Kirkus Historical Fiction 2023

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water follows a family in southern India that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning — and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century a twelve-year-old girl, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this poignant beginning, the young girl and future matriarch — known as Big Ammachi — will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life, full of the joys and trials of love and the struggles of hardship. A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humour, deep emotion and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years. Endorsements Oprah's Book Club selection. "One of the best books I've read in my entire life. It's epic. It's transportive... It was unputdownable!" — Oprah Winfrey, OprahDaily.com

July 1346. Ten men land on the beaches of Normandy. They call themselves the Essex Dogs: an unruly platoon of archers and men-at-arms led by a battle-scarred captain whose best days are behind him. The fight for the throne of the largest kingdom in Western Europe has begun.Heading ever deeper into enemy territory toward Crécy, this band of brothers knows they are off to fight a battle that will forge nations, and shape the very fabric of human lives. But first they must survive a bloody war in which rules are abandoned and chivalry itself is slaughtered.Rooted in historical accuracy and told through an unforgettable cast, Essex Dogs delivers the stark reality of medieval war on the ground—and shines a light on the fighters and ordinary people caught in the storm.The historian makes his historical fiction debut with an explosive novel set during the Hundred Years' War.EndorsementsThe New York Times bestselling historian

The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: a mother’s husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects his wealth no matter the cost, all the while war cries are heard from France, as Napoleon sets forth a violent master plan to become emperor of the world. As institutions are challenged and toppled in unprecedented fashion, ripples of change ricochet through our characters’ lives as they are left to reckon with the future and a world they must rebuild from the ashes of war.Over thirty years ago, Ken Follett published his most popular novel, The Pillars of the Earth. Now, with this electrifying addition to the Kingsbridge series, we are plunged into the battlefield between compassion and greed, love and hate, progress and tradition. It is through each character that we are given a new perspective to the seismic shifts that shook the world in nineteenth-century Europe.The long-awaited sequel to A Column of Fire, The Armor of Light, heralds a new dawn for Kingsbridge, England, where progress clashes with tradition, class struggles push into every part of society, and war in Europe engulfs the entire continent and beyond.

Two Victorian marriages, two dangerous love affairs, one extraordinary partnership . . .London, 1894. After a lifetime spent navigating his desires, John Addington, married to Catherine, has met Frank, a working-class printer.Meanwhile Henry Ellis's wife Edith has fallen in love with Angelica — and Angelica wants Edith all to herself.When in 1894 John and Henry decide to write a revolutionary book together, intended to challenge convention and the law, they are both caught in relationships stalked by guilt and shame. Yet they share a vision of a better world, one that will expand possibilities for men and women everywhere.Their daring book threatens to throw John and Henry, and all those around them, into danger. How far should they go to win personal freedoms? And how high a price are they willing to pay for a new way of living?

Maine, 1789: When a man is found entombed in the frozen Kennebec River, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As the local midwife and healer, Martha is good at keeping secrets. Her diary is a record of every birth, death and debacle that unfolds in the town of Hallowell. In that diary she has also documented the details of an alleged rape that occurred by one of the town’s most esteemed gentlemen – the same man who has now been found dead in the ice.While certain townspeople are eager to put both matters to rest, Martha suspects that the two crimes are linked, and that there is more to both cases than meets the eye. Over the course of one long, hard winter, whispers and prejudices mount, and Martha’s diary lands at the centre of the scandal, threatening to tear both her family and her community apart.In her newest offering, Ariel Lawhon brings to life a brave and compassionate unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice on behalf of those no one else would protect. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense and tender story of a remarkable woman who had the courage to take a stand, and in the process wrote herself into history.

Four centuries. A single house deep in the woods of New England.A young Puritan couple on the run. An English soldier with a fantastic vision. Inseparable twin sisters. A lovelorn painter and a lusty beetle. A desperate mother and her haunted son. A ruthless con man and a stalking panther. Buried secrets. Madness, dreams and hope.All are connected. The dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

