New Books in Historical Fiction
Interview with Writers of Historical Fiction about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction
Episodes
July 17, 2025 • 37 mins
This compelling debut novel explores the interconnected lives of three acclaimed female concert pianists: Clara Bishop; her teacher, Zofia Mikorska; and their nineteenth-century predecessor, Constantia Pleyel—best known for her arrest and subsequent incarceration for the murder of her own piano teacher, a composer named Aleksander Starza. Exactly how these three women are connected becomes clear only late in the book, but two of th...
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July 6, 2025 • 63 mins
How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.How to Dodge a Cannonball (Henry Holt, 2025) is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes...
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June 9, 2025 • 52 mins
NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Jack Wang about his novel, The Riveter (HarperVia, 2025).
In the vein of All the Light We Cannot See, a cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII.
Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to make a new life for himself. The Second World War is in full swing, and Josiah, like so many Canadians, wants t...
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June 5, 2025 • 47 mins
Keeping details straight while writing a chronologically organized series is difficult enough. Focusing four full-length novels on the events of a single group experience in a single year, with back stories and future developments for a small group of heroines, each of whom has a chance to tell her own story of the central event and its consequences, requires even greater skill. Yet Karen Swan pulls off this mammoth enterprise in h...
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May 24, 2025 • 84 mins
For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers—including his own ancestors—who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation.Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their fa...
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May 6, 2025 • 43 mins
Joanna Miller’s The Eights (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025) follows four women attending the University of Oxford in 1920. They are not the first female university students in the United Kingdom, or even the first who can hope to attain a degree, but they are the first class of women who can, if they fulfill all the requirements, attain a university degree from Oxford.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone on the campus regards their pr...
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April 20, 2025 • 33 mins
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with debut Toronto author Tim Welsh about his novel, Ley Lines, published by Guernica Editions, 2025.
Set in the waning days of the Klondike Gold Rush, Ley Lines begins in the mythical boom town of Sawdust City, Yukon Territory. Luckless prospector Steve Ladle has accepted an unusual job offer: accompany a local con artist to the unconquered top of a nearby mountain. What he finds th...
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April 15, 2025 • 49 mins
Sona Falstaff, a hospital nurse in Bombay, has things more or less where she wants them. Yes, she faces a certain discrimination, positive and negative, because of her mixed heritage, which makes her a “half-half” in the lingo of 1930s India. She lives in a poor section of the city, and she must work to support herself and her aging mother. India itself is a state of flux as the British Raj comes to an end and demands for independe...
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March 22, 2025 • 55 mins
Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila Slaback, who grew up in a dysfunctional, working-class family in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. In her short adult life, she gave birth to seven children with at least four different men and died in 1958 at age thirty-six. She was a real person, but her family was not proud o...
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March 19, 2025 • 37 mins
Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk.
But if Dubois is well known, the same canno...
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March 1, 2025 • 35 mins
Raphael Klonimus battles deep regret. Haunted by losing Laila, he sees himself as a coward for letting her slip away. But fate offers him a second chance. He whisks Laila away to a secluded castle, determined to reignite their passionate love. A single, soul-stirring kiss sparks hope, yet Raphael knows their journey to happiness will be challenging. In Instead of Harmony (2023) by Sara Adrien, can he prove their love is worth fight...
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February 18, 2025 • 33 mins
As Nazi tanks roll toward Leningrad in August 1941, an unmarried nineteen-year-old ballerina gives birth to twin girls in the soon-to-be besieged city. Bereft of hope, the dancer—once a rising star at the Kirov—slashes her wrists, but her babies survive, rescued by the devoted friend who arrives just too late to save their mother. The friend, too, is a dancer with the Kirov, and her tutelage and self-sacrifice ensure that the girls...
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February 8, 2025 • 48 mins
When the nobility and gentility of England are at their wits end, they send a discrete note to Miss Vivienne Clarke’s Governess Bureau. Only accepting the very best clients, their governesses are coveted, with every governess following three rules:
1.You must have an impeccable record.
2.You must bring a special skill to the table.
3.You must never fall in love…
In this interview with Dr. Miranda Melcher, Emily E K Murdoch takes li...
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February 4, 2025 • 23 mins
Today I talked to Alegra Goodman about her novel Isola (The Dial Press, 2025)
After Marguerite is orphaned as a young girl, her guardian leaves her alone in her family’s enormous home, where servants see to her needs until he hires a mother and daughter to tutor her in the ways of wealthy 16th century lords and ladies. The guardian sells her home and spends her fortune, betting on an expedition to New France (now known as Canada). ...
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January 18, 2025 • 37 mins
RuFF (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024) is Rod Carley’s highly-anticipated fourth novel. This historical fiction transports us to Elizabethan England, where we witness Shakespeare struggling through a midlife crisis while trying to win a national play competition to secure the King’s business. Hilarious hijinks ensue, with whip-smart dialogue and a captivating tale that touches on salient social issues that persist today, including equ...
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January 9, 2025 • 28 mins
Charlotte Cross has built a satisfying career as assistant curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. It’s 1978, the museum has just opened the Temple of Dendur and is preparing to become the last US stop for the King Tutankhamun exhibit, and Charlotte at sixty has almost completed her long-planned article on Hathorkare, one of ancient Egypt’s few female pharaohs. Between that and a steady romantic...
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December 29, 2024 • 45 mins
In The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale UP, 2024), Sara Lodge tells stories of women who brought 19th century criminals to justice, in real life and popular culture, as unacknowledged crime-fighters and feminist icons.
On stage and in fiction, women detectives were sensational figures who fascinated the public with cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroines who captured thieves, flushed out cheats, and solved mu...
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December 26, 2024 • 35 mins
The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024) is heart-wrenching historical fiction from beloved Canadian author, Kim Fahner. .With her incomparable ability to create immersive worlds, Fahner tells the story of an Irish Catholic family in a Northern Ontario mining town almost a hundred years ago.
Willful, headstrong Lizzie is our relatable protagonist and we follow her through an uncertain courtship, a difficult pregnancy, an absent husban...
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December 24, 2024 • 30 mins
Set in 1898, Harriet Morrow is 21, supports her 16-year-old brother, and has been accepted as the first female detective at the Prescott Agency. She’s given one week to find Agnes, maid to the wealthy Pearl Bartlett, who lives in one of the Prairie Street mansions on the south side of Chicago. Harriet, who prefers wearing men’s shoes and hats and has no intention of ever getting married, immediately notices that Agnes has been take...
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December 19, 2024 • 43 mins
Robert Penner’s best-selling novel, The Dark King Swallows the World (Radiant Press, October 2024) is a phenomenal genre-bending read.
A coming-of-age, historical fiction, and fantasy novel that simultaneously engages with and dismantles the cliches of its many genres, The Dark King Swallows the World is a totally unique and totally fresh story that is both engaging and emotional. Most of all, given the surreal events south of the ...
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