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My graduating class in high school once designated me as “the most likely to start a feminist revolution.” That was a lot to live up to, but I’ve made a very small stab at it by writing about women who have changed our world. I love to bring awareness about the contributions great women have made in history, but I also want modern women to see themselves in these struggles. I always say that Historical Fiction is an exercise of empathy, and I hope my work encourages women today to get involved and make a difference in the world, too.
I adored this book because it gives us a peek into the early life of Chinese Empress Wu. Weina Dai Randel did her homework, and her words absolutely blossomed in ancient China.
With an extremely sympathetic young protagonist who rises to be a force in the Emperor’s court, this book captivated me. I also remember it as being rather romantic in its way.
"Randel's gorgeous debut novel seductively pulls back the curtain to reveal the heartbreaking world of...China."-Stephanie Dray, NYT bestselling Author of America's First Daughter A thrilling work of historical fiction, bringing romance, intrigue, and the unexpected rise of an Empress to intoxicating life under the inscrutable moon. In Tang Dynasty China, a concubine at the palace learns quickly that there are many ways to capture the Emperor's attention. Many hope to lure in the One Above All with their beauty. Some present him with fantastic gifts, such as jade pendants and scrolls of calligraphy, while others rely on their knowledge of…
I grew up in the era of sweeping historical epics, traveling with the turn of a page from Gaius Marius’s Rome to Victoria’s England and everything in between. I’ve always loved books that immerse you in places and time periods you know nothing about—and when I couldn’t find enough of them, I started writing my own. While my long-ago history PhD work is in Tudor-Stuart England (my specialty was the English Civil War), what I love most is being a historical dilettante and getting to hop around the historical record—which may be why my books can take you anywhere from Napoleon’s court to 1920s Kenya to Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt!
Fun fact: in college, my specialty was 16th-century Scotland, which meant I spent several months living in Edinburgh doing research for my senior thesis. In this book, Susanna Kearsley brings to life a Scotland we seldom see in novels but which brings back the Edinburgh I lived in and studied more vividly than anything else I’ve encountered.
There are so many books about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but this book tackles the precursor to all that, the tangled politics of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, from the fall-out of the Glorious Revolution and the exile of James II to the ferment around the 1707 Act of Union in all its glorious complexity, through the life of one woman who finds herself—as one does—a normal person buffeted by larger events. Every time I open this book, I feel like I’m back in Edinburgh again.
'Fascinating and immersive... I love a novel that deals with the many ways in which people keep their secrets' DIANA GABALDON A sweeping love story set against the Jacobite revolution from much-loved, million copy bestselling author Susanna Kearsley
Autumn, 1707. Old enemies from the Highlands to the Borders are protesting the new Union with England. As the French prepare an invasion to bring the exiled Jacobite king back to Scotland to reclaim his throne, the streets of Edinburgh are filled with discontent. To calm the situation, Queen Anne's commissioners are settling the losses and wages owed to those Scots involved…
I grew up in the era of sweeping historical epics, traveling with the turn of a page from Gaius Marius’s Rome to Victoria’s England and everything in between. I’ve always loved books that immerse you in places and time periods you know nothing about—and when I couldn’t find enough of them, I started writing my own. While my long-ago history PhD work is in Tudor-Stuart England (my specialty was the English Civil War), what I love most is being a historical dilettante and getting to hop around the historical record—which may be why my books can take you anywhere from Napoleon’s court to 1920s Kenya to Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt!
England is hardly an unusual place for historical fiction, but 7th-century England is entirely different. Wolf takes you to an England where the Saxons are holding court at Winchester while the remnants of Romanized Britain are desperately trying to organize resistance from their decaying villas. It’s a view of an England in flux, broken into small, warring kingdoms—told from the viewpoint of a British princess, Nan, married off to a Saxon prince. But Nan is no wilting violet and her story is one I still re-read again and again.
Born of the Sun is a beautiful interweaving of place and character and a bold attempt to reconstruct lives that have left little mark on the historical record.
This compelling saga about a beautiful Celtic princess who gives her heart to a Saxon prince explodes with the passions of love and war. When the Saxon army, in its bloody charge against the Celts, captures the child-princess Niniane, they bring her to Cynric, King of the West Saxons. Enchanted by her innocence and beauty, he makes Niniane a favored prisoner. But she soon discovers that the King’s court abounds with tempestuous intrigues and tormented rivalries. And when the adulterous and envious Queen arranges for a duel between the King’s beloved illegitimate son and her own son, heir to the…
I grew up in the era of sweeping historical epics, traveling with the turn of a page from Gaius Marius’s Rome to Victoria’s England and everything in between. I’ve always loved books that immerse you in places and time periods you know nothing about—and when I couldn’t find enough of them, I started writing my own. While my long-ago history PhD work is in Tudor-Stuart England (my specialty was the English Civil War), what I love most is being a historical dilettante and getting to hop around the historical record—which may be why my books can take you anywhere from Napoleon’s court to 1920s Kenya to Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt!
