Historical Fiction

... Read The Book of Lost Names Summary

Aminata Diallo, from the village of Bayo, in western Africa, is the daughter of Mamadu, a jeweler, and Sira, a midwife. At the age of eleven, she is kidnapped after watching her parents murdered and her village burned. She is captured by African slave traders, who sell her to white slave traders. She and the other captives are marched in a coffle, a line of prisoners chained together, on a harrowing three-month journey to the... Read The Book of Negroes Summary

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The Book of Salt is a 2003 novel by Monique Truong. Set in the 1920s and 1930s, the novel focuses on Binh, a young, gay Vietnamese cook in French-colonized Vietnam. Binh flees Saigon, and after spending time at sea as a cook, he lands in Paris and eventually answers an ad for a position in the household of Gertrude Stein and her lover/companion, Alice B. Toklas.Binh navigates the limitations of colonialism while exploring his emerging... Read The Book of Salt Summary

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The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a historical novel by American author Kim Michele Richardson. Published in 2019, the book takes place in the Kentucky hills during the Great Depression in 1936. In its depiction of prejudice and community in 1930s Kentucky, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek touches upon themes including the distrust of authority, the random and dangerous nature of prejudice, the power of community, and the importance of caring.Content Warning: The... Read The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek Summary

The Bostonians, by American-born author Henry James, was first published as a serial in 1885-1886 and then as a full novel in 1886. Henry James wrote in the tradition of realism, a late-19th century movement that was a response to Romanticism and Transcendentalism. On the surface, The Bostonians is about the competition between a Northern feminist, Olive Chancellor, and a Southern conservative, Basil Ransom, to win the attention of a young woman named Verena Tarrant:... Read The Bostonians Summary

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The Bridegroom (2000) is a short story collection by Ha Jin. The stories touch on themes involving Chinese social life, the intersection of Chinese and American cultural and economic customs, and authority and the individual. The Bridegroom is Ha Jin’s third short story collection, and first following the success of his 1999 novel, Waiting. Each of the stories in The Bridegroom previously appeared in journals, such as Harper’s and The Boston Book Review.Other works by... Read The Bridegroom Summary

The Bridge on the Drina is a 1945 historical fiction novel by Ivo Andrić, translated from Serbo-Croat by Lovett F. Edwards. It tells the story of a bridge built in Višegrad that linked disparate communities from the east and west.  Plot Summary The novel opens with a description of the scenery surrounding Višegrad, a fertile valley with high forested mountains on either side. The bridge spans the Drina, the largest river, and a second smaller bridge... Read The Bridge on the Drina Summary

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a 2007 novel by the Dominican American author Junot Díaz. Its title character is a young overweight Dominican American man obsessed with fantasy novels, superhero comics, and tabletop role-playing games. Using Spanish neologisms, magical realism, and references to late-20th-century nerd culture, Díaz weaves a multigenerational family saga chronicling life under the murderous Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and the subsequent Dominican diaspora to the United States. Widely praised... Read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Summary

Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American writer who was born in 1962 in Palo Alto, California. Both The Buddha in the Attic (2011) and her 2002 novel, When the Emperor was Divine, portray the Japanese American experience of internment camps following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The subject is close to Otsuka’s heart; the FBI arrested her grandfather on suspicion of being an enemy spy, while her mother, uncle, and grandmother were... Read The Buddha in the Attic Summary

The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi, is a coming-of-age novel that explores significant themes of identity, class, and race in 1970s London. Karim Amir, the protagonist and narrator, tells the story of his maturation against a backdrop of political and social change, as he attempts to create himself, discover his place in life, and grow up. Told in the first person, Karim narrates his life from age 17 to about age 23.The Buddha of... Read The Buddha of Suburbia Summary

Set in Arthurian Britain just after King Arthur’s death,The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro’s seventh novel, is told in four parts and focuses on an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, and their journey to find their son. Along the way, they must deal with issues of memory, aging, love, loss and death. While the voice of a narrator frames the novel, much of the story is told from the shifting perspectives of the major characters of... Read The Buried Giant Summary

Amitav Ghosh's 1995 novel The Calcutta Chromosome is a multi-layered, postmodernist narrative told through the interplay of past and future. Ghosh shapes the narrative through a series of micro-narratives that are woven together through a combination of memory, storytelling, and mystical inferences. The story reflects the tension between science and belief, with science becoming subservient to the mythic forces that underlie the characters’ lives. These mythic forces, such as reincarnation and the Hindu concept of... Read The Calcutta Chromosome Summary

Written in the late 1300s, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is one of the greatest surviving works of Middle English literature, and was a huge influence on later writers from Shakespeare to Keats, among many others.This guide refers to Neville Coghill’s modern English translation (Penguin, 2003).Plot SummaryThe Canterbury Tales tells the story of a group of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury to visit the holy shrine of St. Thomas Becket. This is a story... Read The Canterbury Tales Summary

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” by Mark Twain, is a tall tale about a man who bets on anything and wagers that his frog can out-jump a stranger’s frog, with surprising results. The story is the first of Twain’s works to receive popular attention; it appeared in a New York newspaper in 1865 and was widely republished. In 1867, the story served as the title entry in Twain’s first book, a collection of... Read The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Summary

The Cellist of Sarajevo focuses on the struggles of four people during the long and brutal Siege of Sarajevo. For the citizens of Sarajevo at this time, life is torturous. There are snipers in the hills encircling the city with their guns trained on the people below. These snipers, who the characters refer to as “the men in the hills,” are picking off the townspeople one by one whenever they venture outside for food or... Read The Cellist of Sarajevo Summary

The Chaperone is a work of historical fiction written by American author Laura Moriarty and published in 2012. The novel portrays the Jazz Age of the 1920s in America through a feminine lens. It was inspired by historical people and events, primarily the 1920s silent-film actress Louise Brooks. Moriarty lives in Lawrence, Kansas, and the book is also partially set in Kansas. The Chaperone was adapted into a PBS Masterpiece feature film in 2018. Other... Read The Chaperone Summary

Marie-Henri Beyle, writing under his penname Stendhal, published his last complete work, the novel The Charterhouse of Parma, in French in 1839. It tells the story of an Italian nobleman who fights in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and then navigates the fraught political dynamics of the era known as the Italian Restoration (1814-1848). This was a time when the memory of revolution was repressed and power seemed to many to operate on caprice and intrigue... Read The Charterhouse of Parma Summary