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.

These Heathens is a unique coming-of-age novel set in Civil Rights-era Atlanta

The narrator’s voice grabs hold immediately, and what a tale she has to tell! In small-town Georgia in 1960, Doris Steele, a Black seventeen-year-old, had dropped out of school two years ago to care for her family after her Ma got sick. She’s pregnant and can’t support a baby, but the local midwives who perform abortions know her parents, so she turns to her former teacher, Mrs. Lucas, for help.

Mrs. Lucas has a rich childhood friend in Atlanta who offers to arrange for the procedure, and what Doris sees there takes this Bible-raised teenager way out of her comfort zone.

At Mrs. Sylvia Broussard’s home, Doris hardly knows what to think. Mrs. Broussard wears pants and red lipstick and talks frankly about sex. She’s also an atheist. Mrs. Lucas appears to be a non-believer, too, which Doris can’t fathom; Doris knows she goes to church!

Speaking with honesty and cheeky humor – she crafts witty phrases she jots in a notebook – Doris is irresistibly appealing. She’s not wholly innocent, but not worldly either, and over the course of one whirlwind weekend, she socializes with Mrs. Broussard’s friends (including Coretta Scott King and her cousin Julia, a famous singer) and attends a student workshop on nonviolent activism.

With her medical appointment weighing on her mind, Doris gets introduced to a secret community of queer women, and although she’s not gay, she has many curious questions about how that all works. She also starts pondering her relationship with God, who created a more interesting world than she ever realized, and how much she owes to her upbringing versus her own desires.

With its well-crafted historical atmosphere that emphasizes Black women’s choices in the Civil Rights-era South and the importance of joyful spaces in a repressive world, this is a winning coming-of-age story full of personality and zing.

These Heathens was published by Random House in June, and I reviewed it for the Historical Novel Society.  I haven't heard much about this novel in the online historical fiction community and wanted to highlight it. It's very funny in places (something the genre doesn't see enough of), and the strong narrative voice carries you along.

From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century: a guest post by Nancy Hayes Kilgore

Nancy Hayes Kilgore is here today with a short essay about shifting to a new historical era, and what happens when a potential story idea just won't let you go.

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From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

Nancy Hayes Kilgore

Four years ago I was immersed in the 17th-century world of Isobel Gowdie. The most famous of the Scottish women tried for witchcraft, Isobel lived in a world of drudgery and fantasy. Or was it fantasy? A peasant on the land of a Scottish laird, she used herbs and magic to cure diseases and to spite her enemies, and she could fly in the “Otherworld” of fairies and elves, where she had great powers and consorted with the Devil.

Milford House Press (2021)

The Scottish Reformation was a time of social change, religious wars, and changing belief systems. The reforming Presbyterians wanted to eradicate what was then a widespread belief in that “Otherworld” and in magic, which in their minds included Catholicism as well as folk religion. Heading towards a rational theology and the Age of Reason, which was of course controlled by “the rational sex,” men, they targeted the powerful women who used magic and herbal cures (and curses). They named them witches, tortured and killed them.

Isobel Gowdie’s life and trial took place in this fierce, violent, and passionate milieu. And I, who had been a lackluster history student in school, became fascinated with the era, as well as with Isobel’s story. Differing beliefs, clashing and intersecting, and an amazing cast of characters, held me, a feminist, yogi, Presbyterian minister, and therapist, in thrall and provided continual fodder for the multi-layered novel that became Bitter Magic.

I finished Bitter Magic and launched it into the world. Phew! I thought. Enough novel writing.

But then I started sorting through a trove of letters from my grandmother in the 1910s. I became intrigued with the life of Florence, this grandmother I never knew. A young woman with tuberculosis, she was feisty and ambitious, a staunch feminist, a budding concert pianist, and her letters to my grandfather, her “comrade” but not yet a suitor, burgeoned with tantalizing elements for a novel – her adventures at a ranch in New Mexico, her train journeys, her music, and her paramours.

Sunbury Press (Sept. 2025)

When I began writing the story of Florence, another question, another dimension emerged: my mother’s life as a young woman in the 1940s. My mother, Flossie, never knew her own mother, Florence, who died of tuberculosis when she was born. How did the two lives interrelate?

I’d long been attracted to the idea of a dual-timeline novel, and here it was. After lots of research about those two time periods and lots of drafts, Pennsylvania Love Song emerged.

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Nancy Hayes Kilgore is the author of four novels: Pennsylvania Love Song, Bitter Magic, Wild Mountain, and Sea Level. Awards include the Vermont Writers Prize and a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year.

