April 17, 2023
The best historical fiction of spring 2023
A new season of historical fiction is in bloom, and these are our favorites. Discover historical novels filled with sumptuous detail, transportive narratives and family secrets that go back generations.
Acclaimed children’s author Liz Hyder’s first novel for adults has a richness of prose that immediately hooks readers and allows deep immersion within its strange world. Set in England in 1840, The Gifts is a remarkable, unpredictable tale of ambition, faith and survival, a blend of historical fiction and fantasy from a deft storyteller.
Unexpected magical occurrences cause the lives of four women to intertwine: distressed wife and artist Annie, renegade naturalist Etta, drifting seeker Natalya and aspiring writer Mary. As the story opens, a woman’s corpse is pulled from the Thames River, and from its back sprout what appear to be wings. This immediately attracts the eye of Annie’s husband, Edward, an ambitious surgeon frustrated by the brighter spotlight shone on his flashier colleagues. In this “fallen angel,” Edward sees his entire future in the form of a gift from God, and now he wants to get his hands on a living specimen. But at what cost does success come for Edward, and how does his relentless pursuit of notoriety and fortune change the lives of each of the four women?
Hyder’s novel unfolds through a series of short chapters that function like a sequence of character studies, each of which displays such a tight grasp on detail and emotional range that it could function as a short story. We learn so much through a single visit to Annie’s ornate house or Etta’s ramshackle country cabin. We glean tremendous depth from Mary’s sense of duty and how it conflicts with her own ambitions. Each of the women is so finely drawn that we’re immediately invested not just in their lives but also in the ways they see the world, and how their perspectives shift as the events of the novel start to fall into place. Once the magical elements kick in and wings begin to unfurl, Hyder’s gift for narrative propulsion blends with this character depth to create a sumptuous reading experience.
- by Freya Sachs
The Roman Colosseum is full of wonders and history and secrets—and plants. Observing, cataloging and communicating with these plants is the heart of Katy Simpson Smith’s impressive novel, as the narrative connects two women across time who are both performing these archival acts. Set in 1854 and 2018, The Weeds moves between the voices of these two women, interlocking their lives as they document the presence of (or absence of) plants.
In 1854, a woman was caught stealing, and her misbehavior has led to her being indentured to English botanist Richard Deakin; he sends her into the Colosseum to catalog the flora and their uses. She also tells her own story and meditates on the ways that society impinges upon her selfhood. She speaks to her missing love, a woman who is off on a boat, now married to a man. In 2018, a woman has run from the entrapment of her life, but she finds herself newly hemmed in as she seeks the plants on Deakin’s list, makes notes, begrudges the presence of tourists and wonders what her next step might be. What will science, and her male adviser, allow?
The novel moves in quick (and often blurry) shifts between these centuries and women. They mirror parts of each other; they both encounter violence at many turns and scales, and each reacts to the ways their voices and choices are constrained in their societies. The plants around them produce their own forms of tension and elements of violence; they are undoubtedly characters in their own right.
Just as the plants in the Colosseum ask of the women, The Weeds requests the reader to observe and look for connections, to question structures and patterns, and to discover new ways of seeing. Each detail is carefully attuned and revealed, and each seed opens at the moment it needs to bloom and stretch. Patience is necessary, but close attention reveals infinite rewards.
Read Katy Simpson Smith’s Behind the Book feature on The Weeds: “Women and unwanted plants have an uncomfortable amount in common.”
Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are best friends and sixth-formers at the English public school Preshute College, an Eton-like boarding school. It’s 1914, and the Great War has begun killing their schoolmates. The school newspaper, The Preshutian, lists the names of dead and wounded older friends. Meanwhile, outside of school, young women hand white feathers to young men in civilian clothes to shame them into enlisting.
Gaunt and Ellwood banter, tease, deal with hazing and get drunk with their classmates, but they also harbor secret worries: Gaunt is German and Ellwood is Jewish, marking them as outsiders, more vulnerable in an England at war. What’s more, they can’t admit that their bond is more than friendship— “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Pressured by his mother and sister, Gaunt enlists even though he’s not yet 19, and suddenly he finds himself at the Belgian front, a far-too-young leader thrust into trench warfare. Soon after, Ellwood, starry-eyed with the idea of honor, enlists too, despite Gaunt’s letters urging him against the idea. What follows is an epic war story that depicts the unremitting savagery, trauma and stupidity of World War I. At the same time, In Memoriam tracks an epic love story, as Gaunt and Ellwood sort out their feelings, not knowing if they’ll ever see each other again as their classmates continue to die awful, senseless deaths.
Author Alice Winn so deeply inhabits her characters, their vanishing prep-school world, the end of empire and the arrival of brutal modern war that it’s hard to believe this is her first novel. In Memoriam feels like an old-fashioned door stopper, with a huge cast of background characters, almost all of them young men (Gaunt’s sister is the only significant female character), and some surprising, even melodramatic plot points as it follows the historical trajectory of the war and its aftermath. The story’s points of view toggle between Gaunt and Ellwood, though the novel’s heart belongs to sardonic, tender Gaunt.
Winn draws on real life not only for war details but also for Ellwood’s character, who seems loosely based on real-life English war poet Siegfried Sassoon. He writes his own poems and quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and Rupert Brooke. These verses—along with fictional letters and newspaper articles, especially The Preshutian’s somber roll call of the dead and wounded—underline the impossibilities of both war and life as a gay man in early 20th-century England.
