A preview of fall 2026 in historical fiction

Fall is the big season in book publishing, and when it comes to historical fiction, readers have much to look forward to. This is the latest of my regular previews of upcoming historical novels that interest me personally, and there are 18 this time. I started out with 12, then added a few more, and a few more… and decided to set a limit or I’d never get this post finished! Which of these, or any others, are you  anticipating?

The Extraordinary Florence Stoker, Karen Brooks (HQ Fiction)
Release date: September 1
Biographical fiction about a Victorian woman who deserves to be better known: salon hostess, former fiancée of Oscar Wilde, wife of Dracula’s author, and fierce defender of her family’s rights and legacy. Many of Brooks’s previous historical novels had an American publisher, though it looks like this title from Australia (where it will be spring rather than fall in September) is available just as an ebook in North America and the UK currently.

The Pirate Queen, Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
Release date: September 8
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a major new novel about Grace (Gráinne) O’Malley, so-named Pirate Queen of 16th-century Ireland; her exploits were also dramatized by Morgan Llywelyn in her epic Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas (1986) and several others. Lawhon, who writes about daring real-life women, is heading further back into the past with this retelling about an Irish chieftain’s daughter who takes to the sea to defend her people against Queen Elizabeth’s invading English fleet. I’ve read and reviewed Lawhon’s previous three novels and am eagerly awaiting this one.

Silk and Sensibility, Mengxi Seeley (Shadow Mountain)
Release date: September 15
Re-imaginings and continuations of Jane Austen’s classic novels aren’t hard to find. Compared to Pride and Prejudice, her Sense and Sensibility hasn’t had as many spinoffs, and perhaps none as original in concept as this. Seeley sets her debut novel in Ming-dynasty China and focuses on two sisters of marriageable age who have different ideals about pursuing romance amid family and societal expectations.

Doom Painting, A. K. Blakemore (Granta)
Release date: September 24
In late 14th-century England, the social order is beginning to erupt due to widespread social and economic inequality. Blakemore’s literary epic of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when a contingent of rebels from the countryside journeyed to London to demand redress from the child-king Richard II, spans nearly 600 pages. This is the author’s third novel. For North American readers, Scribner will publish it in April 2027.

Beneath a Fallen Sky, Scott Gould (Regal House)
Release date: September 29
In the southern Appalachians of northern Alabama in May 1910, the arrival of Halley’s Comet is imminent, which has local residents quaking that the world’s about to end. If so, how do they choose to approach what could be their last days? I’m interested to see the uncommon setting and how the characters react; plus, having worked at a planetarium/observatory during Halley’s Comet’s arrival in 1986, the topic is of personal interest.

The French Innkeeper’s Daughter, Diane McPhail (Kensington)
Release date: September 29
From rural Normandy to politically volatile early 18th-century Paris and the New World, McPhail’s latest Southern historical follows a bold woman on her travels via land and sea to become one of the earliest residents of the city of New Orleans.

Istanbul Dreaming, Denise Derya Brandt (She Writes)
Release date: September 29
This debut, which comes with blurbs from Marjan Kamali and Nadia Hashimi, focuses on a young Turkish woman who lands in Istanbul in the 1950s to evade her arranged marriage with her abusive husband, and the additional complications that arise when she falls in love with an American man.

The Nurse at Baker Hospital, Jocelyn Cullity (Regal House)
Release date: October 6
Disturbing happenings are afoot at a hospital for cancer patients in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, something nurse Della King discovers when she arrives for what she hopes is a wonderful job opportunity. This caught my eye with its storyline about a woman uncovering medical fraud as well as the publisher itself; everything I’ve read from Regal House so far (five historical novels) has been top-notch.

Murder on 34th Street, Mariah Fredericks (Minotaur)
Release date: October 6
I enjoy Fredericks’ historical mysteries, both her Jane Prescott novels and her later standalone titles, like The Wharton Plot. New York City should be getting in the holiday spirit at the time of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but in 1932, someone’s threatening the life of the man who portrays Santa Claus. When tragedy strikes, the woman who organizes Macy’s operations behind the scenes is on the case to discover whodunit. Reader reports describe this as a cozy, nostalgic mystery.

