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?

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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.