Interview with Susan Coventry, author of the biographical novel Till Taught By Pain

Within historical fiction, Susan Coventry's Till Taught By Pain offers something unique: the little-known story of an accomplished and historically important American surgeon, the talented nurse he married, and how their relationship was affected by his hidden cocaine addiction. William Steward Halsted, a native New Yorker born in 1852, was a founding professor at John Hopkins Hospital.  His wife Caroline Hampton, niece of a Confederate general, broke away from images of traditional Southern womanhood by training as a nurse up north.

Seen through the viewpoints of both husband and wife, this biographical novel is a fascinating story of their individual struggles and their partnership, all informed by the author's firsthand knowledge of medicine (she's a retired physician) and primary source research into her characters and the era. I read it avidly from start to finish. I was glad to have the opportunity to ask Susan some questions about her work.  Hope you'll enjoy reading this interview!

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Dr. William Stewart Halsted is no longer a household name, although Till Taught by Pain makes a convincing case that he should be. What had you learned about Halsted in med school, and what spurred you to look into his personal life in more depth?

We were taught very little history of medicine in medical school, so I’d never even heard his name until my pathology residency. While I was learning about breast cancer, someone made a passing reference to the Halsted method of radical mastectomy, mainly to point out that it had been discredited. It was a drastic and mutilating surgery, and I was given the impression that it was something of a crime committed against women way back in the past. But it’s really more nuanced than that. It was one step along a very long and ongoing path to treating cancer.

My interest in Halsted was sparked while reading a dual biography of Freud and Halsted, who both became addicted to cocaine while experimenting with the drug for medical purposes. (I’d initially picked up the book because I was curious about Freud’s addiction.) There is an anecdote in the book about how Halsted “invented” rubber gloves for his OR nurse (Caroline) who suffered a terrible dermatitis from the chemicals used for hand washing before surgery. It’s presented as a prelude to their courtship. That’s what grabbed my attention. The more I looked into this “Gloves of Love” story, the more complicated and fascinating both he and she became.

Pub. by Regal House (Nov. 4, 2025)

Halsted and Caroline come from very different backgrounds. I appreciated all the detail about their families, and how their upbringings added layers of interest and also complications to their partnership, considering they married just 25 years after the Civil War ended. Had you been interested in writing about late 19th-century America before conceptualizing this book?

It was more the other way around. I wasn’t specifically looking to write in this time and place, but Halsted’s story drew me into it. Their lifetimes spanned the Civil War through WWI, so there was a lot to digest. I had some built-in support from my husband, who is a historian focusing on the 19th century U.S., and my son, who is a high school history teacher, but writing in this time period taught me how little I knew about it. Fortunately, the research phase was fascinating, and I came out with way more interest in and knowledge of turn-of-the-20th century U.S. history than I had going in.

How did you choose the viewpoints, telling Halsted’s story in third person and Caroline’s in first?

I initially wrote the book from two third-person viewpoints. I’m much more comfortable writing in third person. But Caroline’s story was overwhelmed by Halsted’s, and she seemed to fade into the background. My wonderful developmental editor suggested switching to first person for both, but I couldn’t put myself convincingly in the head of a man in the throes of addiction and withdrawal. I needed him in third person. However, I found that writing Caroline’s viewpoint in the first person pulled her forward and brought her out of Halsted’s shadow.

The novel explores the notion of complicity and secrecy when it comes to addiction, and how Caroline – and Halsted’s close associates, too – acted to hide his drug dependence. Do you feel Caroline hasn’t been given sufficient credit in terms of ensuring her husband’s successful career? How complex was it to research a topic that was kept quiet during Halsted’s lifetime?

I definitely feel Caroline hasn’t been given enough credit! There isn’t much of substance about her in the historical record, but she was accounted to be a smart woman, able to hold her own with her brilliant husband. One problem I had researching her is that she is seen largely through the eyes of a few of his colleagues who considered her odd and anti-social, and that characterization has been carried forward as fact.

I don’t see how Halsted could have reached such heights and kept his addiction secret without Caroline’s support. Of course, that begs the question: should she have enabled his drug abuse? He was an impaired physician. Even she (in my fictional account) questions this.

It is complicated to research something that is currently accepted as true but that wasn’t common knowledge at the time of the story’s setting. Given how closely guarded a secret his addiction was, I do wonder how many people knew or suspected. It was fascinating to see how the secret was covered up and then uncovered over time. In letters exchanged by his colleagues, there are sometimes tantalizing hints, but no one comes out and names the problem. In a biography written shortly after his death, it is acknowledged that he had some trouble with cocaine early in his career, but it’s emphasized that he had completely recovered by the time he moved to Baltimore. Then as now, there is stigma attached to addiction so I imagine friends and colleagues who suspected it tried hard not to believe it. The question remains: Does this taint his legacy or make him more human, more complex?

author Susan Coventry

What are some favorite facts and stories you learned about from research into archival records?

My favorite finds in the archives are personal letters. Halsted is remembered as a reserved, private man with a biting wit. Yet in his letters, he is very polite and often playful. Perhaps even flirtatious. I have a letter that Harvey Cushing (another giant in the history of surgery) wrote to his fiancée, describing the aftermath of a carriage accident that injured Caroline, where he inserts a description of “the delicious coffee I’ve told you about and some bread and white unsalted butter. All very Halstedian.” To me, that comment demonstrated the admiration of a young mentee mixed with his amusement over his mentor’s quirks. I can “hear” him talking to his Katie, poking fun at the great surgeon. The young always feel slightly superior to their elders, don’t they?

Caroline’s letters were the most important to me, because they were revealing of her personality, and that was hard to get at otherwise. Very few of her letters are extant, unfortunately, and nothing touches on her husband’s addiction. But there are early letters to her aunt where she discusses her upcoming marriage that give a good glimpse into her state of mind. And my favorites are the rare surviving letters to Halsted, written when she was at their summer home in North Carolina while he was still back in Baltimore. She gives him day-to-day news. She gives him very explicit instructions on where to find the spaghetti she wants him to bring with him when he comes down. And in one, she adds a P.S., “Thank you for the candy. Don’t send anymore.” That really warmed my heart, to think of him sending her candy while they were apart, and her joking response that she shouldn’t be eating it. None of these anecdotal finds were earthshaking, but the big events of Halsted’s life, and Caroline’s, can be found in the biographies and histories of Johns Hopkins Hospital. For a historical novelist, the archives present a way to discover the personal side of the protagonists, and that helps to bring them to life.