 
The Housekeeper, Rose Tremain (Harper)
Release Date: October 6
Origin stories of classic novels are perennially popular, and Tremain’s newest novel about the backstory to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca should ignite interest for multiple reasons. It centers on the forbidden affair between a housekeeper at a mansion on Cornwall’s coast and the visiting Du Maurier. A star-studded film version is already in production. Reading this one now.

The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Scribner)
Release date: October 6
In small-town Oklahoma in the 1920s, a wealthy moonshiner with an eye for the ladies is dead, and the four women he left behind become suspects in his murder. Which of their stories is the truth? The debut novel from the multi-award-winning author of the short story collection Heads of the Colored People.

Flyweight, Courtney Ellis (Blackstone)
Release date: October 20
A change of subject (though not era) for the third historical novel from Ellis, whose first two books were romantic family sagas centered on WWI and its aftermath. Flyweight, set in East London in the early 1920s, looks at two female pugilists – the owner of a boxing ring and a married woman who develops an unexpected talent for the sport – who risk societal disapproval if they pursue their interests.

Royal Witch, Philippa Gregory (William Morrow)
Release date: October 20
Lately, Gregory’s novels have been hit or miss for me; I enjoyed her Fairmile series but passed on reading Boleyn Traitor, her retake (2025) on Jane Boleyn’s life. Royal Witch moves to a less familiar subject with its portrait of Eleanor Cobham, an English knight’s daughter who rose to become mistress, then wife, of the Duke of Gloucester, powerful uncle of the young Henry VI in the 15th century. Did she use necromancy to further her ambitions? We’re in prime Gregory territory here, and I’m intrigued.

Queen of Lombard Street, Lisa Kleypas (Avon)
Release date: October 20
I’ve been a library subject selector for Economics for 20+ years, so I look out for novels where my specialty and historical fiction overlap. There aren’t many (Hernan Diaz’s Trust is one). So I immediately grabbed an ARC of this upcoming work about a half-Spanish female economist with the ambition to build a bank for women, at a time and place (Victorian England) when women couldn’t open bank accounts of their own. Kleypas is best known for historical and contemporary romances; this is her first big mainstream historical.

The Stolen Women, Alysandra Dutton (Park Row)
Release date: October 27
Readers’ passion for classical myth retellings continues unabated, and this story is less familiar than many. Dutton’s debut novel, set just before Rome was founded, delves into the story of the Sabine women who vanished from their homes, a fact their fathers mysteriously deny, and an enterprising pair who want to locate and rescue them.

The Lost Kingdom of Daughters, Weina Dai Randel (Lake Union)
Release date: November 1
The Moso people of remote, mountainous southwestern China are an ethnic minority whose society is based in matrilineal traditions. (This BBC article about them shows the region’s gorgeousness: China’s Kingdom of Women.) Randel, known for illuminating aspects of Chinese history, has written a new novel about a woman of the Moso who finds her affections divided by two American brothers who arrive as strangers to her land. The blurb promises a multigenerational saga starting in the 1950s.

The Unfinished Work, Jeff Shaara (St. Martin’s)
Release date: November 10
Shaara is especially known for his expertise on the American Civil War and his ability to turn its battles and personalities into realistic, page-turning narratives. In his latest, he focuses on Abraham Lincoln, examining his public and private personas from November 1860, as a first-time President, through his famed Gettysburg Address... venturing into moments infrequently covered in history books. Living here in the Land of Lincoln, this will be a must-read for me.

The Last Prince of Florence, Zoe Sivak (Berkley)
Release date: November 17
Based on historical figures, Sivak’s sophomore novel (after Mademoiselle Revolution) tells the story of Simonetta, the mother of Alessandro de’Medici, first duke of the Florentine Republic. As a dark-skinned woman of African descent, Simonetta has a liaison with a son of the powerful Medicis and strives desperately to see her illegitimate son as Florence’s ruler.

And if you missed my preview of spring and summer historicals for 2026, please feel free to visit the earlier post; most of the books included are available now.

A family full of stories: Those Are Pearls by André Narbonne

One can’t help but feel for Harry Short, the initial protagonist of André Narbonne’s trim yet sweeping historical tale. He can’t catch a break for long. His experiences with the military bookend the novel, but though he survives both, they have troubling consequences.

