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Seattle Picks: Historical Fiction

Recently published historical novels with a rich variety of settings and time periods. (Updated June 2020)

The Seattle Public Library

36 items

  • A sweeping saga, told in graceful language, about two young people – an army doctor and a sheep-herder – who flee the Spanish Civil War and immigrate to Chile, where they begin new lives.
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  • A haunting novel that begins during the Civil War and sweeps across generations to tell the stories of two enslaved women, their master’s daughter, and the bonds between them.
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  • In the aftermath of the American Civil War, an orphaned Lakota girl grows up in rural Tennessee with two ex-soldiers and former slaves. This is a heart-wrenching story told in lyrical language.
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  • As Japanese bombs begin falling on China in 1937, university faculty and students set off on a long trek to carry both themselves and a rare collection of folklore and mythology books to safety.
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  • Myth, mystery and romance all intertwine in this sweeping, layered novel set in rural Malaysia under British colonial rule in the 1930s.
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  • Using gorgeous language and a touch of fantasy, this novel tells the moving story of a boy born into slavery on a Virginia plantation who struggles to achieve freedom for himself and his loved ones.
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  • This family saga spans most of the 20th century, charting the course of three generations of descendants of the founders of a community of former slaves in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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  • In 1830, a young man in the Crow Nation (in what is now Montana) journeys with his mother to Trinidad – the homeland she fled in 1796 – to uncover difficult truths.
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  • This dark novel is set in 1600s Scandinavia. When the men in a remote fishing village all die at sea, the women are left to struggle against natural forces as well as charges of witchcraft.
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  • When a young woman from a Christian family in 11th century France falls in love with a Jewish scholar they face violence and danger when they flee their city in order to be together.
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  • After the death of her famous sister Jane in 1817, Cassandra Austen discovers a trove of private letters which bring back rich memories and force her to decide how to protect her sister’s literary legacy.
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  • At the end of the Civil War, a wandering fiddler in Texas tries to eke out a living while seeking the Irish indentured servant he met on the eve of the Confederate surrender.
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  • A teenage girl escapes an abusive marriage in 1950s India, fleeing from her rural village to the “pink city” of Jaipur where she strives to create an independent life for herself.
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  • Set in Britain and France in the 1840s, this quietly atmospheric novel explores how controversial new ideas about evolution illuminate the workings of both the natural world and its human inhabitants.
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  • This novel follows the lives of three prominent women in film - Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl - who were photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt at a Berlin party in 1928.
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  • The final book in Mantel’s epic trilogy (start with Wolf Hall) about Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who became one of the most powerful men in England as King Henry VIII’s chief minister
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  • This epic saga about Finnish siblings who emigrate to the Pacific NW in the early 1900s is packed with interesting details about old-growth forests, logging, and the emerging labor movement.
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  • Both funny and moving, this novel depicts what happens to the witnesses of a shooting in 1960s New York City, written with McBride’s signature emotional honesty and faith in humanity.
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  • This historical story is a powerful and devastating account of the female soldiers who joined the Ethiopian army when Mussolini invaded in the 1930s.
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  • This fascinating tale incorporates both historical fiction and Mayan folklore as it follows a young woman’s quest that takes her to Mexico City during the Jazz Age and the underworld.
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