You’ve written one YA novel about a 12th-century royal woman, a Regency romance series, and now literary biographical fiction set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which makes for a really interesting publishing journey! How did this come about – did your interests change over time, or was it more a matter of finding the right publishers for the subjects you wanted to write about? Do you have any suggestions for authors who want to explore a variety of styles and subjects in their historical fiction?

My interests changed over time.

Way, way back when I started writing, I was deeply into medieval history, particularly that of France and England. I didn’t intend to write a YA novel, but my kids were in their tweens/early teens at the time, so I was reading a lot of YA fiction with them, and that must have influenced the way I wrote.

In the years between the publication of The Queen’s Daughter (2010) and now, I wrote several other manuscripts that are now stuffed away in the drawer, but I came back to writing biographical fiction because I am especially drawn to novels that are firmly grounded in real people and events. At the same time, as a physician who’d been in the field a long time, I found myself more and more interested in the history of medicine. And when I came across Halsted and Caroline, I knew I wanted to write their story.

The romance series was something else entirely. I read romance to relax and escape. When the pandemic hit, I needed that escapism more than ever, so I decided to try writing romance as well as reading it. Counting on Love resulted. It was accepted by Dragonblade, and they publish series, not standalones, so I got to write three more novels to tell the love stories of each of the siblings. I suppose my suggestion for other authors who want to branch out and write in different styles or subgenres is to not chase trends but to write what you love to read. If you do want to take your writing in a different direction altogether, start by reading a lot in that genre or subgenre. And then, go for it!

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Susan Coventry is a retired physician with a lifelong historical fiction obsession. Her first novel, The Queen’ s Daughter, was a YA historical set in the Middle Ages. She has since switched from YA to adult novels and moved on from medieval Europe to the turn-of- the-20th-century U.S. She lives in Louisville, KY with her historian husband, Brad Asher. Visit her website at https://susancoventry.com.

Kelly J. Goshorn's The Undercover Heiress of Brockton, set in 1905 Massachusetts, evokes strength and love amidst tragic events

In 1905 Brockton, Massachusetts, Miss Henrietta Maxwell is a busy, eccentric young woman. The tall, bespectacled daughter of a self-made Bostonian businessman with Brockton roots, she attends upscale garden parties and writes a city society column while living in a Brockton boardinghouse and writing hard-hitting news for the Brockton Enterprise in disguise as “Henry Mason.”

Until now, Etta successfully kept her secret under wraps, but Leo Eriksson, a local fireman, unmasks her identity (literally) after she falls from a tree while investigating corruption and arson—knocking both her and Leo to the ground. Impressed by her intelligence and gumption, Leo agrees to stay quiet about Etta’s clandestine career.

They begin courting, hoping their affection will surmount class barriers, but a devastating industrial accident complicates things. The sensational headlines and cold-hard-facts approach to her reporting make Leo question if she lacks empathy. Also, Etta fends off a rival reporter desperate to out-scoop her.

Goshorn sets her inspirational romance against the backdrop of the Grover Shoe Factory disaster, which killed dozens after the four-story building collapsed and caught fire after a boiler explosion. She transforms this little-known historical incident into a riveting human drama, successfully animating a large cast and illustrating many moments—taken from primary source accounts—of heroic rescue and inescapable tragedy.

Etta and Leo are both caring people whose personalities complement each other, and their journey back to one another is realistically complex (if a bit overlong) as they rely on their Christian faith while working their way out of a big misunderstanding.

Boston and Brockton are 25 miles apart, so it’s unclear why their social circles overlap so much, or how Etta juggles her multiple roles while traveling back and forth. But in all, this is a well-crafted novel, with a hopeful bent, which underscores the importance of industrial safety regulations.

The Grover Shoe Factory, Brockton, before the 1905 explosion
(Public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

Barbour published The Undercover Heiress of Brockton in August, and I reviewed it for August's Historical Novels Review.  Having lived and worked in southeastern Massachusetts, just south of Brockton, for six and a half years, I was excited when I read about the setting.  The Brockton Enterprise had been one of my local newspapers.  I'd never come across mention of the Grover Shoe Factory tragedy before, and the novel certainly puts you right there. It's part of a six-book inspirational romance series called Enduring Hope, each focusing on a different set of historical events.

Historical fiction preview for winter 2026

Looking ahead to the upcoming season, here are a dozen historical novels that caught my attention.

The award-winning Indian author's second novel covers themes of exploration, colonialism, and unexpected human connection in the story of three travelers seeing entry into Tibet in the mid-19th century, a time when it was closed to Europeans.  Random House, January 2026.

Three women travel from Chicago to Jamaica as part of dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham's visit to study the country's dances.  As in her previous historical novels (I've read three), Bryce illuminates episodes from history that deserve more attention. Kensington, February 2026.

Enticingly subtitled "a gothic novel of Old Shanghai," Chang's latest novel is set in Shanghai in 1911 and centers on two young women with secrets, one Chinese and one American, brought together in an ornate mansion with its own shadowy past.  William Morrow, February 2026.

Chaput writes historical fiction about badass women.  Her latest is a dual-timeline novel about an art historian in contemporary times and a female courtesan in 17th-century Venice who crafted illicit erotic art.  She Writes, February 2026.

The dark power of witchcraft meets the story of the Filles du Roi, young women sent to New France to become settlers' brides, in this debut novel set in 1670s Quebec, and written by a CBC Radio producer.  Simon & Schuster, January 2026.

A young woman in 1940s North Carolina finds herself trapped in an institution after being reported for supposed promiscuity, and finds she's hardly alone in her captivity there. A timely novel about the unjust repression of women, from a prolific author of Southern fiction (including The Saints of Swallow Hill).  Kensington, January 2026.

A British children's author's first work of adult historical fiction, When We Were Divided takes place in northern England, where two sisters find themselves on opposite sides during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Fox & Ink (UK), February 2026.

From a former BBC exec who's written both historical nonfiction (A Royal Experiment) and Austen-themed fiction (The Other Bennet Sister) comes a new novel based on historical figures: Lady Harriet Bessborough, sister of the scandal-prone Duchess of Devonshire, and her own scandalous affair with a younger nobleman. US release from Henry Holt, Jan. 2026.  In the UK, Mantle published it in August 2025.  

Johnson's third historical novel takes place in the aftermath of WWII, revolving around the abandoned children of African American GIs and local German women, and those who sought to help them. 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster, February 2026.

Award-winning Australian author Rose's new novel, her first to be published in the US for some time, involves family secrets, champagne, the French Revolution's aftermath, and a young woman's daring voyage to the other side of the world in the 1830s. It makes me curious how they all connect. Summit/Simon & Schuster, January 2026.

