A gallery of 12 forthcoming historical novels for summer and autumn 2020

I don't know about you, but I'm looking ahead to late summer and fall reads. Forthcoming in the next few months are a bumper crop of historical novels, ranging from new releases by longtime reader favorites to debuts from talented newcomers.  While WWII settings are still holding steady in popularity within the genre, there's plenty on offer for readers seeking to expand beyond this time frame and the 20th century in general.  Below are just a dozen among many that caught my attention, in order by author surname.

Cathy Marie Buchanan moves back in time to pagan 1st-century Britain with Daughter of Black Lake (Riverhead, Oct.) while Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle's Even As We Breathe (Univ Press of Kentucky, Sept.) follows a young man from the Cherokee Nation into WWII-era intrigue. The Glass House (Flatiron, Sept.), the final novel from the late Scottish novelist Beatrice Colin, tells a story of secrets and friendship in early 20th-century Scotland.

The Evening and the Morning (Viking, Sept.), the highly anticipated prequel to The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett's best known epic, focuses on the English settlement not yet known as Kingsbridge around the time of the first millennium CE. Another series entry, Dark Tides (Atria, Nov.) by Philippa Gregory, picks up her heroine Alinor's story, following her trials in Tidelands, in Restoration-era London. The Mermaid of Jeju (Alcove, Dec), Sumi Hahn's debut novel, centers on the haenyeo, female deep-sea divers, on Korea's Jeju Island after WWII.

There are three debut novels in this second collage. Denise Heinze's The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew (Blackstone, Sept.), the first of these, takes its name from the historical woman who married two Governors of Virginia in the early 17th century. Confessions in B-Flat by the prolific Donna Hill (Sideways, Nov.), is a love story taking place in New York during the 1960s civil rights movement and Vietnam War years. For The Deadly Hours (Sourcebooks, Sept.) newest in a growing collection of multi-author collaborative projects, Susanna Kearsley, C.S. Harris, Anna Lee Huber, and Christine Trent trace the story of a mysterious gold watch and those it affects, beginning in the 18th century.

Two more debuts: Asha Lemmie's Fifty Words for Rain (Dutton, Sept.) has the unique viewpoint of a young girl of African-American and Japanese heritage in post-WWII Japan, and her search for her rightful place in a world that continually rejects her. The Company Daughters (Bookouture, Oct.) by Samantha Rajaram journeys along with its two heroines on their voyage from Amsterdam to marry settlers in the Dutch East Indies in the early 17th century. And, last alphabetically, Alice Randall's Black Bottom Saints (Amistad, Aug.) is set amid Detroit's historic Black Bottom neighborhood in the 1930s-40s and centers on the stars of this locale's famous art and culture scene.