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New Books in Historical Fiction

New Books in Historical Fiction

By: Marshall Poe
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 Interview with Writers of Historical Fiction about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fictionNew Books Network Art
Episodes
  • Karen Swan, "The Midnight Secret" (Macmillan, 2025)

    Karen Swan, "The Midnight Secret" (Macmillan, 2025)
    Jun 5 2025
    Keeping details straight while writing a chronologically organized series is difficult enough. Focusing four full-length novels on the events of a single group experience in a single year, with back stories and future developments for a small group of heroines, each of whom has a chance to tell her own story of the central event and its consequences, requires even greater skill. Yet Karen Swan pulls off this mammoth enterprise in her Wild Isle series, which concludes with The Midnight Secret (Macmillan, 2025). The Last Summer, the first book in the series, opens in June 1930 with three friends sitting on a rock plucking fulmars, a kind of seabird. Effie, Mhairi (the Gaelic form of Mary, pronounced VAH-ree), and Flora already know that they will have to evacuate their island home in the Outermost Scottish Hebrides within a few months. Flora greets the change with enthusiasm, Effie with cautious pragmatism, and Mhairi with despair. From this first book and the two that follow, The Stolen Hours and The Lost Lover, we discover what drives each young woman’s response. We also delve ever deeper into the circumstances leading up to a mysterious death, highly unusual in the history of this isolated island with its tightly intertwined population of thirty-six individuals. The Midnight Secret begins in 1926 with the perspective of Jayne Ferguson, the slightly older wife of a handsome but, she soon learns, abusive man. It then jumps forward to 1930. From her mother, Jayne has inherited a particular form of second sight that shows her the faces of people in her vicinity who are destined to die soon. The visions haunt her until the death occurs, but they do not come with useful information about what will cause it or how to prevent it. Sometimes even the “who” remains murky at first. The combination of this rather disturbing gift and what Jayne sees as the necessity to conceal her husband’s abuse erect a barrier between her and those around her, especially after the transition to the unfamiliar landscape of the Scottish mainland. At the same time, Effie, Mhairi, and Flora are wrestling with the consequences of their own prior choices as well as the difficulties of adapting to a completely unfamiliar world. And as things heat up, with various characters accused of involvement in the mysterious death, Jayne’s extrasensory ability becomes ever more important to the survival of her community even as it undermines her already rocky relationship with her spouse.  Karen Swan is the bestselling author of twenty-eight novels to date, most recently The Midnight Secret and All I Want for Christmas.  C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her Song of the Steadfast (Songs of Steppe & Forest 6) appeared in June 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction
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    48 mins
  • Frank X Walker, "Load in Nine Times: Poems" (Liveright, 2024)

    Frank X Walker, "Load in Nine Times: Poems" (Liveright, 2024)
    May 24 2025
    For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers—including his own ancestors—who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation.Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slave owners and prominent historical figures from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglas and Margaret Garner. Imbued with atmospheric imagery, these persona poems and more “[clarify] not only the inextricable value of Black life and labor to the building of America, but the terrible price they were forced to pay in producing that labor” (Khadijah Queen). “How do you un-orphan a people?” Walker asks. “How do you pick up / shattered black porcelain and make / a new set of dishes fit to eat off?”While carefully attuned to the heartbreak and horrors of war, Walker’s poems pay equal care to the pride, perseverance, and triumphs of their speakers. Evoking the formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: “I am America’s promise, my mother’s song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream.” Expansive and intimate, Load in Nine Times is a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry by an indelible voice in American poetry. Winner of the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective, the oldest continuously running predominantly African American writing group in the country. He is a Professor of English, and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program the University of Kentucky. You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Professor X continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction
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    1 hr and 25 mins
  • Joanna Miller, "The Eights" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025)

    Joanna Miller, "The Eights" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025)
    May 6 2025
    Joanna Miller’s The Eights (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025) follows four women attending the University of Oxford in 1920. They are not the first female university students in the United Kingdom, or even the first who can hope to attain a degree, but they are the first class of women who can, if they fulfill all the requirements, attain a university degree from Oxford. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone on the campus regards their presence as a plus. Views of women as lightheaded, emotionally unstable creatures incapable of mastering sophisticated thought or living without male guidance have begun to fade since the Great War of 1914–1918, but they continue to influence popular thinking. Unlike the men, women students live under strict restrictions against partying or even entertaining male visitors who are not blood relatives. Defy the rules, and they risk being “sent down” (suspended, in effect) or even dismissed from the program altogether. So what brings the four heroines to Oxford? Each has her own story, much of which becomes obvious only later in the book. Beatrice Sparks, the daughter of a suffragette, considers herself unattractive and unlikely to find a husband; Ottoline Wallace-Kerr, known as Otto, is fleeing a family bent on marrying her off to the first man who asks; Theodora (Dora) Greenwood lost her brother, then her fiancé, in France and doesn’t quite know how to go on; Marianne Grey must make her own way in the world. Together, they are known as the Eights, because they live on Corridor Eight. Although different in character, background, and interests, the four women bond, helping one another cope with the challenges that face them, individually and collectively. These include Oxford, of course, but also the lingering effects of the Great War, their personal situations, and the challenges that face most twenty-somethings as they struggle to define their place in the world. As they do, they draw us in and make us root for them to succeed—and what else would we want from a novel? Joanna Miller, a poet and former teacher, is a graduate of Oxford University’s Exeter College, as well as the university’s teacher training and creative writing programs. The Eights is her debut novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, will be released in June 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction
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    43 mins
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