For fans of royal fiction, a pulled-from-history story you may not know. It evokes the time when countess Jacquette Gyldenstolpe fell in love with the heir to the Swedish throne, as well as the fallout from their romance.  She Writes. January 2026.

Unexpected love in unexpected places, as two young women--one on the run from her past, another a Jamaican orphan in a foreign land--fall in love while trying to survive the harsh circumstances of late 18th-century Nova Scotia.  Berkley, February 2026.

A woman alone: Allegra Goodman's Isola

Allegra Goodman’s newest novel shows how life as a young 16th-century noblewoman offers no guarantees. Not a life of wealth, not a prosperous marriage, not even a secure home.

For Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, heiress to a chateau in Périgord in southwestern France, her intended future is swept away after her parents’ early deaths. She’s left dependent on the whims of her guardian, an older male relative who keeps himself at a distance.

Titled after the Italian word for “island,” glimpsed by the protagonist on an Italian map of the New World, Isola is an extraordinary tale of survival. Its plotline emerges from contradictions found in several historical fragments, including an account of the real woman written by Marguerite de Navarre, the king’s sister, in her Heptaméron. This is a literary space where historical fiction can take root and flourish, as it does in this book.

Marguerite’s guardian, maritime explorer Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, was named the Lieutenant General of New France (now Canada) by the king, and he made the unorthodox decision to bring his ward with him on his Atlantic crossing in the 1540s, when he intended to establish a colony and promote the spread of Catholicism. After discovering her relationship with a young man aboard ship, he marooned the couple, along with her elderly servant, on a small island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Years later, Marguerite was rescued, alone, and brought back to France. What must she have endured?

From the first few pages, the modern world dissolves, and we enter the viewpoint of Marguerite, who narrates her story from childhood on. She’s raised by her devoted nurse, Damienne, who always reminds Marguerite about the appropriate conduct for a girl of high birth. Marguerite befriends her teacher’s daughter, Claire D’Artois, whose calm gentility serves as a foil for her impulsiveness and curiosity, and they learn from one another.

We’re alongside Marguerite as she and Claire admire the feminine roles within Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, and we feel her confusion when they’re moved to her chateau’s North Tower after a merchant family arrives as tenants. It seems Roberval, in charge of Marguerite’s finances, has mortgaged her home to cover his own losses.

A responsible guardian would arrange his ward’s respectable marriage with the son of a noble family, but this doesn’t describe Roberval. In him, Goodman creates a multifaceted and frighteningly effective villain. He is enigmatic, unpredictable, difficult to please, and ever-watchful for fault.

So unthinkable (to any rational person) is his decision to abandon Marguerite and the man she loves on a deserted island that we feel a lurch of shock when it happens, even though we know it’s coming. Here she develops skills she’d never thought of doing herself. She draws on newfound strength—and throw off the ladylike behavior that Damienne still insists on—to feed herself and stay alive through the seasons, from the brilliant autumns through the unsparing winters and back out again. Descriptions of the terrible cold and isolation are particularly visceral: “All was white, and all was emptiness.”

Isola isn’t what you’d expect from biographical fiction about a young woman of privilege in the 1500s. “If I was in danger here,” she thinks about her island, “so I had been at home. If I could not choose my dwelling place, that had been the case before.” We can feel her self-awareness grow alongside her strength, and by the time she returns to France, which is as class-conscious as it ever was, she is forever changed by her unusual taste of unrestricted freedom.

Isola was published by The Dial Press/Penguin Random House in February 2025.

A Different Kind of Three-Act Structure: Writing my Main Character as a Child, a Young Woman, and an Elderly Grandmother, an essay by Kristen Loesch

I'm glad to be featuring Kristen Loesch here today with an essay on a unique variation of the multi-period novel.  Her second work of historical fiction, The Hong Kong Widow, is out today from Allison & Busby (and from Berkley in the USA). As a gothic thriller featuring séances and a heroine who can see ghosts, it sounds ideal for this time of year.

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A Different Kind of Three-Act Structure:

Writing my Main Character as a Child, a Young Woman, and an Elderly Grandmother

by Kristen Loesch

In my second novel, The Hong Kong Widow, we meet one character, Mei, at three different periods of her life: As a child growing up in 1930s Shanghai; as a young refugee in 1950s Hong Kong; and as an elderly grandmother in modern-day America.

In each of these three timelines, she has one goal: Seven-year-old Mei in Shanghai wants to find her missing mother. Twenty-something Mei in Hong Kong is hell-bent on revenge, and enters a séance competition at a haunted house hosted by the wife of the man who once destroyed her life. Elderly Mei in America wants the truth about the final night of that long-ago séance competition to come to light.

Pub. by Allison & Busby (Oct. 2025)

The best feeling, when you’re reading a dual or multi-timeline historical novel, is when the narratives come together seamlessly. Not only do they make sense, presented as one story, but you get the feeling that actually, they couldn’t exist without one another. Ever since reading my first Kate Morton novel, I have been drawn to that kind of historical fiction: Usually one timeline is contemporary, in the POV of a present-day protagonist, and the other is historical, but I’ve increasingly seen multi-timeline novels in which all the timelines are historical, set at different points in the past. Either way, when this is done well, it’s breathtaking; when it’s done badly, the reader ends up more deeply invested in one timeline and one protagonist over the other. The writer, therefore, takes a risk by splitting up the narrative in this way, in the hopes of achieving that perfect plait, one timeline woven neatly into the next, all the way to the end. It is certainly what I hoped to achieve in my debut novel, The Porcelain Doll.

But in The Hong Kong Widow, all three timelines are written from the perspective of the same character. And although Mei is the same person across all three timelines, in many ways she’s also a very different person. (It’s almost like I was trying to make things harder on myself!)

When I first read Emma Donoghue’s Room, I was struck by the storytelling power of a young child’s perspective, and I knew that I would one day want to try it myself. Writing Mei as a child was an eye-opening experience for me as a writer. Although Little Mei is growing up in 1930s China, on the eve of the Japanese invasion, and her family life is no less tumultuous, I wanted her to have a wondrous innocence about her, and a quirky sense of humor. I wanted her to notice things that other people wouldn’t. I wanted her to be open and trusting and vulnerable, but also incredibly strong. I thought it was going to be so much more difficult than it was: As it turned out, Little Mei has such a distinctive voice, such a unique way of looking at the world, that whenever I wrote from her perspective, it felt effortless; it simply flowed. I never had to stop and wonder: What would this character be feeling right now? Or why does this character actually want this; why are they doing this? (I did, however, try to be careful with the vocabulary she used!)

