I'm a retired historian of early Islam and writer of historical fiction set in medieval Iraq, Turkic, and Persian lands. I write and love to read novels that “do history.” In other words, historical fiction that unravels the tangles of history through the lives of its characters, especially when told from the perspectives of those upon whom elite power is wielded. My selections are written by authors who speak from an informed position, either as academic or lay historians, those with a stake in that history, or, like me, both, and include major press, small press, and self-published works and represent the histories of West Africa, Europe, Central and West Asia, and South Asia.
It is 908 CE, the waning days of the Sunni Abbasid caliphate. A body is discovered in Baghdad shot in the exact manner of Shia martyr slain some two hundred years earlier. Many suspect the murder signals a coming attack on the Shia community. The city is on edge as political, religious, and personal factions are exposed, sending the caliph’s army into the streets. Ammar and Tein, detectives with Baghdad’s Grave Crimes Section, and Tein’s sister Zaytuna, have to clear the case one way or another before violence erupts. The investigation offers no easy resolution as the three seek out the killer among those vying to gain power over the meaning of the past for the future, not just caliphal authorities and scholars, but also old women, children, and wayward sons.
Segu
may begin with a lone white explorer gazing across a river at the Bambara
people, but this novel turns away from him to those whose world will be irrevocably
changed as colonialism and Christianity, Muslim expansionism, and the horrific
trade in human beings irrevocably changes the course of African lives. Condé
turns an unblinking eye on the Traore family as they break under the weight of
these civilizational pressures. Traditional ways of life turn brutal and
desperate—women especially feel the brunt of an unstable world—and sons abandon
the family for enemies or are kidnapped and enslaved. Each storyline in this
famed epic cuts straight into the political and social complexities of that
time and exposes its players to uncompromising account.
'Maryse Conde is an extraordinary storyteller who brings the history of an African kingdom alive as vividly as if it existed today. . . This is a great novel: unputdownable and unforgettable' Bernardine Evaristo
Winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize for Literature 2018
The bestselling epic novel of family, treachery, rivalry, religious fervour and the turbulent fate of a royal African dynasty
It is 1797 and the African kingdom of Segu, born of blood and violence, is at the height of its power. Yet Dousika Traore, the king's most trusted advisor, feels nothing but dread. Change is coming. From the…
The inaccessible
Secretum at the centre of the novel is not simply a repository for the most
important manuscripts in Christendom. It is a maze shaped in the order of
creation and an argument for how the world should be by controlling what people
know. Knowledge has always been curated and does not require banning books or
even book burnings to do the work of shaping minds, cultures, and empires
towards a desired end. People at every level of society—not just elite
scholarly, religious, and political powers—make direct but also unintentional
decisions about what may be considered worthy resources for thought. This
celebrated mystery asks us to consider and acknowledge the choices, majestic
and banal, that lead to such ends.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
The magnificence
of the first in the Amalgant series is the immersive
reconstruction of Mongol social, political, and religious worlds, as well as the
lives of its people. Hammond resistantly reads histories produced by hostile
cultures, instead privileging the earliest and most comprehensive Mongol
tellings of their own lives, The
Secret History of the Mongols. This is no dry historical account of
cultural norms, steppe relations, or material artifacts, but an intimate and
humane telling of the personal tragedies and struggles that would change the
world as the war-orphaned Temujin grows to be the man we know as Chenggiz Khan.
Mother Hoelun was never ashamed or embarrassed by their hardships. When Jochi wore a dog’s pelt for a cloak, because they had no fleeces and no felt and had to trade for hides and dog was cheap, none of the children felt a sense of indignity. Indignity was alien to her.The Mongols are a people of orphans. A disastrous battle with China has left wives without husbands, children without fathers. Temujin is one of these children, impoverished by the heavy tribute China has punished them with, in danger of forgetting what a Mongol stands for. Worse, Temujin's the subject of…
This riveting
Young Adult novel sets the action on a stage in which “East” and “West” are not divided as typically
imagined, but intertwined economically, politically, and culturally. Moses’
staff has been stolen from Topkapi Place and a team of Ottoman janissaries is
sent on a mission through Italy and England to recover it. The team is made of
free and formerly enslaved men and women hailing from rising empires and those
lost. Their struggles offer a searing account of the Ottoman, West and North
African, and European dependence on the trade of enslaved human beings. And
while the theft of the staff of Moses may seem fanciful, its possession confers
imperial power and thus is the perfect object to ask from who was it truly
stolen and to whom should it be returned.
A small undercover unit of hand-picked, trusted warriors is assembled to track down the thieves who have stolen the Staff held by Moses as he parted the Red Sea. They are the `Ruzgar' - the `Wind' - and like the wind, they travel silently and unseen. Awa, the studious daughter of a noble family from the Songhai Empire in West Africa, was kidnapped and enslaved by Moroccans after the disastrous Battle of Tondibi. Awa is a whirling and deadly force when she has a scimitar in her hand. Will, who was snatched from his home in London at the age…
Set in Delhi on
the eve of the first battle for Indian independence in 1857 that would be so
brutally put down by the British, ending with Delhi in flames and India coming
under direct British rule, our detective, the poet laureate Mirza Ghalib
investigates a murder. The investigation reveals the myriad of personalities,
pressures, and allegiances from every corner of Indian and British society that
led to the uprising and all that has come after. This finely wrought novel
begins and ends with death at a Mushaira—a poetry recitation, public, private,
or intimate for just two, that typically drew from every level of society—sounding
the loss of India as it was before colonization, and then partition, when
religious and social boundaries were not as starkly defined and policed as they
are now.
3 May 1857. India stands on the brink of war. Everywhere in its cities, towns, and villages, rebels and revolutionaries are massing to overthrow the ruthless and corrupt British East India Company which has taken over the country and laid it to waste. In Delhi, the capital, even as the plot to get rid of the hated foreigners gathers intensity, the busy social life of the city hums along. Nautch girls entertain clients, nawabs host mushairas or poetry soirees in which the finest poets of the realm congregate to recite their latest verse and intrigue, the wealthy roister in magnificent…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? A dizzying ride between past and present, the novel unravels these mysteries, just as Eddie has decided to return to society after two decades on the streets, with the help of Jane, a woman whose intelligence and integrity rival his own. Will he succeed, or is it too late?
In the tradition of Graham Greene, this is a book about love, betrayal, and life’s heavenly music
“Crazy Eddie” is a homeless man who inhabits two squares of pavement in front of a bank in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this makeshift office, he panhandles and dispenses his peerless wisdom. Well-educated, fiercely intelligent with a passionate interest in philosophy and a profound love of nature, Eddie is an enigma for the locals. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? Though rumors abound, none capture the unique worldview and singular character that led him to withdraw from the perfidy and corruption of human beings. Just as Eddie has…
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