The best speculative novels that fictionalize history

I read this book for the first time while working on my PhD, and I love the novel for its beautiful, uncanny, and brutally honest portrayal of maternal love.

Based on the true story of an enslaved woman who escaped a Kentucky plantation to the free state of Ohio and then did the unthinkable in a desperate attempt to save her children from bondage, Morrison’s book is literally haunted by the ghost of the protagonist’s lost daughter, and figuratively haunted, by the stygian specter of American slavery. Toni Morrison was a true master, and for me, Beloved is her masterpiece.   

I read this book shortly after it came out, and I was blown away by this miraculous novel. A reimagining of the lives of the famous Bronte siblings, this book mixes what is “known” of the Brontes with Rachel Cantor’s own delightful, and at times unnatural, imaginings to explore and explicate the too-short lives of three beloved English authoresses (and their brother).

I love stylistically daring work, and here, Cantor manages to weave a strong emotional thread that easily pulls the reader through various unconventional forms—a phenomenal achievement.     

Speaking of authors who combine stylistic daring with profound emotion, I give you George Saunders. Saunders’s strange and funny stories prompted me to try my hand at writing fiction, and his first novel is one of my favorite books.

Inspired by the true story of Abraham Lincoln sneaking, on multiple occasions, into a Washington D.C. crypt to cradle the corpse of his young son, Willie, this book also breathes life into a sizeable cast of ghosts squatting in the “Bardo”—a liminal space between life and death. As the American Civil War rages, President Lincoln and the unwilling ghosts must all come to terms with the inevitability of death. This book is a great American novel, equally hilarious and heart-breaking.

The frame-tale—also known as a “story within a story”—is one of my favorite fictional devices, and Margaret Atwood’s deft handling of three separate storylines makes this book a truly astonishing read.

Though her characters are fictional, their story is set against a backdrop of major Canadian historical events of the 1930s and 1940s. The exterior tale carries Iris Chase, an unhappily married upper-class woman, from childhood to death, while the real author of the interior story—a novel about a pair of illicit lovers that contains an embedded science fiction tale (the eponymous Blind Assassin)—is one of the story’s biggest mysteries.

This novel is ambitious, engaging, and wholly surprising. 

My last pick is Colson Whitehead’s first novel, a book that, for me, was a revelation. Set in an unnamed City chockablock with skyscrapers (implicitly New York), in an unspecified time period (implicitly the mid-20th century), it is the story of the City’s first Black female elevator inspector, Lila Mae Watson.

In the book, the City’s elevator inspectors are split into two warring schools: The Intuitionists and the Empiricists, and when an elevator that Lila has inspected goes into freefall, she must try to clear her name, as well as that of her school. This novel—a propulsive page-turner thick with satire and philosophical commentary—remains one of the most extraordinary I’ve ever read.