual in secret.
During Amalia’s long and varied life, she travels from her childhood home in Sevilla to Portugal and to Castile, to Granada and to Valencia–accompanied by the exquisitely decorated atlas painted by her great-grandfather and charting her course between security and identity. With a sure hand, Laurel Corona explores the importance of choice, the prices paid for resistance and assimilation, and the overlapping of identity and community, especially in the lives of women. Along the way, she makes a powerful case for the value of diversity–not only in the past but in the present.
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56 min
July 15, 2014 Dmitry Chen, “The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas” (Edward and Dee, 2013)
From the Saxons and Danes warring in the British Isles, this month’s interview skews dramatically eastward and dives back two centuries in time, although the circumstances of war and unrest will seem remarkably familiar. Nanidat, head of the Maniakh trading house, has just returned from two years in Chang’an, the capital of Tang Dynasty China–three months’ away along the Silk Road from his home in Samarkand. It is 749 CE. The House of Maniakh–like Samarkand and the surrounding lands–is slowly recovering from a recent invasion by the Arabs, who have striven to impose their rule and their religion on the Zoroastrian and Buddhist Sogdians. Nanidat looks forward to a relaxing visit filled with wine, women, and poetry before he again mounts his camel to return to his beloved Chang’an. Instead, he is less than halfway through the opening reception before a pair of strangers try to murder him.
The next morning, his knife wound still raw, Nanidat finds himself bundled out of his house, on the road west to Bukhara, in search of a young woman whom he has loved as a sister–and perhaps a little more. A reluctant traveler, Nanidat soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of conspiracy and intrigue that threatens his beliefs about his family and its place in the larger world.
Dmitry Chen‘s The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas, translated by Liv Bliss (Edward and Dee, 2013) explores the events surrounding the decline of the Umayyad Caliphate, the rise to power of its successor state under the House of Abbas, the founding of Baghdad, and the conflict that underlies the current division between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, now playing out in Iraq. Follow Nanidat as he struggles, never quite certain where the next betrayal will come from, to puzzle out a path to safety before his would-be murderers succeed in their mission.
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57 min
June 18, 2014 Bernard Cornwell, “The Pagan Lord” (HarperCollins, 2014)
As fans of Uhtred of Bebbanburg know, England in the ninth and tenth centuries is just an idea–a hope held by the kings of Wessex that they may someday unite the lands occupied by the Angles and Saxons, most of whom then lived under the control of Danish invaders. Not only England’s future hangs in the balance: spurred by King Alfred the Great of Wessex, Christianity has spread rapidly among the Saxons, but that early success threatens to crumble if the pagan Danes complete their conquest as planned.
Enter Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a Northumbrian lord of Saxon descent, raised by the Danes and defiantly pagan, a warrior and leader of men. The rulers of Wessex can’t decide what to make of him, but they grudgingly admit that they need his help. As victory follows victory, Uhtred gains and loses estates, marries and buries wives, takes lovers both peasant and royal, and goes from battle to battle, dragging his sons in his wake. Uhtred has a cherished dream of his own, to reclaim Bebbanburg–his birthright, stolen from him by his uncle during Uhtred’s Danish childhood.
In The Pagan Lord (HarperCollins, 2014) Uhtred has reached his mid-fifties, an advanced age for the tenth century. Much has changed with the death of Alfred the Great, and the new king of Wessex believes he can dispense with Uhtred’s services. When Uhtred’s eldest son announces that he has not only converted to Christianity but become a priest, Uhtred’s rage leads him to disinherit that son and to kill the abbot who tries to intervene. The Wessex court and Church strip Uhtred of his rights and banish him. Meanwhile, a hidden adversary has abducted the wife and children of the Danish leader Cnut and pinned the crime on Uhtred. Cnut retaliates by raiding and burning Uhtred’s estate, killing most of the inhabitants. With little to lose and everything to gain, Uhtred gathers his three dozen surviving warriors and sets off to storm the impregnable fortress of Bebbanburg.
Bernard Cornwell has more awards and best-selling books than we can possibly list here. The Pagan Lord–and The Saxon Tales of which it is a part–opens a door onto a long-forgotten and under-appreciated past in a way that offers pure entertainment. Warning: you will lose sleep trying to find out what happens next.
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50 min
June 06, 2014 Libbie Hawker, “The Sekhmet Bed” (Running Rabbit Press, 2013)
Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty seems both impossibly distant in time and disconcertingly present. Over 250 years, the dynasty produced several of the rulers best known to modern Western culture: Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, Tutankhamen (Tut), and Hatshepsut, the most famous of the handful of women who ruled Egypt as pharaoh.
The Sekhmet Bed begins a few years before Hatshepsut’s birth, with the death of Pharaoh Amenhotep I in 1503 BCE. He leaves two daughters, Mutnofret and Ahmose, to marry–and therefore legitimate–the next pharaoh. The marriage surprises neither of them, but in an unexpected twist the thirteen-year-old Ahmose is proclaimed Great Royal Wife while her older sister has to settle for second place. Mutnofret does not take her perceived demotion lying down, and she uses her greater maturity to seduce the pharaoh. She is soon fulfilling the main obligation of a queen: to bear royal sons. But Ahmose, a visionary, has the ear of the gods–the reason she received the title of Great Royal Wife in the first place. And the gods will decide whether Ahmose or her sister will bear the next pharaoh.
The Sekhmet Bed is the first of four books that trace Hatshepsut’s rise to power, the obstacles she faces in assuming the throne, the long and prosperous reign that follows (1479-1458 BCE), and its aftermath in the reign of her successor. Libbie Hawker brings this long-gone but fascinating period alive in a tale of two sisters forced into conflict by the need to secure an empire and a dynasty.