I don’t know about you, but when I learned history in elementary school, we skipped straight from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Norman Conquest with the briefest of nods at Byzantium to acknowledge there was something in between. It was all very simple and straightforward—and completely left out the crumbling kingdoms left behind in the wake of the fall of Alexander the Great’s Empire.
I can still remember opening Gillian Bradshaw’s Horses of Heaven for the first time and thinking, “What’s Ferghana? Or Bactra?” Gillian Bradshaw wrote a number of books set in the wake of Alexander’s empire, but this one is the one that really stuck with me, told through the eyes of a girl picked to go as attendant to a Greek aristocrat from Bactra being married to King Mauakes of Ferghana (now Afghanistan).
Heliokleia, a young princess of Bactria, is allied in a mismatched marriage to the ruler of Ferghana, but she realizes too late that the king's son, Itaz, is her true soulmate
I am the author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee and A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. I’ve been a teacher, editor, and writer for over twenty-five years. The Civil War, in particular, has been my passion since I first read Bruce Catton’s The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War as an elementary school student in the 1960s. My articles on Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant have been featured in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and on the History News Network.
Pryor’s work has become essential for scholars of Robert E. Lee. She had access to numerous unpublished documents from Lee’s descendants, and used this invaluable material to provide a more complete and realistic portrait of the man. In one chapter, she explores Lee’s complex attitudes toward slavery. She writes, “He embraced the legal and economic aspects of the master-slave system without really grasping its complex underlying relationships.” The Lost Cause notion that Lee opposed slavery is not supported by the evidence. Pryor provides new insights on his decision to resign from the army in 1861, and offers a detailed account of the creation of Arlington National Cemetery at Lee’s former estate.
"Pryor's biography helps part with a lot of stupid out there about Lee - chiefly, that he was, somehow, 'anti-slavery.'" - Ta-Nehisi Coates, theatlantic.com
An "unorthodox, critical, and engaging biography" (Boston Globe) - Winner of The Lincoln Prize
Robert E. Lee is remembered by history as a tragic figure, stoic and brave but distant and enigmatic. Using dozens of previously unpublished letters as departure points, Pryor produces a stunning personal account of Lee's military ability, shedding new light on every aspect of the complex and contradictory general's life story. Explained for the first time in the context of the young…
I’m the author of ten books, including fiction, memoir, collected journalism, and criticism. My novels are historical fiction, hence my decision to make my recommendations within that genre, mostly. My own historical novels comprise a tetralogy beginning with The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin and ending with The Turner Erotica, so the series takes the reader roughly from 1648 to 1900. The second book chronologically in the series, Rebecca Wentworth’s Distraction, won the 2003 Langum Prize for historical fiction. Retired now, I was the founding director of the MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University.
This historical novel is set just before the American Civil War. What singles it out is not the theme—the struggle of an African American slave and mother, Rosetta, for her freedom. More unusual is White’s courageous depiction of the full yet flawed humanity of her slave (“soul”) catcher, Augustus Cain, as Rosetta flees her inhumane conditions in Virginia enroute to Boston. Cain is one of the best at what he does, but the journey both characters endure also brings both toward mutual compassion and redemption. Though published in 2007, the book fits perfectly into, and helps to amplify further, our current awakening to our historical racism and the vast suffering white Americans have inflicted on their Black brothers and sisters.
Augustus Cain is a man with his back against the wall. A war-scarred wanderer, he faces a past he wants to forget, a present without prospect or fortune, and an uncertain future marred by the loss of his most prized possession - his horse - which he has carelessly gambled away. But he is not without skill - he has an uncanny, if unwelcome, ability to track the most elusive runaway slaves. And to repay a debt and keep his horse, he must head north from Virginia and retrieve a runaway named Rosetta. When he eventually runs Rosetta to ground…
I’m a historian of empire, with a particular interest in the British Empire, colonial violence, and the ways in which imperialism is shown and talked about in popular culture. I studied at Oxford University, and having lived in and travelled around much of the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, I am always trying to understand a bit more if I can… but reading is best for that… My first book was The Khyber Pass.