Pub. by Palimpsest Press (June 2026)

A boilermaker in 1895 South Africa, Harry joins the British on Jameson’s Raid, a foray against the Boers of the Transvaal, even though he knows it’s a “fool’s mission.” He believes he'll have a better chance, as a returning war hero, of winning the hand of Margaret Roll, daughter of a well-off physician in Cape Town.

Margaret, however, doesn’t love him back. Disabled from a childhood accident, she sees marriage to Harry as her ticket away from her controlling father’s uncomfortable treatments. She never forgives him for wanting to make his own way in the world – that is, without her father’s money. Homesteading on the Manitoba prairie, where they settle in 1910 since a colder climate was questionably recommended for Harry’s health, isn’t for the timid. Margaret justifiably feels grumpy about that. Still, Dr. Roll describes her accurately in telling Harry that “she lives her life in grudges.”

Later, as a 45-year-old father of four in Winnipeg, Harry has grown weary of Margaret’s complaints and poor attitude. He enlists to fight overseas in WWI. Pain and secrets ensue.

Some people are driven by duty, others by desire, and some both, depending on the circumstance. Through the Shorts and their progeny, Narbonne takes us through these very human motivations and failings with an expert hand. Spanning three generations, the narrative loops back and forth through time, introducing character after unique character. While their escapades seem tailor-made for fiction, they feel very realistic and are historically based (Harry was the author’s great-grandfather).

Across over eighty years, through the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and the Great Depression and after, we experience their adventures, love affairs, tragedies, growing pains, and the varied ways they come to know – or refuse to know – one another.

Thanks to Narbonne’s careful interweaving of timelines, and with the time and place noted at the start of many chapters, the non-chronological structure is less confusing to follow than it sounds. With a few exceptions. Among other perspectives, there are two first-person narrators, Ruth’s sister, Nan, and Ruth’s daughter Margaret – her grandmother’s namesake – and sometimes it’s unclear which of them is speaking.

Through this approach, we’re not only privy to nuggets of family lore shared by Harry’s descendants, but we also see them fleshed out in full scenes, many chapters later. For example, we learn early on that Harry’s son-in-law, Frank Good, abandoned his family by running off with the maid. Seeing firsthand how this transpires brings plenty of interesting surprises.

A Giller Prize longlisted author, Narbonne unfolds the story with pithy observations, references to the classic literature Harry adores, and occasional dry humor, adding insights on the novel’s locales (“In the twenties, Winnipeg was a young adult, brashly uncertain”) and historical events (“The war arrives in absences. As early as 1939, people go missing”). It turns grim in places, true, but is always an involving journey.

Those Are Pearls (you may recognize the title from Shakespeare) was published by Palimpsest Press, an independent press out of Windsor, Ontario, in June 2026.

A portrait of women's choices, cultural assimilation, and generational differences (plus other historical fiction news)

Vivian Jacobson is beyond overwhelmed. The children of Russian Jewish immigrants, she and her loving husband, Mel, moved from Chicago with their family to a new house in suburban Wilmette, so people of her time—1956—may believe she’s achieved the pinnacle of American womanhood. But with four young children needing her undivided attention, Vivian’s completely frazzled. A solo homemaker six days a week, she’s left without transportation while Mel takes their Oldsmobile downtown to work at his family’s eatery.

When Vivian learns she’s pregnant again, to her despair, Mel agrees to support her choice to seek an illegal abortion with a doctor her obstetrician recommends. The place is grimy, the provider sarcastic and rude, and Vivian’s too scared to proceed. Now what? She has a week to change her mind.

Pub. by She Writes Press (2026)

First-time novelist Leavitt draws us fully into Vivian’s daily life and emotional turmoil as she weighs this most painful of decisions. Alongside, we also see Vivian’s mother, Hannah Kolson, raising a large family in a small apartment in 1923 Chicago.

Isolated as a non-English speaker, Hannah contends with a sexist husband who lays frequent claim to her body. She, too, has an unwanted pregnancy, a situation which Vivian gradually discovers. One of many very personal women’s stories, as we see in this compassionate and psychologically involving work, that exist but are rarely spoken about.

Vivian’s Decision is also delightfully full of Jewish wisdom, traditions, and immigrant history, from the classic Settlement Cook Book to a rabbi’s sensible advice. We see how much has changed between the ´20s and the more modern ´50s—wives no longer sit separate from their husbands in shul—but the importance of women’s freedoms remains constant, as it does today. This riveting novel about female friendship and agency is strongly recommended.

