Best historical fiction 2024

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Clear

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Welsh author Carys Davies (West) is still breaking into American readership, but it won’t take her long. Her latest historical novel, Clear, which thoughtfully explores a passionate friendship set against religious and civic changes in mid-19th century Scotland, is bound to expand her audience.

John Ferguson is a poor Presbyterian minister struggling to provide for himself and his wife, Mary. Desperate, he accepts a challenging mission to evict the remaining inhabitants of a remote Shetland island. Soon after his arrival on the island, he is injured in a fall while walking the cliffs, and his unconscious body is found by Ivar, the island’s sole occupant. Ivar brings John to his croft and nurses him back to health. Unable to understand one another (Ivar speaks a dialect of an archaic Scandinavian language called Norn) the two men form a tenuous friendship and gradually share enough words to communicate, though John postpones admitting to Ivar why he is really on the island. Long-isolated and having had only animals for company, Ivar takes pleasure in living with and caring for another person, while John, who continues to keep his mission a secret, begins to have second thoughts about the morality of his assignment. Meanwhile, back on the mainland, Mary grows uneasy with the nature of her husband’s undertaking and resolves to follow him, undertaking the difficult passage north on her own.

Davies sets her novel at the crux of two historical upheavals: the 1843 break of the Free Presbyterian Church from the Church of Scotland over the issue of landowners influencing the placement of clergy, and the final years of the Scottish Clearances, in which hundreds of rural poor were evicted to create additional grazing land for livestock. Davies is attentive to these details but keeps her focus on the relationships as the narrative moves seamlessly between the three main characters. With breathtaking descriptions of the natural world and a tender exploration of an unexpected friendship, Clear challenges readers’ expectations, offering a powerful and unusual story of connection.

Carys Davies sets Clear at the crux of two historic upheavals in 1800s Scotland but keeps her focus on her characters.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Safekeep

Review by Lauren Bufferd

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, is set in 1961 rural Holland. At 30, Isabel is living in the house where she was raised after the death of her father forced the family’s move from the city and into a furnished house their uncle Karel found for them. Isabel lives a circumscribed and watchful life, guarding her dead mother’s things, suspecting the maid of theft and fending off the attentions of a flirtatious neighbor. Of her brothers, Louis and Hendrik, she is closer to Hendrik, although she disapproves of his friend Sebastian, suspecting a deeper connection. Of Louis and the steady stream of girlfriends he introduces to her, she thinks even less. Until Eva.

The siblings meet Eva at a dinner out. With her clumsy manners and brassy dyed hair, she hardly impresses, and Isabel is shocked when Louis brings her to the house, telling Isabel that Eva must stay there while he goes away on business and showing Eva to their mother’s room. Even under Isabel’s watchful eye, things begin to disappear—a spoon, a bowl, a thimble. More alarming to Isabel is the overwhelming attraction she feels to Eva, an attraction that spills into an obsessive, intensely depicted sexual relationship.

Van der Wouden may be familiar as the author of the 2017 essay “On (Not) Reading Anne Frank,” which explored what it means to be a Dutch Jewish writer and her complicated relationship to Frank’s legacy. As Isabel and Eva’s connection unfolds, Van der Wouden’s true subject comes into view: how ordinary people were implicated in the ethnic cleansing that took place during World War II. Even in peacetime, Isabel and her peers are quick to notice people who appear different, with a fierce disgust that Isabel risks turning on herself as she comes to terms with her sexuality. A novel of redemption as much as revenge, The Safekeep has the pacing and twists of a thriller, while delving into the deeper issues laid bare by the Holocaust.

In Yael van der Wouden’s mesmerizing debut, The Safekeep, Isabel lives a circumscribed life in her dead mother’s house until her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, alarming Isabel when an obsessive attraction develops between the two.
FictionHistorical FictionComing of Age

Malas

Review by Stephenie Harrison

The legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) has endured for centuries in Latinx culture, with roots tracing back to 1500s Mexico. A malevolent spirit who drowned her children after discovering her husband’s infidelity, La Llorona now roams the Earth cursing all who encounter her with lifelong misfortune and unhappiness. With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on this tale, updating it for the 21st century into a fiery family epic teeming with rage and revenge.