A landmark work by virtue of being the first book by a black woman to be published in Britain, this is a powerfully harrowing account of Mary’s own life as a slave in the Caribbean. Though only short, it supplies valuable testimony on the gruesome British exploitation of enslaved people over the centuries, and the many cruelties inflicted upon Mary personally by her brutal ‘owners’. Should be required reading for all those who think of the British Empire with nostalgia.
Mary Prince was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince, was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. This edition of "The History of Mary Prince" is Volume 4 of the Black History Series. It is printed on high quality paper with a durable cover.
Is there any genre so purely escapist as a portal fantasy adventure? I grew up on stories like these, devouring any book I could find that had a portal in it, from Alice in Wonderlandto The Chronicles of Narnia to Tunnel in the Sky. Books, in a way, are portals to other places and times, and as a child I wandered through the stacks of the local library, plumbing the depths of every strange world I could get my hands on. If you want to experience the long-lost thrill of falling into a story, few do it like those that take their characters through portals to other worlds.
The other novels I’ve listed here are optimistic, hopeful stories.
This one takes us on a dark and bloody path.
In The Mirror Empire, two nearly identical worlds populated by violent people and sentient (also violent!) plants are at war with each other.
The only doorway between them is powered by blood.
The limitations of this concept are fascinating. Since the worlds are duplicates of each other, each person who lives in one world has a copy of themselves living in the other.
The twist? A person can only cross to the other side if their imposter is dead.
Talk about consequences!
This novel is incredibly bloody and full of betrayal. It’s violent, but the intense action had my eyes pinned open late into the night.
The Mirror Empire is often gory and frequently shocking, but two things are for sure: You won’t be able to predict what’s…
From the award-winning author of God's War comes a stunning new series...
On the eve of a recurring catastrophic event known to extinguish nations and reshape continents, a troubled orphan evades death and slavery to uncover her own bloody past... while a world goes to war with itself.
In the frozen kingdom of Saiduan, invaders from another realm are decimating whole cities, leaving behind nothing but ash and ruin. As the dark star of the cataclysm rises, an illegitimate ruler is tasked with holding together a country fractured by civil war, a precocious young fighter is asked to betray his…
When I decided to familiarize myself with eighteenth-century authors of African descent by editing their writings, I didn’t anticipate becoming their biographer. In annotating their writings, I quickly became intrigued and challenged by trying to complete the biographical equivalent of jigsaw puzzles, ones which often lack borders, as well as many pieces. How does one recover, or at least credibly speculate about, what’s missing? Even the pieces one has may be from unreliable sources. But the thrill of the hunt for, and the joy of discovering, as many pieces as possible make the challenge rewarding. My recommendations demonstrate ways others have also met the biographical challenge.
Equiano’s autobiography fascinated me when I stumbled upon a paperback edition of it in a local bookstore nearly thirty years ago.
A bestseller during Equiano’s lifetime, hisInteresting Narrativeis appreciated as a work of enduring historical and literary value. The odyssey he recounts takes him from enslavement as a child in Africa to becoming a leading figure in the struggle to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.
Along the way, he serves in the British Royal Navy, gains his freedom, participates in a scientific expedition to the Arctic, has a religious conversion, observes various kinds of slavery in North and Central America, England, Europe, and the Middle East before agreeing to help administer settling in Africa formerly enslaved poor Blacks who had joined the British forces during the American Revolution.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, first published in 1789, is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. The narrative is argued to be a variety of styles, such as a slavery narrative, travel narrative, and spiritual narrative. The book describes Equiano's time spent in enslavement, and documents his attempts at becoming an independent man through his study of the Bible, and his eventual success in gaining his own freedom and in business thereafter.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was one of the first widely read slave narratives. Eight editions…
I find it crucially important that we acknowledge that slavery is a global phenomenon that still exists this very day. Dutch historians like me have an obligation to show that the Dutch East India Company, called the world’s first multinational, was a major slave trader and employer of slavery. I am also personally involved in this endeavour as I am one of the leaders of the “Exploring the Slave Trade in Asia” project, an international consortium that brings together knowledge on this subject, and is currently a slave trade in Asia database.
Although broaching many more themes than slavery, this book gives us a unique insight into how local patterns of enslavement linked up with the growing colonial presence of the Dutch and Portuguese in Timor (East Indonesia). The book has been thoroughly researched by the world’s most knowledgeable scholar on this subject. For me, it is a source of inspiration for how local forms of enslavement can be studied in interaction with European colonial expansion.
European traders and soldiers established a foothold on Timor in the course of the seventeenth century, motivated by the quest for the commercially vital sandalwood and the intense competition between the Dutch and the Portuguese. Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea focuses on two centuries of contacts between the indigenous polities on Timor and the early colonials, and covers the period 1600-1800.
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