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56 min
May 16, 2014 Tara Conklin, “The House Girl” (William Morrow, 2013)
Lina Sparrow can’t believe her luck when the boss at her fancy New York law firm offers her a once-in-a-lifetime chance: find a suitable plaintiff for a class-action suit to be lodged against the U.S. government and fifty rich corporations that profited from slave labor before the Civil War. The wealthy technocrat intent on pushing this suit for reparations claims he has a deal that will protect Lina’s law firm from going head to head against the government, and the case seems guaranteed to generate lots of publicity and a lovely bag of cash for the law firm. But the pressure is on: Lina has only a few weeks to find the right person and convince him or her to play along.
Luck again appears to favor her when a friend of her artist father alerts her to a recent controversy surrounding the paintings of Luanne Bell, a plantation lady from the 1850s whose art portrays her slave laborers with extraordinary complexity and compassion. Are the paintings Luanne’s, or the work of her house girl Josephine? And if Lina can prove that Luanne has received credit for Josephine’s work for the last century and a half, can she also find a descendant who can serve as living evidence of the devastating damage inflicted by slavery?
The House Girl moves deftly back and forth between past and present as Lina works to trace the history of one young girl enslaved on a Virginia tobacco plantation while fending off challenges posed by her coworkers, the man who may be Josephine’s descendant, and even her own past. Tara Conklin‘s debut novel hit the bestseller lists within weeks of its release. You’ll have no trouble figuring out why.
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56 min
April 15, 2014 Pamela Mingle, “The Pursuit of Mary Bennet” (William Morrow, 2013)
It seems fair to say that a large proportion of the English-speaking reading public has encountered Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice, either on the page or in one of the many adaptations for stage, screen, and television. At the same time, the number of avid Austen readers who remember much about Mary, the third of the five Bennet sisters, is almost certainly small. Mary rates so little time on the page that scholars have questioned the need for her existence: could Austen not have made her point with three daughters, or at most four?
Mary is the sister in the middle–solemn and unattractive, liable to put her foot in her mouth at any moment, more enthusiastic than skilled at the piano. She is, in modern terms, the perfect subject for a makeover–which she receives to great effect in The Pursuit of Mary Bennet (William Morrow, 2013).
Three years after the events in Pride and Prejudice, Mary is dwindling into spinsterhood, in her own mind and that of her mother–a grim future for a gentlewoman in Regency England, one that would doom her to a life dependent on the kindness of others. Mary’s mother is already planning to send her off on the first of what promises to be a series of assignments as a high-class nursemaid, not quite a servant but not her own mistress either.
When Mary’s scandalous youngest sister arrives unannounced on her parents’ doorstep, Mary’s life takes an unexpected turn. Love, even marriage, becomes possible. But Mary has learned the hard way not to trust her instincts, and it will take a great deal to convince her that happiness lies within her reach.
As Pamela Mingle notes, it is not easy to step into Austen’s shoes. All the more credit to her, therefore, for doing such a wonderful job.
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1 hr 3 min
March 15, 2014 James Aitcheson, “Sworn Sword” (Sourcebooks, 2014)
The chivalric society of medieval Europe resembled a pyramid, with each man sworn to serve the lord above him in a social hierarchy that reached up to the king. A warrior without a lord had no future, no means of support, no identity. So when Tancred, a Breton knight sworn to defend the newly appointed earl of Northumbria, loses his lord in an English raid, the loss not only deprives him of a leader as close as a father but threatens his entire sense of himself.
No matter that Tancred is away on another mission when the raid begins, that he fights nobly to defend his embattled lord, that he loses his sweetheart and almost his life in the raid. He has broken his oath, despite his best efforts, and no other lord trusts him to fulfill the terms of his service.
It is England in 1069, three years after the Battle of Hastings, and Tancred is fighting for the Norman invaders in hostile territory, where the English forces have rallied under the leadership of Edgar, the last Saxon prince. The earl of Northumbria and most of the two thousand knights under his command are the first casualties in what will become England’s last attempt to throw off a successful invader.
As James Aitcheson reminds us in this month’s interview, the grand battle that makes it into the history books marks only the turning point in any invasion. And although it has become a clichÃ© to say that history is written by the victors, the Norman Conquest has traditionally been one area where that adage does not apply. Sworn Sword (Sourcebooks, pbk, 2014) and its sequels reveal the other side of a familiar story through the eyes of victors who do not yet know whether they will win or lose.
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59 min
February 21, 2014 Jessica Brockmole, “Letters from Skye” (Ballantine Books, 2013)
In March 1912, a college student at the University of Illinois takes time away from his usual pursuits–painting the dean’s horse blue, climbing dorm walls with a sack of squirrels, reading Huckleberry Finn–to write a letter to a Scottish poet living on the remote Isle of Skye. As the young man, David Graham, notes in his first paragraph, poetry is not his usual literary fare, but something in this book has touched his soul. A few weeks later, his poet, Elspeth Dunn, responds, initiating a conversation that will flourish as friendship and eventually as romance, with consequences that reach across the first world war and into the next.
To sustain a novel entirely through the exchange of letters poses a challenge to any writer, although the epistolary novel itself has a long tradition: the earliest novels adopted this form. Here David and Elspeth emerge as two distinct personalities, drawn to each other across the cultural divide symbolized by the Atlantic Ocean and the greater divide that propels David to war in France even as Elspeth clings to her island. But it takes the determination of a second generation at war to bring Elspeth and David’s story to its natural conclusion.
In this sparkling debut novel, Jessica Brockmole explores the many layers of connection that bind lovers and family members across the years and through adversity. With its exquisite descriptions of place and its ability to evoke the myth-drenched wildness of the Hebrides, Letters from Skye (Ballantine Books, 2013) will pull you into the lives of David, Elspeth, and their families. It’s a journey you will not regret taking.
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48 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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