Set in the dusty border town of La Cienega, Texas, Malas follows two social outcasts separated by decades yet bound together in a surprising way. In 1951, Pilar Aguirre, mother to a young son and expecting her second child, is cursed by a crone who claims to be married to Pilar’s husband. The discord sown by this encounter ricochets through the subsequent weeks, months and years, rending relationships and ruining lives. Forty years later, another mysterious old woman appears in town, this time causing an uproar at the funeral of Lulu Muñoz’s grandmother. Headstrong and seeking to annoy her domineering father, 14-year-old Lulu strikes up a clandestine relationship with the stranger; as friendship blossoms and their connection deepens, the devastating way in which the two are linked gradually comes to light, dredging up old secrets that threaten to throw La Cienega into chaos once again.

Readers will devour Malas. Fuentes’ propulsive plotting; rich and precise depiction of Tejano culture; complex characters; and thoughtful exploration of female anger, grief and intergenerational trauma combine to form a fully immersive reading experience that—for all its specificity—will be compelling and meaningful to readers of all backgrounds. Brimming with brio, Fuentes’ deliciously defiant debut breathes new life into classic lore and heralds the arrival of a bold new literary powerhouse.

“[O]vercoming generational trauma might sometimes be related to not accepting a fate-driven narrative.” Read our Q&A with Marcela Fuentes about Malas.

With her debut novel, Malas, Marcela Fuentes puts her own electrifying spin on the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman), turning it into a fiery family epic teeming with rage, revenge and revolution.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

This Strange Eventful History

Review by Alden Mudge

Claire Messud’s enthralling sixth work of fiction recounts the wanderings of three generations of the Cassar family over seven decades, from the Nazi occupation of France in June 1940 to the passing of François Cassar in Connecticut in 2010.

This Strange Eventful History opens with 8-year-old François wanting to write to his father in Salonica, Greece, to alert him about the French surrender. His father Gaston, a French naval attaché, has of course heard the sorry news and considers his options with a mixture of doubt, shame and defiance. He longs for his wife Lucienne, who has been and will be to the end of their days his “aIni,” his source. She and their children, François and Denise, have fled to their home in Algeria to wait out the conflict.

The Cassars are French Algerians, pieds-noirs, who have lived in Algeria since its colonization. They feel French, but they are regarded as outsiders in mainland France, especially after the Algerian revolution in 1954. François’ sense of not fitting in is one reason he leaves for America. Gaston, in a new career in the booming oil business, also learns he doesn’t fit in. A colleague tells him, “We lost the war, my friend. . . . To the victor go the spoils. The future is in oil, and the future is in English.” For this family, every success carries a germ of defeat.

But it isn’t only business and geopolitics that stymies the Cassars. Some whiff of family shame or dysfunction leaves François always feeling inadequate and warps his sister Denise into a delusional and increasingly alcoholic spinster, devoted to the care of their aging parents.

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her descriptions of people and places are beautiful, precise and illuminating. Her understanding of the human soul is profound. This is reason enough to read the novel.

Yet the novel’s magic casts a wider spell. Chloe, a third-generation Cassar, is a novelist, like Messud. She wishes to write about and understand her family’s uncomfortable history. She observes, “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.” In This Strange Eventful History, Messud has given us that richer thing. It is amazing.

Read our interview with Claire Messud for This Strange Eventful History.

With thrilling, adventurous sentences, Claire Messud leads readers along the elusive edges of life, where family and national histories entwine. Her understanding of the human soul is profound.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

James

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Percival Everett brings The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved supporting character, Jim, into the foreground of his new novel, James, a reworking of the Mark Twain classic. Though James stays with Huck Finn’s characters, setting and first-person perspective, it’s Jim, not Huck, who narrates this story. Jim overhears that he’s about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, and, as in the original, he runs, landing on Jackson Island, where he encounters Huck, who’s faked his own death to flee his abusive, alcoholic father. The two set out together, floating down the Mississippi.