Della Leavitt’s Vivian’s Decision was published in April by She Writes Press, and I’d reviewed it initially for the Historical Novel Society. I chose it because it focuses on Jewish immigrant life, it’s set in Illinois, and because I’d loved Jennifer S. Brown’s Modern Girls, an earlier novel set in 1930s Manhattan that addresses similar themes.

The cover image, depicting a woman from above, reminded me of a few other recent designs. Four isn’t enough to call it a trend, but The Frozen River was so popular that I’m surprised there aren’t more of these. Did I miss others?

~

Among other historical fiction news:

Of this year’s winner, the judges of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction said it “may be the most unusual book you read this year.” Alice Jolly’s The Matchbox Girl took home the honors. Set in Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938, it follows a young, non-speaking girl who comes to the attention of Dr Hans Asperger… and other children at the doctor’s pediatric clinic have been disappearing. The Matchbox Girl is published by Bloomsbury.

Nobel laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born British author, has announced his upcoming novel: Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger, to be published in March 2027 by Faber (UK) and Knopf (US/Canada). It’s described as a spy caper set in Britain in 1938 that draws on the author’s “love of music, art and Golden Age cinema,” says Faber publishing director Angus Cargill.

For Writer’s Digest, Julie Gerstenblatt (her second novel, The Stargazer of Nantucket, is out now) contributes an article with five good tips on How to Bring a World to Life in Historical Fiction.

Sylvia Plath in the English countryside: Helen Bain's innovative debut, The Daffodil Days

The Daffodil Days, Helen Bain’s debut, can be read on different levels.  It's a multi-angled portrait of the small English town of North Tawton as its residents observe, react to, and recall the bright spirit of an American newcomer who settled among them for a short time.

It also works as a unique lens on the person herself, the brilliant author Sylvia Plath. The structure is unusual. As the chapters move backward through time, from late 1962 through summer 1961, each reveals the viewpoint of someone who interacted with Plath over these fifteen-odd months.

Pub. by Scribner (June 9, 2026)

In the beginning, Sylvia is present only through the memories of others and the artifacts she left behind. At Court Green, a thatched farmhouse in Devon, Nancy Axworthy, who served as part-time housekeeper to Plath and her family during their residence there, cleans up the home before closing it up for the winter. As Nancy scours the sink, she keeps a loose eye on her grandson while a neighbor offers his thoughts about Sylvia. We’re privy to her life through these conversations:

I said she didn’t have to leave, Gilbert says, laughing. She’s a free agent. Especially now she doesn’t have a husband telling her what to do.

Separated from her husband, poet Ted Hughes, after discovering his infidelity, Sylvia has moved with her two children to a flat in London. Although she’d told Nancy she expected to return to Court Green in the spring, others suspect she won’t be back.

Knowledge of Plath’s death by suicide at her London home in February 1963 (not mentioned, but so well known that it’s not a spoiler) is always in the background. Yet this isn’t a somber novel. While the pacing is relaxed, it’s infused with personality and life, along with periodic glimpses of the brilliant yellow daffodils that Sylvia loved.

Each of the viewpoint characters is fully dimensional, and their impressions of Sylvia progressively join to form a kaleidoscopic picture.

In October 1962, Dr. Hugh Webb, a physician in North Tawton, reflects on the differences between his current daily routine and his previous medical practice in Kaduna, Nigeria. Then he spots Sylvia in his waiting room. She’s injured her thumb while cutting an onion and sits calmly, unflinchingly, as he sews it up and makes careful inquiries about her health.

Months earlier, on a Tuesday morning in June, Stella Woodhouse, a producer at London’s Broadcasting House, sets up a recording session for Sylvia and her reading of her “dramatic poem,” as she describes it. Sylvia is a tall, sociable woman with a distinctive transatlantic accent (“Wait until you hear her… sounds more RP than the ruddy Queen,” Stella’s colleague says) who has exacting standards – for herself most of all.

Is this what it is like to be inside Miss Plath’s mind? This rich exactitude, this precise point of intelligence, this controlled tempo. Each individual item considered, measured, selected.

It is focused, sharp, amusing. It holds your attention. It is precisely what a six-minute Features recording ought to be.