Young Woman Mei was the greatest challenge.

In the 1950s, Mei is no longer quirky and innocent; she is lost and traumatized. As a character, she is in tremendous pain, and this pain clouds her judgement, her perspective, her every thought. She wants revenge, but she’s never considered what that revenge actually means, or what she might do afterwards. This timeline also contains the majority of the spooky, supernatural happenings in the novel; this is Mei at her most haunted, literally and figuratively. To reflect the fact that she’s largely forgotten who she is, I decided to write her in the third person. (Little Mei and elderly Mei are both written in the first person.) My aim was not only to show how far removed she is from her true self, because she is consumed by pain and hatred, but also to help the reader differentiate more easily between timelines!

Elderly Mei, who is a mother and a grandmother in 2015 Seattle, had to be both a combination of these two previous versions of Mei, but she also had to be more than that. In a way, elderly Mei is more like Little Mei; she knows who she is and she’s comfortable with who she is. She isn’t defined by her own pain, the way that 1950s Mei is. She’s moved on. But if anything, she’s moved on too far. She’s repressed her memories of the past. She refuses to believe that anything that is painful could be worth revisiting. She’s in denial of a large part of her own history, and has strived unsuccessfully to pretend that it doesn’t even exist. So while I wanted elderly Mei to come across as wise, and experienced, and self-aware, I also wanted her to need something, to be missing something, to have her own journey to embark upon.

I’m not sure I will ever write another novel the way I wrote The Hong Kong Widow. I’m not sure there will ever be another protagonist quite like Mei. The structural choices I made for this book presented a unique challenge, and a unique sense of accomplishment at the end. I would love to hear from any readers out there: Which version of Mei did you prefer? Which one spoke to you the most? And why do you think that was?

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Kristen Loesch holds a BA in History, as well as a Master’s degree in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her debut historical novel, The Porcelain Doll, was shortlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award and was a finalist for the Edgar Award. She lives in Switzerland. 

Elizabeth A. Tucker's The Pale Flesh of Wood is a mesmerizing American family saga

In the northern California hills in 1953, seven-year-old Lyla Hawkins nervously climbs her grandmother’s live oak to hang a tire swing from its heavy branches, having been encouraged—then bullied—into the task by her father, Charles, a charming and troubled WWII vet. Three years later, Charles hangs himself from the rope, leaving his family distraught, all wondering what motivated him and whether they bear any blame.

Pub. by She Writes Press (2025)

The subject matter admittedly sounds grim. But in her debut novel, a saga spanning a total of fifty years on both sides of the tragedy, Tucker creates such intimacy with her characters to make readers deeply invested in their lives. Each person becomes sympathetic and challenging, in turn, depending on whether we’re seeing them from within or from the outside.

Caroline, Lyla’s grandmother, is a tall, imposing woman unforgiving of weakness, which included her son’s decision to go AWOL overseas. Louise, Caroline’s daughter-in-law, misses her late husband desperately, and as Lyla grows up, their relationship becomes fraught. And while Charles adores his daughter, the personal demons spurring his recklessness get in the way.

Tucker is superb at writing scenes that evoke emotion. Charles’s post-Thanksgiving drive with Lyla to the coast on the mountain highway, radio blasting and wind rushing through their hair, starts out exciting but soon turns terrifying. Always aware of Caroline’s meanness, especially toward her dad, young Lyla knows she’ll be punished for stealing Caroline’s cherished porcelain doll—which provokes considerable suspense about whether she’ll be caught.

Because of the close focus on family dynamics, the narrative falters when this connection is broken. We learn about some important life events via offhand comments long after they occurred, which feels disconcerting. Despite these occasional slips, the story mesmerizes, leaving characters that remain with us long after it ends.

I originally reviewed this book from an ePub copy for the Historical Novels Review's August issue. It's been a few months since I read it, and multiple scenes still stick in my mind. Adult novels seen partly from a child's perspective don't always work for me, though this one did.  I also love the cover design.

Tamar Shapiro's Restitution delves into secrets, exile, and reunification in a family story about late 20th-century German history

For most of 1989, my husband was living in Germany, working for a private company after years of being stationed with the military there. He returned home to the US two days before the Berlin Wall came down. “I missed it by that much,” he told me, imagining the wild party that spilled through the streets. There had been obvious rumblings of political change earlier, but nobody knew exactly when it would happen.

For those whose lives it touched, November 9, 1989, has become a day of flashbulb memories, one marking the beginning of the Iron Curtain’s dismantling – a time of elation and the celebration of freedom. For the family at the center of Tamar Shapiro’s gripping debut Restitution, whose Oma and Opa (grandmother and grandfather) had fled East Germany for the West in the '50s, the date is indeed joyful, as well as devastating for more personal reasons.

The countries’ reintegration also brings complications for these people, and the novel kept me following how and why they arose.

The story is narrated by Kate Porter beginning in 2005, as she and her husband and daughter travel from central Illinois to New England to visit her brother, Martin, after fifteen years’ estrangement. In addition to the time around reunification, he recalls the childhood summers they'd spent at their grandparents’ home at the Bodensee (Lake Constance); the shock of their Opa’s death in ’73; and a visit to a lawyer in 1991 that led to the siblings’ long mutual silence. Another splintering in a family with a long history of separations and secrets.

In July 1990, with the borders reopened, the family members decide to return to Grimma, the former East German town where their late grandparents had lived. Their Opa was a natural storyteller, but none of his stories, oddly, involved their original home. Which, as they learn after they arrive, has been occupied by a middle-aged couple, Greta Schultz and her brusque husband, Klaus, for decades.

Afterward, Martin lets them know there are procedures for them to possibly reclaim their long-lost property. Should they?

About half the novel takes place in the 1970s and prior, between Kate’s memories and the recollections of her mother and aunt. The clear prose is unshowy yet thoughtfully worded. The many shifts in timeframe are handled smoothly, although there are so many that whenever I had to take a break from reading, I needed to re-orient myself by checking the year(s) at the start of each chapter. The German settings are so precise, also, that I wondered why the Porters’ Illinois home city went unnamed. (Based on landmarks familiar to me, they’re from the Champaign area.)

Fateful decisions lead to terrible secrets, and how and why they’re kept – and later revealed – says much about these characters. Kate and Martin’s sibling relationship, especially how patterns formed in childhood can be either nostalgic or vexing, feels honest and at times painfully real. Like Kate, I often found Martin irritating, but he became more understandable with greater context.

