Historical Fiction for Your Book Club

Ghana, 18th century: Two half-sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: From the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem.

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old, and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor, penniless and bullied by a violent father, falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature, known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small Southern Black community and running away at age 16, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults; it’s everything: Their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. What will happen to the next generation when their own daughters’ storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing.

Eleven-year-old George Washington Black, or Wash, is a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation and is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed, and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self.

This colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history. At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a farreaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem and America.

In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith transports the reader to Victorian England, transfixed by the real-life trial of the Tichborne Claimant, in which a cockney butcher, recently returned from Australia, lays claim to the Tichborne baronetcy, with his former slave Andrew Bogle as the star witness. Watching the proceedings, with a story of her own to tell, is Eliza Touchet, cousin, housekeeper, and perhaps more to failing novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. From literary London to Jamaica’s sugarcane plantations, Zadie Smith weaves an enthralling story linking the rich and the poor, the free and the enslaved, and the comic and the tragic.

Abbas is just 17 years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu’s sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu’s palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.

Two young women go missing decades apart. Both fearless; both are lost. And both will have their revenge … The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound by past generations, ghosts and ancestors, and the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the children of French expatriates just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all.