James, like Huck Finn, is a picaresque tale, one of improbable adventures and moments of reunion. Jim and Huck encounter the con men the Duke and Dauphin, and though this duo get their comic moments, Everett highlights their quick turn to brutality. Jim and Huck are soon separated, and Jim recounts a series of horrors—Everett pulls no punches in depicting white enslavers’ treatment of enslaved people—leavened with the unexpected connections Jim makes. Unlike in Huck Finn, James’ Jim can read and write, secretly reading books from his enslaver’s library. In a feverish dream encounter after he’s bitten by a snake, Jim debates Voltaire, proponent of liberty and equality, forcing Voltaire to admit to his own racism. All the while, he longs for his wife and daughter, determined to gain his own freedom and theirs.

Everett balances a moral clarity about the atrocities of slavery with a dry, Twainian humor, even turning Twain’s dialect on its head to great effect: In this telling, enslaved people use this stereotypical “slave” dialect only around white people, so as to seem unthreateningly foolish, while laughing about it together in private. On his journey, Jim repeatedly encounters other enslaved people being brutalized by white people, but he’s powerless to intervene; life has taught him that to do so leads to greater violence, and sometimes death. Throughout, the novel’s revelations feel both surprising and convincing, and its explosive, cathartic ending points at the possibility of hope for Jim and his family.

In an era of retellings, James stands out for staying true to Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people. In revealing Jim’s full humanity, deep thinking and love through his hero’s journey, Everett has written a visionary and necessary reimagining.

In an era of retellings, Percival Everett’s James stands out for staying true to Mark Twain’s voice, tale-spinning talent and humor, while also accurately depicting what Twain failed to acknowledge: the reality of life for enslaved people.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Wandering Stars

Review by Michael Magras

“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest. Tommy Orange demonstrates the veracity of that line in Wandering Stars, his follow-up to There There, the 2018 debut novel for which he was a Pulitzer finalist. Few literary debuts are as chillingly of-the-moment as There There, which spanned a huge cast of Native American characters and culminated in a tragedy at an Oakland powwow. Orange further explores the lives of some of those characters in this assured continuation.

Orange pulls off a neat sleight of hand in Wandering Stars: He limits the scope by focusing on only a few characters, yet he also expands his narrative by rewinding to the 19th and early 20th centuries to tell the story of ancestors of the Red Feather family.

The book begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when the U.S. Army attacked Cheyenne and Arapaho people in present-day Colorado. As Orange puts it, “seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons,” and killed hundreds of Native Americans—a prolongation of “America’s longest war.”

One of the survivors was Jude Star, a mute man sent by train as a prisoner of war to a fortress in St. Augustine, Florida. The man the army chose to run the prison was Richard Henry Pratt. Years later, Pratt founded the Carlisle School, to which Native American parents were forced to send their children to be “taught that everything about being Indian was wrong.” Jude’s son, Charles Star, is enrolled there. By the early 1900s, Charles develops an addiction to laudanum and tries to interview an aging Pratt to learn about his father.

The novel then shifts to 2018, when Orvil Red Feather, a survivor of the tragedy in There There, is trying to overcome his injuries and emotional trauma. Like Charles, he turns to drugs, in his case with the help of his friend Sean, whose father sets up a basement lab and starts his own pharmacopeia. He also tries to piece together the story of his Cheyenne family history, although Opal, the great-aunt with whom he and his younger brothers live, isn’t forthcoming about their heritage.

The style of the first part of the book is different from the second, more modern half. If the result feels like two separate books, there’s still much to recommend Wandering Stars, from Orange’s sensitive depiction of Orvil’s path to recovery to the chronicling of important, overlooked moments in the brutal history of America’s treatment of its Indigenous people. As Opal laments, Native Americans have been “consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions.” Wandering Stars is an impassioned censure of that marginalization.