(Anyone curious to hear Plath’s voice firsthand, with its unique Massachusetts-English blend, can do so; there are numerous recordings on YouTube.)

The UK cover (Bloomsbury Circus, March 2026). Very different!

Readers seeking in-depth views of Sylvia’s troubled marriage or creative process won’t find them here, but there are hints. Throughout the chapters, we’re immersed in Sylvia’s domestic side – at a dress shop, beside a local churchyard, at home as a salesman demonstrates a newfangled washing machine, at a riding lesson atop a horse called Ariel – and see her hopes for finding contentment and creative inspiration in the English countryside.

The reverse chronology means that The Daffodil Days ends on a poignant note of promise. Extensive prior knowledge of Sylvia Plath’s biography and works isn’t required. If you’re unfamiliar with all things Plath, you’ll miss some references within this beautifully subtle novel, but don’t be surprised if it also spurs new interest in her life and work.

The Daffodil Days appeared from Scribner/Simon & Schuster on June 9th. This is a significant expansion/reworking of my original (175-word) review for Booklist, which ran in their June 2026 issue.

Titanic fiction for the non-obsessed: The Lost Passenger

Over a century since it sank in the icy North Atlantic in the early hours of April 15, 1912, readers remain fascinated by the Titanic, seeking out novels that sweep them into a story of opulence, desperate human drama, and the hubris that declared the ship “unsinkable.”

Alas, I’ve never been one of them. I understand the reasoning behind the obsession, but the idea of imagining myself amid the massive loss of life at sea? No thank you. I haven’t seen the movie either.

Even so, I decided to request Frances Quinn’s The Lost Passenger on NetGalley before it was published last year. I’d heard positive reports, and there promised to be much more to the novel than the voyage. I finished reading it last weekend and can confidently say that if you have a longstanding aversion to Titanic novels but are curious to read one anyway, this is an excellent choice. I quite enjoyed it, some parts more than others, and the author’s fluid writing style left me interested to try another book of hers.

Pub. by Ballantine (2025)

The Lost Passenger is about Elinor Hayward, a young Englishwoman from “new money” who has a whirlwind romance with the heir to an earldom and discovers after their marriage that his family compelled him to wed her for financial reasons. To escape their hold over her and her toddler son, Teddy, Elinor seizes the opportunity for them both to invent new lives as American immigrants after a dream trip on the Titanic’s maiden voyage turns tragic. This she does by claiming the identity of another woman from aboard ship.

The novel can be divided into three parts, relative to the Titanic: before, during, and after, and they’re knitted together smoothly. With Eleanor moving from a vast noble estate to elegant shipboard accommodations to New York’s crowded Lower East Side, the plot covers significant ground, subject-wise and geographically.

The first part tosses in many common fiction tropes about aristocratic life, its personalities, and their ruthless attempts to control women. I’d hoped for a bit more depth, but there are some original touches. Frederick Coombes, Elinor’s husband, isn’t uncaring or cruel but has “the weight of thirteen generations” on him and caves to parental expectations.

Details about the Titanic shipwreck are effective and not overly graphic. The story and characters are strongest in the third part. Scenes with Elinor and Teddy settling into the bustling world of working-class immigrant life, with new connections but no money, are engrossing. While worried about the emotional cost, she hopes she can pull off her deception:

“I was coming to realize that I couldn’t have found a better place to disappear into than the Lower East Side of New York. You’d hear six different languages just walking to the corner, and who was going to care much about where you’d come from, or ask for your story, when everyone had pretty much the same one?”

Quinn deals sensitively with the lingering effects of trauma. Elinor remains haunted by everything she saw and heard that terrible night. When she’s given the opportunity to visit the beach at Coney Island one weekend afternoon, her desires for relief from the heat and to show a good example for Teddy vie with alarm in her mind.

With Elinor’s previous prominence, even on the other side of the ocean, her past threatens to reappear eventually. Surely, hopefully, the daughter of the Manchester mill owner dubbed the “Cotton King” can use her ingenuity to rescue herself again?

Despite an overly familiar initial plotline, The Lost Passenger is a winning story of reinvention, family, and survival twice over, and it ends with a wonderful epilogue.

