New Historical Fiction to Read in 2022

1944: As World War II rages on, the threat comes to the home front and Meiko and her daughter, Aiko, are taken from their home in Seattle and sent to an internment camp in the Midwest. Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp, when a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. The Fervor explores the horrors of the supernatural beyond just the threat of the occult. A sharp account of too-recent history, it’s a deep excavation of how we decide who gets to be human when being human matters most.

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history.

A powerful, engrossing story of a biracial heiress who flees to Paris when the Haitian Revolution burns across her island home. But as she works her way into the inner circle of Robespierre and his mistress, she learns that not even oceans can stop the flames of revolution.

From the author of the classic A Little Life–a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.

When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself. This is the dramatic story of how a humble bookseller fought against incredible odds to bring one of the most important books of the 20th century into the world, honoring a woman who made it her mission to value the life-changing impact of books.

The secret is hidden within a collection of Dior dresses… The City of Light comes alive in this lush, evocative tale that explores the ties that bind us together, the truths we hold that make us who we are, and the true meaning of what makes someone family.

Kitty Talbot needs a fortune. Or rather, she needs a husband who has a fortune. Left with her father’s massive debts, she has only twelve weeks to save her family from ruin. Kitty has never been one to back down from a challenge, so she leaves home and heads toward the most dangerous battleground in all of England: the London season. This is a frothy pleasure, full of brilliant repartee and enticing wit—one that readers will find an irresistible delight.

When Isabel Perez travels to Barcelona to save her sister Beatriz, she discovers a shocking family secret in Chanel Cleeton’s new novel. Alicia and Isabel’s lives intertwine, and the past and present collide, as a mother and daughter are forced to choose between their family’s expectations and following their hearts.

A teenage girl living in 1960s China becomes Mao Zedong’s protegee and lover—and a heroine of the Cultural Revolution—in this epic yet intimate novel.

This sweeping novel from the author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.

The #1 Indie Next Pick, this witty and tender novel follows two women in 1960s America as they discover that food really does connect us all, and that friendship and laughter are the best medicine.

The Nobel Prize-winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.

From the New York Times bestselling author of We Must Be Brave comes a new sweeping historical novel about one couple’s journey through war, love, and loss, and how the people we love never really leave us.

Set in Jaffa in 1947-51, this fable-like novel is a heartbreaking tale of young love during the beginning of the destruction of Palestine and the displacement of its people. This novel is a cinematic, though devastating, account of one of the most dramatic and least known chapters of Palestinian history. It is a portrait of a city and a people irrevocably changed.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Wench, a searing and compassionate new novel about a young Black nurse’s shocking discovery and burning quest for justice in post-segregation Alabama. Inspired by true events and brimming with hope, Take My Hand is a stirring exploration of accountability and redemption.

Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue, returns with a tantalizing novel about the secrets, betrayal, and murder within one of New York City’s most impressive Gilded Age mansions.

Two women, two countries. Nothing in common but a call to fight. A heart-stopping new novel based on the extraordinary true stories of an American socialite and a British secret agent whose stunning acts of courage collide in the darkest hours of World War II, where the decisions they made would change their lives, and the world, forever.

It’s summer 1968, and the world is reeling from war and assassinations, protests and riots. In a British seaside town, a producer, a novelist, and an actress are enduring their own private crises on the set of a disaster-plagued movie. All are leading secret lives, and as the shoot zigs and zags, pressures build inexorably—and that’s before the FBI and CIA get involved…By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Trio is an enthralling novel that asks the vital questions: What makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn’t?

The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

As a child, Devlin Ware thought his family stood for all that was right and good in the world. But at twenty-two, he discovered his whole world was an elaborate illusion, and when Devlin publicly called his family to account for it, he was exiled as a traitor. But six years later, his father is dead, and as the heir he is being called home. It’s only Gwyneth Rhys—the woman he loved and then lost after his family banished him—who holds out her hand to help him. It is Gwyneth’s loyalty, patience, and love that he needs. But is Devlin’s hardened heart even capable of offering her love in return?

Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home and search for him. An epic, mesmerizing debut novel set against a rapidly changing post-Cultural Revolution China, A Map for the Missing reckons with the costs of pursuing one’s dreams and the lives we leave behind.