Anyone who enjoys interlocking mysteries mixed with family dynamics and history’s impact on individuals – both visible and not – will find much worth pondering. Restitution is a moving chronicle of the reverberation of choices over time, and of the importance of recognizing the past while reuniting divided countries and divided lives.

Restitution will be published next week by Regal House; I read it from a NetGalley copy.

Morgan Jerkins' Zeal is an engrossing, unpredictable story of Black love, family, and freedom

Zeal is an engrossing tale of a heartfelt love born during slavery, and how the couple’s descendants have the potential to embody their forebears’ greatest dreams—if they can get past some messy obstacles.

The novel opens on a moonlit evening in Manhattan, as Oliver Benjamin and Ardelia Gibbs celebrate their engagement with relatives and friends at an elegant party. With his parents’ blessing, Oliver gifts Ardelia a precious heirloom: a poetic, heartfelt letter dated October 1865, written by his ancestor Tirzah Ambrose to her beloved, Harrison, from whom she was separated during wartime.

Over the next 150 years, their families’ stories unfold, beginning just after the Civil War. Wearing a Union soldier’s blue uniform, Harrison returns to the plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, where they had been enslaved, only to discover the site in ruins and Tirzah nowhere to be found. Now residing in Shreveport, Louisiana, Tirzah has a kind preacher looking out for her welfare, but she never gives up hope of reuniting with Harrison.

Jerkins is a superb storyteller who nimbly uses a vast swath of American history for her canvas, from the Freedmen’s Bureaus that supported the formerly enslaved, the Black Codes that legalized discrimination, the Great Migration, and much more… leading through the isolation of the Covid pandemic. Revealing specifics of the plot risks spoilers; the novel is best experienced through the author’s own words.

Covering impressive geographic and emotional ground, she explores her strong-minded characters’ choices as they pursue romantic liaisons and the freedom to live as they wish, sometimes getting in their own way. The trauma they encounter is laid bare on the page, and the love they share echoes even more strongly. An unforgettable story of ancestral legacies and the long journey to understand and overcome them.

Zeal was published by Harper in the US, Canada, and the UK earlier this year. My review originally appeared in the Historical Novels Review.  If you're in the US, you can get a copy on Kindle for $1.99 during the month of September.  It's well worth it!

Stitching Together the Novel Research, an essay by Barbara Stark-Nemon, author of Isabela's Way

I love how Barbara Stark-Nemon's essay about historical research incorporates embroidery, both thematically and literally.  Her new novel, Isabela's Way, is published tomorrow.

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Stitching Together the Novel Research

Barbara Stark-Nemon

Anyone who knows me well has learned that I love novel research, and in the course of ten years of doing author talks and interviews, one of the most frequent questions I’m asked is how and where I conduct my book research. My new novel, Isabela’s Way, takes place in early 17th-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, and required extensive research involving travel, reading and experiential learning.

Isabela, my main character, is a young embroideress in Portugal, and her embroidery becomes crucial to the novel’s plot. A dear friend gifted me with a book that grabbed my attention and informed the embroidery elements in the novel. Its title alone intrigued me —Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, by Clare Hunter. 

Hunter’s book tells the story of embroidery in Europe, and traces the development of stitchery entwined over centuries with the history of the people and places where embroidery was cultivated. It also tells of the plants that found their way into fabrics, dyes, thread and decoration starting in the 10th century. Inevitably the history of embroiderers became the history of the women who embroidered, the perfect background information I needed to move forward with Isabela’s Way.

Women used needlework to claim their place in the world, “stitching down political comment or feminist complaint, documenting their experience through domestic sewing.” During the 16th and 17th centuries, “embroidery was one of the most precious forms of …communication, valued as a transmitter of intellect and emotion - when it was a conversation between people and their God, the church and its congregation, ruler and subjects. Needlework had power and embroiderers had value.”

A writer knows when she’s found a deep source of material when every page requires notes! I was particularly interested, in Threads of Life, in the story of Mary Queen of Scots, whose complicated life between Scotland and France and her sovereignty fight with Elizabeth I of England is a colorful part of history. Mary’s son James became king of England during the time my novel takes place. Hunter tells us that Mary was an expert embroideress, an art she learned in France where embroidery had moved from monasteries to castles and into home production. For all the years that Mary was kept captive because of her threat to the English crown, she embroidered coded messages in gifts of clothing, in her own ensembles and in banners displayed in royal and public settings. These beautifully stitched items subtly reflected her demands to be freed, her devout Catholic faith, her political rivalry with Elizabeth and her romantic interests. I borrowed this concept and adapted it to Isabela’s refugee story.

Another form of research I used heavily for Isabela’s Way involved trips to museums on three continents to view early 17th-century paintings and textiles. I wanted to see what clothing and other embroidered textiles were represented, and when possible, to see the textiles themselves. I also wanted a sense of rooms in 17th-century homes, furnishings, cooking and eating implements and landscapes. I haunted the old historic parts of the European cities and countryside where my story took place, imagining Isabela stitching her way with the sights and smells of the local landscapes.

Because I like many forms of fiber art—I quilt, knit, crochet and sew—I was drawn to the study of embroidery personally, and decided to “try my hand” at it! My wonderful book cover designer incorporated embroidery-like images into the cover for Isabela’s Way and (perhaps unwisely) I determined to recreate that cover as an embroidered piece. That decision opened up a whole new world of local embroiderers, international organizations with vast stitch banks and textile history over hundreds of years.

Stitching the book cover has been a challenge, a joy, and a meditation on slow art. I newly appreciate the skill required to do embroidery well, the complexity of the design process, and the exacting patience embroiderers must embrace. I have experienced (along with occasional frustration!) the quiet thrill of bringing color and texture to an outlined design. Finally, it’s been a delightful way to deepen my understanding of my main character, Isabela!

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Barbara Stark-Nemon is the award-winning author of short stories, essays, the historical novel Even in Darkness, and the contemporary novel Hard Cider. Her historical novel Isabela’s Way is published in September 2025. Barbara lives, writes, swims, cycles, and does fiber art in Ann Arbor and Northport, MI.

Stephanie Cowell's The Man in the Stone Cottage reflects on the creative life of the Brontë sisters

Stephanie Cowell’s latest novel to explore the inner lives of artistic people from the past reveals the passions of the Brontë sisters, primarily Emily and Charlotte. These talented siblings have figured in many unique works of fiction. They all died tragically young, and the best literary interpretations grant us the wish that they might live again on the page. As this one does.

Mystery surrounds the title character. In 1846, on one of her regular walks through the moorlands of west Yorkshire, Emily meets a shepherd from the Outer Hebrides living in a stone cottage which had previously been in ruins. Affable and kind, he doesn’t much resemble Heathcliff, the brooding, mercurial hero she invents later on, though he has his own bittersweet story of loneliness and exile that has the air of a Celtic legend.