An ordained minister and pastoral psychotherapist, Nancy leads workshops on writing and spirituality. She lives in Vermont with her husband, dog and cat. 

From Ford's Theater to Victorian England, M. J. Trow's The Blue and the Grey is a creative Civil War-era thriller

The spelling in the title of M. J. Trow’s historical thriller The Blue and the Grey hints that this novel set just after the US Civil War has a British angle. So does its subtitle, “A Grand & Batchelor Victorian Mystery.”

It opens with a deadly night of drama at Ford’s Theater (or Theatre, as it’s written here) in Washington, DC. Captain Matthew Grand, uniformed as a member of the Third Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, sits in the audience with his fiancée when President Lincoln is shot. Dashing into the alleyway after John Wilkes Booth, Grand has a violent encounter with one of Booth's burly accomplices, who sports an English accent.

Over in London, fresh after discovering the body of a strangled prostitute and nearly being accused of her murder, novice journalist James Batchelor gets canned from his dreary job at the Telegraph after refusing to invent copy for a prospective interview.

After being secretly recruited to track down Booth’s fellow conspirator, Grand travels to England, where – following many almost-too-coincidental-to-be-real events that put them in each other’s company – he and Batchelor compare notes and suspect the two crimes are connected.

The writing is economical and smart, demonstrating an impressively wide vocabulary, and Trow demonstrates his ease with the mid-19th century on both sides of the pond. Much is made of Grand’s unexpected culture shock overseas, which creates some funny moments, and so does a British bandleader’s poor choices at a gala to honor the visiting American. The frequent viewpoint switches among the large cast makes the experience feel kaleidoscopic, which works splendidly amidst the shocking chaos at Ford’s Theater, but less effectively in the middle sections of the book.

The plot takes many detours, which Trow seems to jokingly acknowledge to the reader via one man’s remarks. A few of the side characters (the cleverly proactive Inspector Tanner and the real-life magician known as The Great Maskelyne, to name two) feel like they’d gladly take more on-page time if Trow would let them get away with it. This is the first in a series, so maybe they’ll have their chance.

The Blue and the Grey was published by Severn House way back in 2015, meaning it took me ten years (I'm ashamed to say) to review this novel via NetGalley.  I'm still working through my NetGalley list until I hit the elusive review ratio of 90%.  Slowly getting to that goal, but adding more books to my queue hasn't been helping. 

A Daughter's Place by Martha Bátiz reveals the stories of the Cervantes women

Moving from an upscale Madrid household to Valladolid’s chaotic streets and back to the capital, this debut illustrates Golden Age Spain from the viewpoints of the women in Miguel de Cervantes’s family – whose lives were as eventful as any work of fiction. With a scholarly background in her subject, Mexican-Canadian writer Bátiz has the knowledge and storytelling prowess to make her novel vibrant.

The title character is Isabel, who speaks of her shock upon learning, at 15, that her birth father is the celebrated writer and war hero. After her aunt Magdalena collects her from her late mother’s tavern to reside with the Cervantes family, Isabel finds it hard to adjust. She must share a bed with her resentful cousin Constanza and pretend to outsiders that she’s their maid while despairing of her new status as a “bastarda… a daughter of sin.”

Living separately in Esquivias, Miguel’s devoted wife Catalina, who begins her sections with fervent prayers, wants nothing more than to bear his child, not realizing he already has one.

House of Anansi (2025)

The era’s Catholic morality permeates the setting, which doesn’t prevent the strong-minded Cervantes women from exercising their will. Financial security is a critical motivator, too. They work as seamstresses to support themselves after having gathered a fortune to ransom Miguel from captivity in Algiers and unstintingly obey his wishes despite his frequent absences. The reason why eventually comes to dramatic light.

As Miguel conceptualizes and publishes Don Quixote, the story winds through their house relocations, the women’s love affairs past and present, and Isabel’s ongoing quest to shed the stain of illegitimacy. The shifts in perspective are mostly smooth, with a couple of instances where scene climaxes vexingly happen off-page. Bátiz movingly develops the family’s relationships across two decades, making this more than the exceptional “women behind a famous man” novel that it is.

A Daughter's Place was published by House of Anansi in Canada and the US in May, and I reviewed it from an Edelweiss copy for the Historical Novel Society.  This is the author's debut novel; she has also published short story collections and an award-winning novella, Boca de lobo / Damiana's Reprieve. The painting on the cover is Two Women at a Window by 17th-century Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.