In Saigon in 1963, two young American wives form a wary alliance. Tricia is a starry-eyed newlywed, married to a rising oil engineer “on loan” to US Navy Intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a talented hostess and determined altruist, on a mission to relieve the “wretchedness” she sees all around her.When Tricia miscarries, Charlene sweeps her into a cabal of well-dressed do-gooder American wives. Armed with baskets filled with candy and toys, they descend on hospitals, orphanages, and a leper colony on the coast, determined to relieve suffering, no matter the cost.Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter reaches out to Tricia, now widowed and living in Washington. As the two relive their shared experience in Saigon, they are forced to come to terms with the ways their own lives have been shaped and stunted by Charlene’s pursuit of “inconsequential good.”A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War. With a narrative impact that recalls Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Alice McDermott confronts the unresolved mysteries and ironies of America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the entire community is caught up in the search for him. As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly — newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen — confront their relationships with each other and with the ancient landscape they inhabit.The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It's haunted by many gods — the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found, or lost forever.Endorsements'A blazing mystery . . . tremendous' — Guardian'Moving and masterful' — Daily Mail'Masterful storytelling' — Washington Post'Brilliant, fresh and compulsively readable. It is marvellous' — Ann Patchett'Remarkable' — Harper's'McFarlane's treatment of the dust storm has a simple Steinbeckian majesty . . . Her prose is full of detail, comparable to Claire Keegan's keen-eyed novellas, Foster and Small Things Like These' — Sunday Times'A thrilling success . . . full of mystery and wonder' — Wall Street Journal'Fiona McFarlane's last book was scintillating. The Sun Walks Down is even better' — Sarah Moss'Gorgeous storytelling and superb characters . . . magnificent' — Michelle de Kretser'I can't think of another writer working today who I admire more' — Kevin Powers'Gloriously orchestrated . . . kaleidoscopic in the Victorian tradition, as much a portrait of a community as Middlemarch . . . McFarlane knows what she's doing, and she does it exceptionally well' — Irish Times

The people of Salt Point are afraid of the world beyond their rural town. Most of them are born, live, and die never having gone more than twenty or thirty miles from houses that are crammed with generations of their families. But something shifts at the end of summer 1957. Change makes its way to Salt Point.The Kindred sisters — Ezra and Cinthy — grew up with an abundance of love: love from their parents, who let them believe that the stories they tell on stars can come true; love from their neighbours, the Junketts, the only other Black family in town, whose home is filled with spice-rubbed ribs and ground-shaking hugs; and love for their adopted hometown of Salt Point, a beautiful New England village perched high up on coastal bluffs.But as the girls hit adolescence, their white neighbours, including Ezra's best friend Ruby, start to see their maturing bodies and minds in a different way. And as the news from distant parts of the country fills with calls for freedom, equality, and justice for Black Americans, the white villagers of Salt Point begin to view the Kindreds and the Junketts as a threat to their way of life.Amidst escalating violence, prejudice, and fear, bold Ezra and watchful Cinthy must reach deep inside the wells of love they've built to commit great acts of heroism and grace on the path to survival.In luminous, richly descriptive writing, Promise celebrates one family's story of resistance.It's a book that will break your heart — and then rebuild it with courage, hope, and love.Endorsements"A magical, magnificent novel, that amounts to a secret history of an America we think we know, but never really knew" — Marlon James"A novel so potent, one wonders if it's secretly a magic spell" — Kiran Desai

A heart-wrenching story of love and defiance set in the Warsaw Ghetto, based on the actual archives kept by those determined to have their stories survive World War IIOn a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards, and await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Will he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. He learns about their childhoods and their daydreams, their passions and their fears, their desperate strategies for safety and survival. The stories form a portrait of endurance in a world where no choices are good ones.One of the people Adam interviews is his flatmate Sala Wiskoff, who is stoic, determined, and funny—and married with two children. Over the months of their confinement, in the presence of her family, Adam and Sala fall in love. As they desperately carve out intimacy, their relationship feels both impossible and vital, their connection keeping them alive. But when Adam discovers a possible escape from the Ghetto, he is faced with an unbearable choice: Whom can he save, and at what cost?Inspired by the testimony-gathering project with the code name Oneg Shabbat, Lauren Grodstein draws readers into the lives of people living on the edge.Told with immediacy and heart, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a piercing story of love, determination, and sacrifice for the many fans of literary World War II fiction such as Kristin Harmel’s The Book of Lost Names and Lauren Fox’s Send for Me.Endorsements— New York Times bestselling author Lauren Grodstein