Their meetings are at first infrequent, but memorable, and Emily holds them secret. Is he real, or did she wish him into being? Years after Emily’s death, having long suspected there was a man in her sister’s life, Charlotte find traces of their relationship and seeks out the truth. The shepherd remains secondary to the main story of the sisters’ lives, but his presence is emblematic of the novel’s themes.

The characters are vividly drawn, and their emotional depth, combined with judicious choices on which scenes to depict over the novel’s nine-year span, gives this fairly short novel (260pp) considerable dimension. We follow Charlotte from her heartbreak over unrequited love through years of poverty at the Haworth parsonage, the Brontës’ beloved home, and her unexpected fame when her authorship of Jane Eyre becomes known. Emily is intensely private, a wild spirit who loves roaming outdoors, though she doesn’t neglect her domestic chores.

Their brother Branwell’s self-destruction over romantic failure and the weight of self-imposed expectations troubles Emily greatly due to their closeness. Anne Brontë describes Branwell aptly in a letter, saying of him that “he wants to step into greatness as if he opened a tower door.” With their stubborn father nearly blind from cataracts, refusing help, and in denial about their penury, Charlotte knows it’s up to her and her sisters to support their family.

The small village of Haworth and its environs are beautiful and bleak, an atmospheric character in itself, and one with great influence. “She took the dull brown of the moor in winter and the endless loneliness of the exiled and dead and blended them in ink and paper,” we learn about Emily, seeing how her characters preoccupy her mind wherever she is. Here and elsewhere in this immersive biographical novel, the creative power of the imagination continues to echo.

The Man in the Stone Cottage will be out from Regal House next week.

When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class, and the Stories We Cling To, a guest post by RJ Verity

Welcome to author RJ Verity, who's here today with a post about the role of the cinema in early 20th-century society: the background to her debut historical novel.

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When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class,
and the Stories We Cling To

by RJ Verity

For many working-class families in the early 20th century, the cinema wasn’t just an escape. It was the first place they saw lives larger than their own reflected back at them—the flicker of possibility projected onto a fragile strip of celluloid.

In Britain, by the 1920s nearly every industrial city and mining town had its own picture house. A visit to the cinema was a ritual, a highlight of the week. The historian A. J. P. Taylor once described interwar cinema-going as “the essential social habit of the age,” and it’s easy to see why. The bioscope halls and “electric palaces” that sprang up across the country became not just entertainment venues, but communal spaces where hopes, fears, and identities could be rehearsed in the dark.

Across the Atlantic, Americans were making similar weekly pilgrimages. In the 1900s and 1910s, nickelodeons—five-cent picture houses packed with immigrant and working-class audiences—sprang up in cities and coal towns alike. By the 1920s, they gave way to the great “movie palaces,” which promised marble foyers, chandeliers, and velvet seats. Yet crucially, ticket prices stayed low enough for miners, millworkers, and shop assistants to keep attending. Palaces blurred class lines: for a dime or two, ordinary people could step into surroundings as sumptuous as any opera house. The geography differed, but the impulse was the same—to sit together in the dark and dream.

Writers have long recognised this dual role of cinema—as both escape and mirror. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) gave audiences the bittersweet spectacle of resilience born out of poverty. Greta Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1930), was advertised with the tagline “Garbo talks!”—a reminder that cinema was forever reinventing itself, just as its audiences dreamed of doing.

Literary fiction, too, has mined the emotional charge of movie-going. Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (1966), set in a fading Texas town, captures the poignancy of a cinema on the brink of closure, its light dimming along with the community’s prospects. Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions (2002) meditates on the mystery of a vanished silent film star and the haunting power of moving images to outlive their makers. Julian Barnes, in The Noise of Time (2016), turns to music and totalitarianism rather than film, yet wrestles with the same question: how art survives when lives are precarious.

Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) and A. J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down (1935) were later adapted for the screen, bringing industrial hardship and working-class lives directly into cinemas. These adaptations remind us that film was never only about fantasy—it was also about recognition.

Children in front of movie theatre, Alpine, Texas (public domain)

Virginia Woolf, in her 1926 essay The Cinema, caught something of this strange alchemy. “We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves,” she wrote, marvelling at how moving pictures created visions both intimate and uncanny. Woolf sensed that cinema could show truths not easily told in words: how communities fracture and endure, how individuals imagine themselves anew.

That imaginative leap is what fascinates me as a novelist. My debut historical novel, Poole of Light (September 2025), begins in 1913 with a boy from a colliery town who comes across his first picture house. For Jem, the cinema is revelation: a doorway into stories that feel both impossibly distant and tantalisingly close. Across the decades that follow—through world wars, new technologies, and his own battles with identity—the cinema offers him not just escape, but a way of piecing together who he might become.

"Where the boys spend their money" (photo of St. Louis, Missouri; public domain)

 
I don’t think Jem’s story is unique to fiction. For countless people in Britain and America, the weekly trip to the pictures was about more than amusement. It was a way of locating oneself in a rapidly changing world. Sitting in the dark, you might imagine being someone else; you might imagine your town, your family, your class differently. The silver screen shimmered with reinvention.

That’s why early cinema continues to draw me back as both writer and reader. It’s not only nostalgia for the glamour of Chaplin or Garbo, but the recognition that behind the laughter and tears sat working people from every walk of life, grasping for meaning. Stories were sustenance. And the cinema, in its golden age, was where light itself became a form of survival.

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Short Bio

RJ Verity is the author of Poole of Light, her debut historical novel set against the rise of cinema in early 20th-century England, and the first in The Poole Legacy series. Her writing explores memory, class, and the stories that shape us.

Poole of Light launches across all Amazon marketplaces on 16 September 2025, with the eBook available now for pre-order: https://mybook.to/poole-of-light

Discover more at https://www.rjverity.com.

The Gatsby Gambit takes a fun alternative history/mystery spin on Fitzgerald's classic novel

At the outset of Anderson-Wheeler’s freshly imagined debut, all the principals of The Great Gatsby are alive and well, years after their initial gathering. With their house under renovation, Daisy and Tom Buchanan are bunking at Jay Gatsby’s West Egg mansion on Long Island, along with Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker. Under her boorish husband’s nose, Daisy and Gatsby are still secretly carrying on. Their marriage in tatters, the Wilsons have moved out to New Jersey. Wait, what?