In Memoriam is a gorgeous novel, both a meditation on the futility and trauma of a war that sent a generation of young men to their deaths and a gripping love-in-wartime story, with a bittersweet yet hopeful conclusion.
The action comes fast and furious in Rachel Beanland’s second novel, The House Is on Fire, inspired by the real-life fire that occurred in Richmond, Virginia, on December 26, 1811, and has been described by many historians as the first great disaster of our young nation. The calamity burned down the city’s famous theater during a sold-out performance, killing 72 people and becoming international news.
In Beanland’s retelling, the story unfolds in a quick succession of short chapters told from the perspectives of four real people who experienced the events firsthand. Sally Henry Campbell, daughter of Founding Father Patrick Henry, is in an expensive box seat on the third floor with other high-society folks. Cecily Patterson is in a crowded lobby seat with other enslaved and destitute people relieved to be escaping reality for a few hours. Jack Gibson, an orphan and aspiring actor, is backstage as the stagehand in charge of props, including the chandelier that ultimately causes the house to erupt in flames. Gilbert Hunt, an enslaved blacksmith, runs to the theater, putting himself in danger to save the lives of over a dozen white women and men.
Through the author’s extensive research into letters, census data and newspaper archives, as well as her historically accurate creative liberties—both of which Beanland elaborates upon in her author’s note—The House Is on Fire captures the disastrous night hour by hour, reminiscent of watching a true crime drama on TV. Most importantly, Beanland’s choice to explore the tragedy through four very differently privileged people allows the story to go beyond facts and into the moral fabric and social norms of the time. It is disturbing to be reminded of the vice grip of racism, class and sexism while a deadly fire rages on.
Times sure have changed, but the choices made by Sally, Cecily, Jack and Gilbert resonate deeply. “Would I do the same?” is a question that inevitably pops up often for the reader. And so does the realization that proverbial fires continue to burn around the world as we individuals try to save ourselves and others.
Fast-moving, character-driven and action-packed, The House Is on Fire is simply a thrill to read.
It seems that everything in Kate Morton’s captivating novel Homecoming leads us back to a statement made by a character in the 2021 film The Lost Daughter: “Motherhood is a crushing responsibility.” In Morton’s world, even the longing for motherhood can be a crushing responsibility, one that can be passed along to the next generation, and the next.
The secrets around the Turner-Bridges women—Nora; her daughter, Polly; and granddaughter, Jess—are real doozies. Those secrets start to emerge, tendril by tendril, after Nora suffers a fall and Jess flies from her London home to Sydney to be with her. Neither Nora nor Jess is close with Polly, and Nora has named Jess as her next of kin, rather than her daughter. Odd, but not unheard of.
As a child, Jess had free rein of Nora’s large and beautiful home, Darling House, but was forbidden from accessing the attic. She snuck up there anyway and never unearthed anything shocking. But now, as she waits for Nora to recuperate, she discovers something so terrible about their family that it upends everything she believed about herself, her mother, her grandmother and the world in general. The echoes of the event have resounded for six decades and warped the lives of the Turner-Bridges women in ways they don’t even realize. Someone even wrote a book about the calamity, though it wasn’t published in Australia.
One of the delights for readers of a mystery is picking up little crumbs of evidence along the way. As Homecoming gallops toward its close, you may think you know what’s coming, and the foreknowledge is both ghastly and thrilling. In a book like this one, there are a lot of ways the story can take a turn toward the preposterous or at least the improbable. Just one word of advice: Find a map of Australia. It’ll be a big help.
Some books make you stop, take notice and question: question the narratives we’ve been told about our history and the narratives we’ve told ourselves about ourselves. Victor LaValle’s latest novel, Lone Women, is one such book.
Lone Women tells the story of Adelaide Henry, who keeps a secret locked in a steamer trunk at the foot of her bed. After the deaths of her parents, she moves from California to Montana to make a life for herself. The deal is simple: If she can farm a plot of land for three years as a homesteader, the land is hers. But Montana isn’t what the pamphlets said it would be. The winters are harder, and the people—though kind—have harsh edges. Still, Adelaide finds friends in the form of Grace, a single mother on the next homestead over, and Bertie, a saloon owner who happens to be the only other Black woman in the area. As Adelaide settles in, she begins to think that she can forget what lies within her trunk. But secrets have a way of getting out, no matter how hard you try to keep them in.
There’s nowhere to hide in Victor LaValle’s vision of the American West.
LaValle combines historical fiction with horror to create a tapestry of desolation, wonder, despair and hope. Lone Women isn’t set in the American West as we know it—or at least not the male-dominated American West that is portrayed in midcentury Westerns. LaValle is determined not to whitewash the past, showing not only the full spectrum of people who settled as homesteaders, including women of color, but also the wreckage of Montana’s boom and bust development. He treats the reader to explorations of ghost towns alongside canny character studies of the types of people who would choose a life as hard as the one of a homesteader.
LaValle’s descriptions of the Montana wilderness are as stark and expansive as the land itself, making it painfully clear how someone could get prairie fever or freeze to death out in Big Sky Country. When it comes to Adelaide’s secret, his prose takes on the feeling of a waking nightmare, full of horrific discovery. LaValle explores the themes of shame and ostracization through not just Adelaide’s secret but also the expertly revealed reasons why many of Adelaide’s new friends aren’t fully accepted in town.
A powerful study in setting and character with a healthy dose of horror, Lone Women will forever change the way you think about the Wild West.
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