Dazzle and deception in Prohibition-era Detroit: A Fortune of Sand (plus other recent reads)

One expects some level of eccentricity from the ultra-wealthy, yet Marjorie Lennox’s family sits in a class by itself. In 1927, at their mansion in the Detroit suburbs, they rest secure in their fortune made from automotive windshields, but their luxurious life doesn’t bring contentment.

Charlotte (Chet), preoccupied by death, secretly pens newspaper obituaries under their brother Graham’s name, while sister Cecile, a bitter woman with potential gangster ties, remains their father’s favorite. At twenty, their half-sister, Marjorie, a whimsical dreamer and aspiring designer, is the recipient of Chet and Graham’s caring protection and her stern father’s everlasting shame.

Pub. by Ballantine Books (May 26, 2026)

To escape his ire, Marjorie jumps at the chance to covertly enroll in an artist’s residency in Detroit, especially since the debonair, elusive Charles Bonafante is the sponsor. She craves the structure and space to pursue her craft. These she gets, and she befriends two other women (both as charmingly peculiar as Marjorie). However, the residency has strict rules about self-isolation and locked doors. Marjorie also glimpses a disturbing message scratched into her bathroom mirror.

The storyline of this original mystery, bestselling YA novelist Sepetys’ adult debut, is utterly wild in the best way. With its outsize personalities, heaps of arch dialogue, and Gatsbyesque atmosphere oozing out its pores, it could easily lead to sensory overload, but the overall effect dazzles rather than overwhelms.

Marjorie makes a vivid first impression: brought to the police station for indecent exposure (she draped herself in leaves to amuse a tree-loving friend), she also can’t cook for herself; someone fun to observe, though perhaps not relatable. That proves incorrect as she works within and without her residency’s confines to discover what’s going on.

A hugely entertaining novel about the glamour and darkness of Prohibition-era Detroit, led by a heroine who comes into her own with impressive style.

A Fortune of Sand was published in the US and Canada by Ballantine on May 26th, and I reviewed it initially for the Historical Novel Society. Although I’m aware of Sepetys’ award-winning historical novels for YAs, and have purchased many for the library, this was the first of hers I’d read. Going by the plotlines of her books for younger readers, and the Goodreads reviews of this one by fans of her earlier work, A Fortune of Sand is pretty different in content and style. The book concludes with a wonderful author’s note detailing Sepetys’ knowledge of Detroit, her birthplace, and the elements of the story that were drawn from history.

~

Among other happenings:

Thanks to Booklist’s Susan Maguire for interviewing me for the May issue of Corner Shelf, the magazine’s bimonthly e-newsletter on readers’ advisory. She asked some great questions about the changes in the blogging world over the last 20 years, trends in historical fiction, advice for librarians interested in establishing a review platform, some favorite blogging moments, and more.

My life over the past week has been rest and recovery since I had surgery on Friday the 22nd and am still pretty wiped. My directives include no exertion and no bending, which means no looking down to read print books, but I can read straight on via my iPad and watch TV (the newest episode of The Other Bennet Sister awaits). These novels have been keeping me entertained:

Anna Belfrage, Queen of Shadows (Timelight Press, 2026)—I love reading about historical royalty, and if it’s a story I don’t know well, so much the better. Queen of Shadows whisked me back to 14th-century Castile in its evocation of the longtime affair between King Alfonso XI and his beloved mistress Leonor de Guzmán, who adored him and gave him many children; and how this relationship caused turmoil for his much-ignored wife, Maria of Portugal, and his country’s foreign policy. It’s a powerful rendition of the competing forces of political responsibilities and personal desires, playing out at a national level. Each of the three has unique vulnerabilities and ambitions, which give the novel and its characters significant depth, and each exercises their will in different ways. Added to the mix are two invented characters, part-Moorish Alma Ponce de León, a midwife’s daughter, and the upper-class Rodrigo de Altamar, whose viewpoints add valuable perspectives on the country’s class distinctions and diverse cultures. It’s an epic, compelling, but far from cozy read, reflecting the real history behind it.

