While good historical fiction is never comforting, this year has made the lessons and parallels from history more abundantly clear than ever before. Paradoxically, this year’s best historicals are set further back in history than in previous lists, cutting off after the 1950s. It’s perhaps no surprise that the 1920s figure heavily; the 19th century finds plenty of representation as well, and there’s a good showing from the early modern era. While the books span hundreds of years, many feature similarly cunning characters, either tricksters who use their wit and wiles to defeat the powerful, or con artists whose scheming destroys all around them. These books also exhibit clear moral judgement, shying away from relativism in favor of relevance. Keep an eye out for many more year-end lists, and probably, a certain amount of additional moral grandstanding. Hey, it’s that time of the (every four) year(s).
As usual, the following titles are arranged in chronological order based on setting.
M. T. Anderson, Nicked
(Pantheon Books)
Setting: Mediterranean Medieval World, 11th Century
M.T. Anderson is the author of the now-considered-classic Feed, a portrait of the internet apocalypse uncanny in its predictions and disturbing in its implications. This year, I had the pleasure of reading another work from Anderson equal in quality and completely opposite in setting, scope, and vibe. In Nicked, a group of disparate travelers sets off on an odyssey of the medieval world with a common 11th century mission: they’ve been hired to steal the Anatolian relics of a powerful saint and transport them to an Italian city state in hopes of sparking more commerce from pilgrims (the medieval equivalent of taking the Dodgers from Brooklyn to LA). Along the way, they form deep bonds, some blossoming into romance, and take in the sights and sounds of the entire Mediterranean world. M. T. Anderson does that rare feat of capturing the spirit of the time, granting readers a lively, Rabelaisian interpretation of an unfairly maligned era (see history book The Bright Ages for further appreciation).
Hesse Phillips, Lightborne
(Pegasus)
Setting: England, 16th Century
A queer historical reimagining of the last days of Kit Marlowe! With spies and romance and an absolutely devastating denouement, Lightborne is as bloody and beautiful as the great Marlowe’s plays. You don’t need a dissertation on Elizabethan drama to understand this one, but the author’s academic research evolved in parallel with crafting the narrative, and the ease with which they incorporate telling historical details is an incredibly rewarding experience. Lightborne is so much more than its details, no matter how outrageously entertaining, for the soul of this work comes from its clear-eyed portrait of humanity: the best, the worst, and the somewhere-in-between.
Briony Cameron, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye
(Atria)
Setting: Caribbean, 17th Century
This is a fascinating take on a rumored real-life figure, the swashbuckling Jacquotte Delahaye, but one which takes plenty of narrative license to fill out the gaps in her amazing tale. Jacquotte begins the novel as a shipbuilder, but through no fault of her own, soon becomes an outlaw, and must take to the high seas to preserve her own life and those of her companions. She quickly grows her crew through enlisting some nontraditional sailors, and finds herself on a path towards safety and autonomy—if she can keep herself from a showdown with her nemesis, of course.
Michael Crummey, The Adversary
(Doubleday)
Setting: Newfoundland, Early 19th Century
A remote Canadian fishing village, deliciously christened Mockbeggar, is the setting for this epic tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. The small town is ruled by two siblings, a brother and sister. Both are terrible people, but their malevolence finds expression in vastly different forms, as their take-no-prisoners rivalry and intense mutual hatred inevitably destroys their community, their family, and their souls.
Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher
(Knopf)
Setting: New Jersey, mid-19th Century
This well-researched historical tale of medical experiments gone haywire looks to be a perfect match with Joyce Carol Oates’ visceral style and violent explorations of American sins. Set in the 19th century, Butcher follows a disgraced surgeon sent into exile at a “Asylum for Female Lunatics,” where he finds himself surrounded by vulnerable patients and with few potential consequences for wrong-doing. Butcher is JCO at her best, and an essential text for understanding America’s long war on women.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower
(Simon & Schuster)
Setting: Texas and Mexico, 1895
Growing up in Texas with a historian father, I longed for novels like The Bullet Swallower, based on a legendary outlaw in the author’s own family history. In The Bullet Swallower, a bandit on the run from the Texas Rangers must do whatever it takes to save his family, while two generations later, his descendant confronts an ancient entity determined to make him pay for his ancestors’ crimes. If you like this book, check out With a Pistol in His Hand, Americo Paredes’ classic history of folk hero Grigorio Cortez, subjected to the largest manhunt in US history after a wrongful accusation of horse theft left a Texas Ranger dead and Cortez on the run.
Scott Phillips, The Devil Raises His Own
(Soho Crime)
Setting: Hollywood, 1910s
This novel is so damn charming, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its salacious historical setting—early Hollywood’s burgeoning scene of blue movies. In The Devil Raises His Own, the denizens of Los Angeles just before WWI intersect and part ways in a thousand different combinations for a kaleidoscopic portrait of an entire city at the precipice of extraordinary cultural significance. Phillips has crafted a picaresque tale of winners and losers, lovers and cheaters, suckers and con artists, rising starlets and drunken has-beens, dirty old men and even dirtier married women: in short, a truly American novel of epic proportions.
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz
(Scribner)
Setting: Cahokia, Mississippi River Valley, 1922
Francis Spofford’s Cahokia Jazz is, quite possibly, the best alternative history novel since Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, though predicated on an entirely different premise: namely, that the ancient indigenous city of Cahokia had never been destroyed. Instead, it thrived, becoming a comparative multi-racial paradise, an island of tolerance and community building in a sea of American racism and capitalist excess. Set in the 1920s, Cahokia Jazz follows a detective called to investigate an unusual and gruesome killing with vast implications for the city’s future. The Klan and their wealthy supporters wish to use the crime to wrest economic and political power away from the Native community and impose the segregated policies of other states. Francis Spufford began as a writer of nonfiction, and his uncanny ability to capture the language and vibes of the time are most definitely the result of significant research efforts.
Jacquie Pham, Those Opulent Days
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
Setting: Saigon, 1920s
This book will make you feel things—mostly, a simmering anger against capitalism and colonial exploitation, but also some very sad thoughts about thwarted love and and the oppressive power of self-loathing. Those Opulent Days, set in 1920s Vietnam under the yoke of French colonialism, follows four young men faced with increasingly impossible decisions as revolution grows nigh and a terrible death becomes the catalyst for many more misfortunes. While the novel is a debut, Pham’s voice is self-assured and brutally honest.
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, The Seventh Veil of Salome
(Del Rey)
Setting: Hollywood, 1950s
It took me way too long to realize I could call this a crime novel (and that’s my excuse for leaving it off our big summer preview). Anyhoo, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia has crafted another historical stunner, this one split between two time periods: the biblical story of Salome, and a 1950s film production featuring a doomed Mexican ingenue playing the role of Salome. As the young actress begins a passionate romance and strives to make her own way in Hollywood, she faces the combined threats of colorism, the Red Scare, and the Lavender Scare—but like Salome herself, she’s got a few tricks up her sleeve (and possibly a head on a platter).
