New Books in Historical Fiction

New Books in Historical Fiction

By Marshall PoeArts
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New Books in Historical Fiction episodes

  • Douglas R. Skopp, “Shadows Walking” (CreateSpace, 2010)

    “First do no harm.” Every doctor in the Western medical tradition swears to observe this basic principle of the Hippocratic oath before he or she receives a license to practice. Yet in Nazi Germany, doctors who had sworn to heal participated in grotesque medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners, conducted sterilization campaigns against their fellow-citizens, refused treatment to terminally ill patients, and supported euthanasia, eugenics, and antisemitism. How did they justify such a perversion of their calling?

    This is the question that Douglas R. Skopp addresses in Shadows Walking (CreateSpace, 2010), his extensively researched account of the intertwining lives–like the snakes on Aesculapius’s staff–of two fictional German doctors, the boyhood friends Johann Brenner and Philipp Stein, from 1928 to their final meeting near the end of World War II. The novel opens in Nuremberg in 1946, with Johann working under an alias as a janitor in the Palace of Justice, where the Allied trials of Nazi war criminals are underway. A chance meeting with his estranged wife–furious to discover that her husband has been hiding in the city for months–sparks in Johann a desire to explain in a letter the crimes he has committed since he last saw her, the reasons why he has allowed her to believe that he died in the last days of the war. Every paragraph of his letter leads into a flashback that reveals a segment of his past and pushes Johann farther down the road to Nazism and Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Philipp, as a German Jew, experiences the shrinking horizons and worsening abuse that Nazism inflicted on its victims.

    Because of its subject matter, Shadows Walking is not easy to read, but it is an important book, well worth the investment of time and energy. Skopptraces the path by which fundamentally decent people can descend into barbarism if they forget the importance of compassion. It could happen in Germany–and did. It could happen here. It could happen anywhere.

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    1 hr 6 min
  • Tasha Alexander, “Death in the Floating City” (Minotaur Books, 2012)

    Well-brought-up Victorian ladies don’t expect their childhood nemeses to write from out of the blue, pleading for help because, as the nemesis so tactfully puts it, “what lady of my rank would associate with persons who investigate crimes?”

    In this case, the crime is murder, and the summons brings Lady Emily Hargreaves post-haste from London to aid and support Contessa Emma Barozzi–nee Callum, and the nemesis from Emily’s past–whose husband the Venetian police suspect of dispatching his own father with a medieval stiletto and fleeing with Emma’s inheritance, a cache of illuminated Renaissance manuscript books.

    Although tempted to refuse Emma’s plea for help, Emily cannot abandon a fellow Englishwoman in the midst of crisis–or turn down an opportunity to overcome the petty dislikes of childhood. Moreover, Emily, through no fault of her own, has amassed a certain amount of experience in solving deadly crimes in London, Vienna, Istanbul, and rural France. With her husband, an agent of the British crown, she plunges into an unfamiliar, sometimes terrifying, but appealing world of art, gondolas, canals, decaying palazzi, back streets, brothels, bookstores, carnival figures, and ancient noble families with unresolved feuds that predate Romeo and Juliet. Soon Emily begins to suspect that the key to the mystery lies four centuries in the past, with links to the fifteenth-century ring found clasped in the victim’s dead hand.

    This is the seventh of Lady Emily’s adventures, which began with And Only to Deceive. The next in the Lady Emily series, Behind the Shattered Glass, is due off-press in October 2013. On what Tasha has in store for her characters after that, you will have to listen to the podcast. She is a wonderful speaker: I promise you will not be disappointed. And, of course, read Death in the Floating City.

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    58 min
  • Julius Wachtel, “Stalin’s Witnesses” (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012)

    When does history become performance art?

    In 1936, Joseph Stalin set out to eliminate any communist leader with sufficient prestige to threaten his monopoly on power. In what became known as the Great Terror, he instigated a series of show trials, with scripts written by his political police and entirely false charges, designed to cover up the mistakes of his forced industrialization and collectivization drives by blaming his rivals–especially his arch-rival, Leon Trotsky, by then in exile from the USSR.

    The first trial succeeded in terms of Stalin’s larger goal: the political police convinced the defendants to confess to their “crimes” in open court. Convicted of plotting against Stalin, the leaders were promptly shot. The purges rippled out from the center, sweeping up hundreds of thousands of mid-level bureaucrats and intellectuals throughout the Soviet Union.

    But the international community remained skeptical of trials that relied solely on confessions. So for the next show trial, held in 1937, Stalin’s police selected five witnesses to corroborate the faked charges against a new group of defendants. Julius Wachtel‘s Stalin’s Witnesses (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012) explores the identity, careers, and psychology of these five men–and especially of Vladimir Romm, a journalist, diplomat, and Soviet spy who served in Washington, DC, for two years before his recall and arrest in August 1936.