Katherine Webb, The Promise of Wonder (Lake Union, 2026)—An Amazon First Reads option that’s also a family saga by an author whose previous work I’ve enjoyed? I grabbed it. The setting is late 19th-century Dorset. As the story opens, Theodora Hallewell, a fifteen-year-old dreamer, has arranged for a secret midnight meeting that, she hopes, will finally convince university-bound Toby Meriwether, a young man of lower social station, to see her in a new light. A tragic event derails the lives of everyone there. The novel’s title is a bit misleading since this is a dark and melancholy tale about lost opportunities and regrettable decisions which seem impossible to escape. It’s all pretty heavy, emotionally speaking, but I found it involving nonetheless. This is the first in a trilogy.

I also breezed through Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (Knopf, 2026), which I’d been curious about after learning the initial premise: a “traditional homemaker” Instagram celebrity with a not-so-perfect actual family life on an Idaho ranch wakes up, to her horror, in the 19th century and has to cope without modern conveniences.  Then I read multiple (spoiler-free) critiques of the novel’s historical and religious aspects and got even more intrigued.  While “enjoy” may not be the right word to describe my reaction to the book (the main character, Natalie, is an awful person, deliberately so), it was an addictive story with many surprising plot turns. Yesteryear is over the top, wacky, and very effective in its biting commentary on tradwife influencer culture.  Now that I’ve finished the book, I understand the critiques, which have merit, but also appreciate and understand the writer’s choices – and that’s all I’ll say there.

Maybe these weren't the calmest reads, lol, but they were excellent distractions during my time off.

The glamorous Gabor sisters and their survival stories: Run, Darling, by Karen Essex

Through their novels, authors can unearth obscure figures from the past and draw the public eye toward their interesting lives. They can also reveal the little-known backstories of the wildly famous and wildly rich.

In Run, Darling, Karen Essex illustrates the complicated family and romantic histories of the Gabors and the astonishing trials they endured before arriving in America and becoming fixtures of mid-20th-century gossip columns. They could be called the original Kardashians, but this obscures the core of strength behind the glamorous front.

Pub. by Kleopatra Books (2025)

Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember this about the Gabor sisters:

* Eva and Zsa Zsa – unforgettable names – had charming Hungarian accents, wore their blonde hair in fabulous updos, draped themselves in jewels, and dropped “dah-link” into most conversations

* Their multiple marriages were notorious, even for Hollywood

* They were regulars on TV talk shows and periodic guests of Captain Stubing on his luxurious Love Boat voyages

What I didn’t know before reading this novel:

* There were three sisters! The oldest, Magda, known as the responsible one, married a minor Polish count – the first of multiple husbands. Within the story, they call themselves the “unholy trinity."

* Their mother, Jolie, a jeweler and classic “momager,” had as colorful a personality and almost as chaotic a love life as her daughters did. What a character – it’s impossible not to admire her chutzpah, but she can’t have been easy to live with.

* They belonged to a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism, which didn’t stop the Nazis from targeting them. Despite increasing evidence to the contrary, like Hungary’s passage of anti-Jewish legislation, Jolie continues to believe the family’s wealth and prominence will protect them.

* They arrived in the United States separately in the late 1930s and ‘40s. Their journeys to get there – and desperate attempts to rescue family members in Europe (some eager to escape, others refusing to leave) – make for a nail-biting plotline.

Essex relates their individual, intertwined adventures in this enticingly dishy and sympathetic account, allowing their personalities to shine. Eva, the first to emigrate, lands in Los Angeles eager to star in films though runs up against overbearing sexism and struggles to become successful. Zsa Zsa marries an older Turkish diplomat for security and to evade maternal pressure to become a celebrity in Vienna; her status as a high-profile political wife puts her into dangerous company. In England, Magda undertakes heroic actions and falls in love with intriguing men while hoping her parents in Budapest will see sense and get out.

The Gabor women’s stories positively drip with drama, scandalous antics, and guest appearances from Hollywood luminaries and other famous names. They make impulsive decisions with the best intentions (“Perhaps jumping without a net is just what Gabor women do,” Zsa Zsa muses), which is sometimes necessary to survive. Some of the male characters breeze by on the page without leaving a deep impression, but there are, admittedly, quite a lot of them … and as we know from history, there’ll be more where they came from. The text could use a closer proofread, too, to catch typos and name inconsistencies.

But who can resist a group of almost larger-than-life sisters who keep “emergency diamonds from Mama” they can use in a pinch to save their lives when needed? This novel about a trio of determined, one-of-a-kind women certainly instilled in me a newfound respect for how they survived, using their own talents to do so.