Read Tommy Orange’s essay on the writing of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars sensitively depicts Orvil Red Feather’s path to recovery after the tragedy in There, There, as well as chronicling important, overlooked moments in the history of America’s brutal treatment of its Indigenous people.
FictionLiterary Fiction

My Beloved Life

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Imagine finding yourself in the company of a stranger. A simple hello organically morphs into hours of conversation, full of resonating and enlightening stories. This is the feeling one gets while reading Amitava Kumar’s latest novel, My Beloved Life. Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, the novel is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.

Born in 1935 in the tiny farming village of Khewali, India, without electricity, money or much else, to a mother who nearly died of a snake bite while pregnant, Jadunath (or Jadu) nevertheless seems destined for big things. Curiosity and a thirst for knowledge lead him away from peasant life to the city of Patna where he eventually becomes a respected professor, a political activist and a loving husband and father. Jadu’s story provides glimpses of life in rural India steeped in superstition and faith, and of India’s struggles for equality and progress from post-independence to the modern day.

In contrast to Jadu’s upbringing, his daughter, Jugnu, is born in the bustling city of Patna in 1965. Raised in a loving home, surrounded by her father’s intellectual circle, Jugnu grows up to be a passionate journalist for CNN in the United States. Jugnu’s perspective adds deeply to our understanding of Jadu beyond his words alone.

The novel feels very intimate as it unfolds in the first person from Jadu and then Jugnu’s perspectives. In the skillful blending of individual experience with extraordinary world events, Kumar’s journalistic background shines through, often making one forget that this is a work of fiction. Additionally, Kumar’s own upbringing in a small town near Patna, and his experiences as an immigrant and professor in the United States, add a very powerful element to his ultimate message that everyone has a story that is worth remembering.

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and mundane, My Beloved Life is storytelling at its best.

Telling the life story of a man named Jadunath Kunwar, My Beloved Life is a moving collection of memories and experiences entangled with world history.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

City of Laughter

Review by Laura Sackton

The protagonist of Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel, a queer grad student studying Jewish folklore, describes her work as collecting scraps. In the wake of her father’s death, 30-year-old Shiva decides to get her master’s, hoping to unravel the family mysteries her mother has kept hidden from her all her life. Shiva eventually travels to Warsaw, where a series of experiences, from a night in a queer bar to a performance of a famous Jewish play, lead her to a deeper understanding of herself, her mother and her ancestral heritage.

This novel, like Shiva’s work, is a collection of beautiful scraps—scraps of folktales and memory, hidden family histories, love letters, accounts of strange happenings in the past and present—all tangled together and rewoven into a whole that’s strange, lush, imaginative and pulsing with life. Fruchter draws on folklore remembered from her own childhood, as well as a whimsical (and sometimes dark) universe of invented tales to create something entirely new.

The narrative refuses to sit still, jumping between points of view, decades and countries as Fruchter traces four generations of Jewish women from a tiny Polish shtetl in the early 20th century to contemporary New York. Fruchter’s rich and unwavering exploration of queer lineages, alongside matrilineal and Jewish ones, is extraordinary. As Shiva becomes more deeply immersed in the lives of her foremothers, those foremothers become more vibrant and detailed, in prose that moves from shimmering and dreamlike to sharply funny to wonderfully contemplative.

Readers looking for easy explanations will not find them in City of Laughter. Readers looking for questions—and the spaces they open—will find them in abundance. This is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history, and storytelling that reshapes worlds. It’s a story about the work it takes to look into a rupture—in yourself, in your family, in history—and, through looking, begin to transform it.

Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history and storytelling that reshapes worlds.
FictionWesternHistorical FictionFamily Saga

The Bullet Swallower

Review by Thane Tierney

The Old Testament book of Ezekiel states that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” In theory, while wealth may be passed along from generation to generation, debts—even those of the karmic nature—aren’t.

