I will die on this hill: a knowledge of human history is essential. If we refuse to examine our past, we are truly doomed to repeat it. What we call “history,” however, is told from only one viewpoint: that of the victor, or whatever party lived to record the tale. Since childhood, I’ve been intrigued by the lives of our forebears even as I longed for proof of the uncanny in the waking world. But I’ve only ever encountered the fantastical—not to mention the historical—in texts like those on this list, where the two can commingle, enriching and refining one another for the enlightenment, and the pleasure, of their readers.
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.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
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.
Reimagines the lives of the Brontë siblings—Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and brother Branwell—from their precocious childhoods, to the writing of their great novels, to their early deaths.
A form-shattering novel by an author praised as “laugh-out-loud hilarious and thought-provokingly philosophical” (Boston Globe).
How did sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne write literary landmarks Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey? What in their lives and circumstances, in the choices they made, and in their close but complex relationships with one another made such greatness possible? In her new novel, Rachel Cantor melds biographical fact with unruly invention to illuminate the siblings’ genius,…
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.
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
A STORY OF LOVE AFTER DEATH
'A masterpiece' Zadie Smith
'Extraordinary' Daily Mail
'Breathtaking' Observer
'A tour de force' The Sunday Times
The extraordinary first novel by the bestselling, Folio Prize-winning, National Book Award-shortlisted George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War
The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns…
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.
By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace
Laura Chase's older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First War. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following.…
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.
'A thrilling blend of noir and fantasy.'Guardian. In an unnamed city - a hardboiled pre-Civil Rights New York sort of city -heroine Lila Mae has succeeded in becoming the very first Black female elevator inspector. In Whitehead's darkly comic otherworld, this is a job imbued with an almost mystical significance. But the illustrious Department of Elevator Inspectors is in crisis, bitterly divided between the Empiricists (check the machinery) and the Intuitionists (tune in to the vibes). Lila is an Intuitionist and so much better at her job than anyone else that surely it must be those 'good-old-boy' Empiricists who have…
My book is a literary historical fantasy about “public women,” an age-old secret society, and the earth-shaking power of the female.
In 1862, 22-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that’s landed on her doorstep. This text leads her to Nashville, bustling with soldiers, saboteurs, powerful men—and powerful women. Sylvie translates the playscript by day, but at night, she acts as a Union spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with an ancient sisterhood whose members possess potentially monstrous powers. Inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the American Civil War, Daughters of Chaos questions familiar notions of history and family, warfare and power.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray…