Everyone’s personalities fit the expected mold, but this is clearly an alternate history spinoff to Fitzgerald’s classic. My choice to pick up this novel soon after a Gatsby reread probably wasn’t well-timed. Once I reoriented myself, the plot became an enjoyable “what if” mystery that whipped up new scenarios for familiar characters. 

published by Viking, 2025

In this version, Greta Gatsby, Jay’s younger sibling, returns home to West Egg after graduating from finishing school, hoping for a relaxing summer, only to find her beloved home overcrowded with her wealthy brother’s socialite friends. One of the maids sees a mysterious figure lurking around, and the next morning, a body is found on Gatsby’s boat, an apparent suicide.

Considerable shock ensues, but only the victim’s mother seems upset. The police inspector considers it an open-and-shut case. Greta feels something’s amiss, and her sleuthing proves fertile. She also develops a firmer spine while interviewing servants and seeking clues in the seedy Bowery neighborhood, a place no properly raised young lady should go. 

For readers who adore Fitzgerald’s subtle style, a novel where Daisy explains her feelings may be too much. If you can set aside the comparisons and the occasional off-note Britishisms, you may appreciate this cheeky homage as a fun Jazz Age escape with a pointed look at wealth and class advantages.

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The Gatsby Gambit was published by Viking in April in the US and Canada; Renegade Books is the UK publisher.  I reviewed it originally for the Historical Novel Society.

I'd reread The Great Gatsby over the summer, after seeing countless articles about the book's centenary. Then I got an email about the "author's edition" being on Kindle sale.  First time I'd read it in full since 9th-grade English class, and I dare say I didn't appreciate the high quality of the writing back then.

The novel's been in the public domain since 2021, and there are several other recent sequels, spinoffs, and reimaginings appearing this year.  The Great Mann by Kyra Davis Lurie (Crown, June) is a Gatsby retelling amidst the Black elite in postwar L.A., and Allyson Reedy's Mrs. Wilson's Affair (Union Square, Oct.) switches the viewpoint to Tom Buchanan's mistress. For more in this vein, Goodreads has a list of retellings, sequels, and prequels, and I just added the three abovementioned books to it.  Finally, I didn't realize this until after I'd finished the book, but "Greta" is a clever anagram.

On Isabella Street takes a Canadian perspective on the social turmoil of the late '60s and the Vietnam War

In May 1967, Toronto pulses with activity fueled by the counterculture movement, and Sassy Rankin soaks it up while attending the massive love-in at Queen’s Park. A talented singer with natural confidence, Sassy hasn’t fully squared her love for the hippie life with her father’s status as a successful realtor (who pays for her apartment) and her brother Joey’s unfathomable decision to “fight another country’s war” alongside U.S. Marines in Vietnam.

Dr. Marion Hart, a psychiatrist at the Ontario Hospital, observes the streetside excitement from a safe distance. She worries about her patients’ fate, foreseeing they’ll become homeless or violent after they’re released into the community as deinstitutionalization policies take effect. Over time, she comes to care especially for one of them, Daniel Neumann, puzzled why a man haunted by his Vietnam memories could long to rejoin his fellow soldiers “in country.”

Sassy and Marion live in the same building at 105 Isabella Street and aren’t much alike, but through in-depth conversations, they become close as sisters. On Isabella Street is a warm, authentic portrait of their unusual friendship, and so much more.

In this well-paced novel, Graham handles an array of social issues with exceptional clarity and appropriate depth: workplace sexism, family expectations, the presence of American war resisters, urban gentrification, and how returning Vietnam veterans test the city’s emotional fabric. She creates realistic links between the Greatest Generation and their children, showing how WWII’s effects still linger.

Through Daniel, Marion comes to understand the concept of wartime brotherhood while her admiration for him increases, while Sassy, carefree yet immature, learns responsibility and finds new application for her people skills.

Despite occasionally overused slang, the story carefully balances its nostalgic period vibe with the raw truth about war. As the plot takes unforeseen turns, the characters surprise both the reader and themselves with their growth and resilience.

On Isabella Street was published by Simon & Schuster in Canada and the US in April. This review was written originally for the Historical Novel Society.  This is the first novel of Genevieve Graham's that I've read, and I'm looking forward to reading others.  Most of her novels (this is the 13th) focus on various aspects of Canadian history. The publisher recommends it to fans of Kristin Hannah's The Women, and I agree.

Tatiana de Rosnay's The House I Loved evokes a 19th-century French city's transformation and trauma

Can a novel make us nostalgic for a place we've never been? With her third English-language release, an uncomplicated story brimming with homespun details, Tatiana de Rosnay presents a convincing case. Nearly every sentence evokes the appeal of mid-19th-century Paris, the city she clearly loves, and her empathy for the citizens whose homes and dreams were obliterated by the march of progress.

The premise of The House I Loved is laid out in stark black lines before the first page is turned. The map on the endpapers depicts the colossal transformation Paris underwent in the 1850s and '60s, the new superimposed upon the old. Under the aegis of Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine, its narrow alleys and crowded medieval buildings were razed to make way for a sanitary, safe and modern metropolis.

These changes were called "embellishments," a horribly inappropriate term in the mind of de Rosnay's angry, strong-minded heroine.

St. Martin's Press (2012)

Rose Bazelet, an aging widow, is distraught that her beloved home on the rue Childebert sits on the planned route for the boulevard Saint-Germain – and she intends to take a stand. Hiding in her freezing basement long after her neighbours have moved away, she stays put, dependent on the provisions a rag-picker scavenges and brings her. In these pathetic conditions, she writes a long letter to her adored late husband, Armand. Interspersed are notes addressed to her by friends and family.

The epistolary form can be a forced kind of storytelling, with the writer telling the recipient things he already knows for the reader's benefit, but Rose's touching account is as much confession as love letter; she wants to unburden herself of long-held secrets.

Charles Marville, Haussmann's official photographer, recorded her district and others for posterity before they were demolished, but Rose describes images much more vibrant than any black-and-white photos can provide. Her mind's eye roams around her close-knit neighbourhood and through every room, and she expresses her remembrances in lavish detail: the enticing smells of the market; the green-fringed chair of her kindly mother-in-law, Odette; the elegant flower shop run by her renter, Alexandrine, her closest friend.

Rose sees her home as a refuge from a difficult childhood, and it also shelters her during street riots against the Bourbon monarchy; her tale explains her understandable loyalty to it and her fury at the men who enforce its destruction.

De Rosnay has said that she wrote in longhand, by candlelight, to capture the rhythms of yesteryear. Her technique seems to have worked. Rose's leisurely paced world is one our technology-based society wouldn't recognize, a time when ordinary Parisians passed winter evenings stitching embroidery and playing dominoes, and she illustrates it with care.