Try telling that to any of the Sonoro clan, the family at the center of Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force, The Bullet Swallower.

Beginning with patriarch Alferez Antonio in the 1800s, the Sonoros have committed all manner of sins in the name of ambition, from running a gold mine with slave labor to robbing a train at the turn of the 20th century. When the latter goes sideways, Antonio Sonoro is shot by the Texas Rangers and left for dead in the desert. His henchman brother is killed, but Antonio survives and swears a blood oath for revenge—rechristening himself as El Tragabalas, the Bullet Swallower.

A century later, in 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s number one box-office draw, a much-beloved movie star and performer known as El Gallo (The Rooster). While relaxing at home after a grueling tour, he’s visited by someone whom he believes to be a fan, bearing a strange gift: an ancient volume entitled The Ignominious History of the Sonoro Family from Antiquity to the Present Day.

Ping-ponging back and forth across the decades, Gonzalez James constructs a dynastic legacy that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger. When Jaime tries to pry some of the family’s more recent history out of his tight-lipped father, the old man replies, “Did you ever think that the reason I never said anything about them is because it’s too painful?” And when a shadowy figure named Remedio inserts himself unexpectedly into Jaime’s household, the story takes on an element of the supernatural.

All this would be remarkable enough, but it’s made even more so by the fact that The Bullet Swallower is based, albeit loosely, on Gonzalez James’ own family history. As she puts it in the author’s note, “Everything in this book is true except for the stuff I made up.” So while the son—or in this case the great-granddaughter—may not bear the iniquity of the father, it seems she does wind up bearing witness to it.

Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ dual-timeline magical realist tour de force presents the dynastic legacy of the Sonoro family—one that is shrouded in mystery and carries more than a hint of danger.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Wolves of Winter

Review by Matthew Jackson

With his debut novel, Essex Dogs, popular historian Dan Jones proved that he could take his expertise in medieval history and translate it into compelling, immensely readable fiction. Now, with Wolves of Winter Jones manages to do it again—and then some.

A direct sequel to Essex Dogs, Wolves of Winter picks up on the adventures of a band of soldiers and friends serving in the army of King Edward III in the midst of the Hundred Years War. In the wake of the English victory at the battle of Crecy, the Essex Dogs are convinced they’re going home soon, with pockets full of whatever plunder they’ve managed to scrape together. But the King and his noble allies have other plans. For reasons no one in the army’s rank and file can quite grasp, the English are preparing to lay siege to Calais, a small French port town surrounded by treacherous marshes. So, instead of going home, the Dogs continue on to Calais, even as a man they thought they left in the past creeps up behind them.

Throughout the action, Jones maintains a clear, confident grasp on the historical details, from the weapons the Dogs use to the surprising way that pirates factor into the Calais story. And just as in Essex Dogs, none of that detail ever distracts from the narrative, character development or emotional stakes. Jones’ themes have also matured and deepened, as the mysteries of the siege of Calais offer plenty of new opportunities to explore the futility of war from the Dogs’ perspective. Crecy was such a triumph that to keep fighting feels like an exercise in foolish bravado. As the Essex Dogs descend into the literal quagmire around Calais, they begin pondering the steps that led them to this point, considering whether control over their destinies is possible in a world ruled by those richer and more influential. It’s a study in maturation for an author who was already working at a high level; the added depth never gets in the way of the swashbuckling, epic action of the battles.

Wolves of Winter is another rollicking success for Dan Jones, cementing him as a master of historical fiction and leaving us counting the days until we can read what the Essex Dogs do next.

Wolves of Winter is another rollicking success for Dan Jones, leaving us counting the days until we can read what the Essex Dogs do next.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Curse of Pietro Houdini

Review by Alice Cary

The mysterious, flamboyant Pietro Houdini calls himself “Chemist. Painter. Scholar. Master artist and confidant of the Vatican.” Whatever he may or may not be, to Massimo, the narrator of The Curse of Pietro Houdini, Pietro is a savior. On the day that they meet in August, 1943, 14-year-old Massimo’s parents have been killed in the bombing of Rome, and Massimo lies beaten in a gutter. Pietro immediately takes Massimo under his wing, and the two head up the hill to seek shelter in a towering abbey in the Italian village of Montecassino.