    In Stalin’s Russia, fiction often seemed less fantastic than history. To understand the tragedy wreaked on individual lives by the state as performance artist, you can’t do better than to read Julius Wachtel’s Stalin’s Witnesses.

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    54 min
  • Karen Engelmann, “The Stockholm Octavo” (Ecco Books, 2012)

    It’s 1789, and despite the troubles in France, Emil Larsson, a sekretaire in the Customs Office in Stockholm, has life pretty much where he wants it. His job brings him lucrative under-the-table deals with pirates, smugglers, and innkeepers–not to mention a dashing red cape that appeals to the ladies–and he has managed to parlay his skill as a gambler into a partnership with the mysterious Mrs. Sparrow, owner of a prestigious private club dedicated to games of chance.

    But when the head of the Customs Office announces that every sekretaire must marry if he wishes to keep his post, Emil sees his carefree existence slipping away. Mrs. Sparrow offers to help by casting an octavo–a set of eight predictive cards representing key figures whom Emil must identify and manipulate to achieve his predicted future of love and connection. As Emil moves about the Town (Stockholm), every encounter assumes new meaning. Is this his Prisoner? His Key? His Courier?

    We don’t know, and neither does he. But as Emil’s quest continues, the stakes rise. The situation in France deteriorates; and the future of the Swedish monarchy and its king, Gustav III, increasingly hinges on Emil’s ability to decipher his octavo and influence the contest between Mrs. Sparrow and the fascinating Uzanne–mistress of the fan, foe of the king, and the person most likely to prevent Emil from attaining his goals.

    Fans of historical mystery and political intrigue will love Karen Engelmann‘s “irresistible cipher between two covers–an atmospheric tale of many rogues and a few innocents gambling on politics and romance in the cold, cruel north”–as Susann Cokal characterizes The Stockholm Octavo (ecco Books, 2012) in the New York Times Book Review (December 9, 2012).

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    51 min
  • Julian Berengaut, “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey” (Russian Estate Books, 2012)

    Illegitimacy doesn’t mean much in today’s Europe and North America. In an age when we celebrate many different kinds of families, “bastard” has become an epithet thrown, most often inaccurately, at someone who upsets you. But that was not always true. In early 19th-century Russia, for example, you could marry in one church only to have the marriage denied in another, leaving your children unable to inherit, stripped even of your name. This reality defined the lives of fictional people, such as Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and real ones–for example, Alexander Herzen, the Russian socialist writer who took refuge in London after falling foul of Tsar Nicholas I. It defines the life of Nicolas Nijinsky, hero of The Estate of Wormwood and Honey (Russian Estate Books, 2012).

    Nicolas’s early life as the cherished only son of a rural nobleman vanishes in an instant when his mother dies and his father remarries. As a child, he cannot understand why abuse and mistreatment infringe on his carefree life or why his beloved father exiles him to an elite military school, where his fellow cadets do not hesitate to throw his questionable birth in his face. His only friend is Sergey, the equally despised son of a noncommissioned officer killed at the Battle of Borodino. Soon Sergey becomes the scapegoat for another rich man’s son, and Nicolas must face his tormentors alone. Until, fifteen years later, his fortunes change, and he returns to his childhood home with Sergey at his side and one goal in mind: to settle scores with those who drove him away.

    Follow us into the past as Julian Berengaut kicks off New Books in Historical Fiction by discussing The Estate of Wormwood and Honey. For Russian literature buffs everywhere. I am your host, C. P. Lesley, and I hope you will join me for many such conversations.

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    50 min
  • Francis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” (Greywolf Press, 2012)

    Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing history is fine as far as it goes. It does, however, have a significant drawback: it limits the historian’s ability to tell the truth–not the truth of “facts,” but the truth of stories. Facts are facts; stories have meaning. Most history books are full of facts; yet many lack stories, and necessarily so. As a practicing historian, I can tell you this situation is very frustrating. We know that sometimes the facts are just not enough, but there is nothing we can do about it within the confines of our discipline.

    There are historians–if that’s what they are–who just can’t stand these restrictions. They want to tell historical stories, and they do. They write “historical fiction” and, as a rule, they get very little respect in the literary or academic worlds. I doubt most of them are bothered. Why should they be? Historical fiction is remarkably popular: thousands of titles appear each year and those titles are read by millions of readers. Who cares if literary journals and professional historians poo-poo historical fiction? People love it.

    Once in a great while, however, a book comes along whose truth is so powerful that even the literary critics and professors take notice. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream (Greywolf Press, 2012) is such a book. It contains more “truth” about the Soviet project than an entire library of “serious” novels and dry-as-dust histories. If I had to recommend one book on the Soviet Union to someone who wanted to understand it, Red Plenty would be it. Read it.

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    1 hr 4 min

About New Books in Historical Fiction

From the publisher's feed

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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