But: "I know that bringing back the past is never a peaceful process," Rose writes, and she also endured many sorrows, including Armand's early-onset dementia. She rarely has a kind word for her grown daughter – which shows her least sympathetic side – and she hints at a decades-old tragedy involving her "little one."

This episode is teased out to the ultimate degree. While somewhat easy to guess, the devastating reveal goes far in explaining Rose's decision (and state of mind, it should be added). In the end, whether her stubbornness is admirable or pitiable – or both – is left for us to interpret.

De Rosnay's Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept, international bestsellers both, tell of painful secrets from the past re-emerging in the present. While incorporating this same theme, The House I Loved also shows the past and the future in a violent clash, a city's trauma made deeply personal. Unlike the author's earlier books, it is more domestic than dramatic, but this slim and perceptive diversion has an unhurried charm of its own.

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This review was originally written for the Globe & Mail.  It hasn't appeared on the blog before, and the online version is paywalled.  My initial idea was to post it here for Women in Translation month, but I've since remembered that De Rosnay, who was born in Paris and is of Franco-British parentage, wrote this novel in English!  Still a good book worth highlighting, though. In a recent (June 2025) essay for LitHub, she discusses how she decides to choose one language over another, and the weirdness of reading someone else's French translation of her English-language novel, since she wasn't permitted to adapt it herself even though she's bilingual.  Her latest historical novel is Blonde Dust, about the unusual friendship between Marilyn Monroe and a chambermaid at her Reno hotel.

Between 2010 and 2012, I wrote eight book reviews for the newspaper, and having a platform that large was a unique and eye-opening experience. I got emails from almost everyone I knew in Canada when my first review ran in print.  I also got emails from a few cranky people I didn't know who felt compelled to tell me how wrong my opinion was, but it was good to see readers engaging with them. I'm not Canadian (though have family there and am descended from Canadians!) but decided to keep the Canadian spellings in the review above.

Francesca Giannone's The Letter Carrier (trans. from Italian by Elettra Pauletto) reveals a singular woman

It’s the rare woman in 1930s southern Italy who lives by her beliefs and refuses to downplay her intelligence, but Anna Allavena fits this description.

When Anna arrives with her husband, Carlo Greco, from up north to live in his picturesque hometown of Lizzanello with their young son, Roberto, the villagers find her directness off-putting. They call her “outlander,” which sticks over the decades.

Published by Crown (July 2025).  

Anna discusses literature with Carlo’s older brother, Antonio, who can’t help but notice her beauty—to his wife Agata’s dismay. Over the years, as the couples’ children grow up and Carlo opens a prosperous winery, Anna retains her self-possession, and when she takes the post as Lizzanello’s official letter carrier, tongues wag even more.

The admirable character of Anna remains at the center of Francesca Giannone’s saga, an Italian bestseller based on her great-grandmother’s life, and Elettra Pauletto’s English translation makes the words skip along with fluidity. Spanning through 1961, the story is full of characters you’ll feel you know well, plus their fiery affairs, destructive secrets, and love no less deep when it remains unacknowledged.

Carlo’s former paramour, Carmela the seamstress, snubs Anna, blaming her for her own unhappy married life. Anna and her niece Lorenza, Antonio’s daughter, form a close bond, and Antonio remains protective of brother Carlo even as he watches Anna from afar.

Anna is quite an interesting mix of the traditional and unconventional. She loves her husband and cooks scrumptious recipes while she makes connections through her work and befriends others in need—even helping a lonely, illiterate woman correspond with her secret lover, a priest.

In a smart move, Giannone jumps over the war years, though we see the growth of Mussolini’s fascism and the postwar recovery. The storytelling carries you easily, and the vineyard country of southern Italy makes for a lovely backdrop.

The Letter Carrier, an international bestseller, was published in the US by Crown in July.  The UK publisher is Headline Review. I reviewed it originally for the Historical Novel Society.

Historical novels to read in August for Women in Translation Month

For over a decade, August has been celebrated as Women in Translation Month, an observance dedicated to addressing the gender imbalance in world literature selected for translation. Skilled translators can open up new worlds of experiences to an English-language readership, and within historical fiction, translations add global diversity into a genre too often focused on a narrow range of geographic locales. In recent years, it does feel that fewer female-authored historical novels are being translated into English... just my impression.

Here are some novels in translation that I'd reviewed previously, plus some others, that I can recommend.

From Polish: Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob (trans. Jennifer Croft), her magnum opus about Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Jewish messianic figure who courted controversy wherever he went. 

From Spanish: Return to Your Skin by Luz Gabás (trans. Noel Hughes), a time-slip novel set in the Spanish Pyrenees in the present day and the late 16th century. 

Also from Spanish: My Name Is Emilia Del Valle and Violeta (trans. Frances Riddle) and A Long Petal of the Sea (trans. Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson), all by Isabel Allende.  Set, respectively, during the Chilean Civil War, a century of South American life, and the Spanish Civil War (and, later, in Chile).

From French: The Exchange of Princesses by Chantal Thomas (trans. John Cullen), about two lesser-known 18th-century European princesses.

Also from French: Victoire: My Mother's Mother by Maryse Condé (trans. Richard Philcox), which imagines the life of the author's maternal grandmother in late 19th-century Guadaloupe.

From Hebrew: Sarit Yishai-Levi's The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem (trans. Anthony Berris), an early 20th-century saga about the women of a Sephardic Jewish family.  Made into a wonderful Netflix miniseries!

From Russian: Jacob's Ladder by Ludmila Ulitskaya (trans. Polly Gannon), a lengthy epic of Russian-Soviet history.

From Korean: The Court Dancer by Kyung-Sook Shin (trans. Anton Hur), set in 19th-century Korea and Paris.

From Italian: The Florios of Sicily by Stefania Auci (trans. Katherine Gregor) and its sequel The Triumph of the Lions (trans. Katherine Gregor and Howard Curtis), following an entrepreneurial family that rose to power in 19th and 20th-century Sicily. Made into an Italian TV series which I haven't yet seen.

From Norwegian: I haven't formally reviewed this one, but Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter (trans. Tiina Nunnally) is a classic trilogy about a woman's eventful life in 14th-century Norway.

From Dutch: Another classic is Hella Haasse's In a Dark Wood Wandering (trans. Lewis Kaplan), a novel of European power struggles during the Hundred Years' War, based on historical figures.

I welcome suggestions of other titles to read, and will have one or two posts about newer novels in this category in the upcoming weeks.