Ah Boon is born into a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of twentieth-century coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is a gentle boy who is not much interested in fishing, preferring to spend his days playing with the neighbor girl, Siok Mei. But when he discovers he has the unique ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can find, he feels a new sense of obligation and possibility—something to offer the community and impress the spirited girl he has come to love.By the time they are teens, Ah Boon and Siok Mei are caught in the tragic sweep of history: the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, grief intrudes, and the future of the fishing village is in jeopardy. As the nation hurtles toward rebirth, the two friends, newly empowered, must decide who they want to be, and what they are willing to give up.An aching love story and powerful coming-of-age that reckons with the legacy of British colonialism, the World War II Japanese occupation, and the pursuit of modernity, The Great Reclamation confronts the wounds of progress, the sacrifices of love, and the difficulty of defining home when nature and nation collide, literally shifting the land beneath people's feet.Set against a changing Singapore, a sweeping novel about one boy's unique gifts and the childhood love that will complicate the fate of his community and country

Blue skies, empty land—and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere.Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.Endorsements“absorbing, powerful” — BuzzFeed

An unforgettably rich and vivid historical novel set in eighteenth-century India, London, and Paris, about a young man’s dream of leaving a mark on the world.Abbas is just seventeen years old when he leaves his family to serve in the court of Tipu Sultan, the beleaguered ruler of Mysore. An inspired wood-carver, Abbas is apprenticed to a master toy maker in order to build a massive tiger automaton, a gift to celebrate the return of the sultan's sons from British captivity. Working alongside the legendary French clock maker Monsieur du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns to read French, and then meets Jehanne, the daughter of one of du Leze’s fellow expatriates. When du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Paris, he begs Abbas to accompany him. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, the palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton disappears. To prove himself and make a livelihood in Paris—with Jehanne at his side—Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered Moorish and Oriental art.A hero’s quest, a love story, a novel that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years, Loot is a dazzling, wildly inventive, and irresistible feat of storytelling from an Indian American writer at the height of her powers.

The End of Drum-Time is a richly atmospheric saga that charts the repercussions of a scandalous nineteenth-century love affair between a young Sámi reindeer herder in the Arctic Circle and the daughter of the renegade Lutheran minister whose teachings are upending the Sámi way of life.It’s 1851 at the edge of the Arctic Circle, and things are changing quickly. The church outpost that Lars Levi, a fervent Lutheran minister, mans is rugged and sparsely populated. But as the zeal of his teachings mounts, so does the attendance at the weekly services he holds. The Sámi reindeer herders he’s been sent to minister to are skeptical of the Christian values—and strict rules—he preaches, but when Biettar, one of the Sámi’s most respected herders, has a dramatic religious awakening on the shortest day of the year, more and more of the Sámi people become ready to let their long-held traditions and beliefs give way to new ones. Biettar’s new commitment to Lars and his teachings means that Biettar’s son, Ivvár, is left to tend the family’s reindeer herd alone, an increasingly impossible task.Meanwhile, Lars’s daughter, Willa, has always been the picture of obedience, until a chance encounter with Ivvár leads to an infatuation that gradually becomes something more. When a catastrophic illness threatens the life of her young brother, everything she’s ever believed is called into question, making her feel reckless—and free—in a way she’s never been before.Gorgeously written and stunning in scope, The End of Drum-Time is both a powerful immersion into a rich and sometimes forgotten culture and a celebration of a beautiful, ancient way of life. It masterfully weaves together the complex geopolitics and rich tradition of nineteenth-century Scandinavia; brings to life a people caught between an old way of life and the new; and asks how what we believe shapes the course of our lives.EndorsementsWhiting Award winner — Hanna Pylväinen

In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military buses called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle.After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dorothy, and a love affair with a gallant American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact.Taking inspiration from his mother's Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea delivers an overlooked story of women's heroism in World War II. With its affecting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene tells a moving story of courage and resilience.In the tradition of The Nightingale and Transcription, an exhilarating World War II epic that chronicles an extraordinary young woman's heroic frontline service in the Red Cross.Endorsements"Urrea's touch is sure, his exuberance carries you through... He is a generous writer, not just in his approach to his craft but in the broader sense of what he feels necessary to capture about life itself." — Financial Times"Urrea's 'gifts as a storyteller are prodigious'." — NPR

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” — Inferno, Dante AlighieriLet Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.A haunting masterpiece about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation. A miracle of a novel that inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.EndorsementsJesmyn Ward — Two-time National Book Award winner; youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction; MacArthur Fellow.