The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; an account of pivotal, yet little-known events of World War II; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Readers will quickly discover that unusual, dangerous times call for creative acts of deception on the part of both main characters, whose relationship forms the heart of this unforgettable, cinematic story. Massimo, who narrates the events from an adult perspective, notes: “The man I knew was a thinker and a storyteller and a liar who had as little reverence for the facts as P.T. Barnum.”

The abbey houses over 70,000 manuscripts and works of art, many of them moved there from museums for safekeeping during the war. Now, with an Allied bombing seemingly imminent, two real-life German officers, Julius Schlegel and Maximilian Becker, are secretly carting them out as quickly as possible, sending them back to the Vatican. Pietro hatches his own scheme—”the first art heist within an art heist in the history of the world”—to paint over three undiscovered Titians and sneak them out with Massimo’s help. Along the way, the plotting pair encounter a rich cast of characters and endure many suspenseful, heart-pounding and heartbreaking moments.

Derek B. Miller—the author of How to Find Your Way in the Dark and Norwegian by Night—has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece: an epic novel that manages to convey an extraordinary yet realistic story encapsulating the horrors of war. As Pietro explains, “That’s what art does, my child. It opens our hearts to the human condition.”

Read our interview with Derek B. Miller for The Curse of Pietro Houdini.

The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Derek B. Miller has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

You Dreamed of Empires

Review by Cat Acree

It was Hernán Cortés who made the ludicrous claim that Moctezuma voluntarily surrendered sovereignty of the Aztec empire to the Spanish conquistadores. Cortés’ narrative is not easily believed, especially considering that he quotes Moctezuma as referencing the Christian Bible, but certainly there are those who believe that the Aztec people, either out of naiveté or superstition, could have been duped into a bad bargain.

Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue’s agile modernist novel You Dreamed of Empires offers a reimagined encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma, with far more political machination at work than superstition. It all kicks off with the Spaniard trying to hug the Aztec emperor on first greeting—a bad move considering Moctezuma’s impulsivity and comfort with executions. Although the moment somehow doesn’t end in blood, readers know that the ultimate outcome will undoubtedly be disaster.

Over the course of one day in November 1519, conquistadores bumble around the labyrinthine city of Mehxicoh-Tenoxtitlan. Their horses, lost in Moctezuma’s palace, are a novelty to their hosts but unfortunately decimate the emperor’s collection of exotic fruits. Meanwhile, Moctezuma languishes in his room, treating his depression with hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti, while his sister (and wife) Atotoxtli tries to figure out how to save the kingdom. “If there’s anything Spaniards and Mexicans have always agreed upon,” Enrigue writes, “it’s that nobody is less qualified to govern than the government itself.”

Readers of Enrigue’s 2016 novel Sudden Death have already encountered his way of dealing with lopsided accounts of Latin American history. In both books, there are translator characters deliberately mistranslating, effortless comparisons to the Roman empire, plenty of feathered capes and a porous fourth wall. On several occasions, Enrigue yanks us out of the story to look at events from our 21st-century vantage point, such as when Moctezuma is admiring the sound of withered fingers swaying in the breeze “to the beat of some music he couldn’t place,” and we learn that it’s the 1973 song “Monolith” by T. Rex. And as beautifully written as the novel is, especially in its descriptions of the metropolis of Tenoxtitlan, You Dreamed of Empires is also bone-dry funny: “In Mexico, authority has always flowed from the smack of a flip-flop.”

When history is retold in such an irreverent, unprecious manner, there are no winners—except the reader.

You Dreamed of Empires offers a reimagined encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma. When history is retold in such an irreverent, unprecious manner, there are no winners—except the reader.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features