Podcasts by New Books in Historical Fiction
Interview with Writers of Historical Fiction about their New Books
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Samantha Silva, "Mr. Dickens and His Carol" (Flatiron Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Christmas is not looking bright for Charles Dickens. His latest novel has proven a massive flop, and that upstart William Thackeray doesn’t miss an opportunity to crow. Bills are rolling in, every ...
ListenLee Zacharias, “Across the Great Lake” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lake Michigan in 1936 is an essential commercial seaway, one that captains and their crews must cross regularly no matter the season, breaking massive ice floes under the prows of their ships and p...
ListenBernard Cornwell, “War of the Wolf” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As seems appropriate for a character as resourceful, skilled, and self-confident as Uhtred of Bebbanburg, he goes from strength to strength. In addition to a set of bestselling novels, collectively...
ListenLeslie Schweitzer Miller, “Discovery” (Notramour Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Giselle Gélis runs into David Rettig at a biblical studies conference, she’s not expecting a life-changing experience. On the contrary, the thought foremost in her mind is escaping the creepy ...
ListenJacqueline Friedland, “Trouble the Water” (SparkPress, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Douglas Elling has left his home town in England and made a name for himself in Charleston. It’s about twenty years before the US Civil War, and slavery is still very much an institution in South C...
ListenNick Dybek, “The Verdun Affair: A Novel” (Scribner, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State University has written a terrific novel, The V...
ListenRobert Goolrick, “The Dying of the Light” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” So opens Robert Goolrick’s rich, lyrical new novel, The Dying of the Light (Harper, 2018). The house is Saratoga, a colonial-era estate in Virginia th...
ListenDanielle Teller, “All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother” (William Morrow, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most of us hear the Cinderella story in childhood: a mean stepmother favors her own daughters and controls her hapless husband, turning the sweet and innocent Cinderella into a scullery maid and re...
ListenEllen Notbohm, “The River by Starlight” (She Writes Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Annie Rushton heads west to keep house for her older brother on his Montana homestead, she expects to leave marriage and motherhood behind her. After all, the husband she walked out on at twen...
ListenAdrienne Sharp, “The Magnificent Esme Wells” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At six, Esme Wells has never attended school, but she has already learned how to take care of her father: accompany him to the racetrack, load up on hot dogs when asked, and keep an eye open for st...
ListenJohn Richard Bell, “The Circumstantial Enemy” (Endeavour Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We all imagine that, when put to the test, we will end up on the right side of history, however we define it. Nowhere is that statement more true than in reference to World War II. But sometimes pe...
ListenClaudia H. Long, “Chains of Silver” (Five Directions Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, the Catholic authorities in Spain and its colonies, including Mexico, took a hard line against the Jewish community. Those who would not c...
ListenGwen C. Katz, “Among the Red Stars” (Harper Teen, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Valentina (Valka) Koroleva and her cousin Iskra share a dream: to fly in defense of their Soviet motherland against the Nazi forces that have launched a surprise invasion in violation of Hitler’s n...
ListenHazel Gaynor and Heather Webb, “Last Christmas in Paris” (William Morrow, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we first meet Thomas Harding in 1968, he is facing what he believes will be his last Christmas and mourning the loss of an unnamed woman who clearly meant a great deal to him. He carries with ...
ListenOctavia Randolph, “Silver Hammer, Golden Cross” (Pyewacket Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Silver Hammer, Golden Cross (Pyewacket Press, 2017) is sixth in the series of the Circle of Ceridwen series. It begins by exploring the friendship of two young heirs, Ceric, of Saxon descent and Hr...
ListenBarbary Ridley, “When It’s Over” (She Writes Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For some reason, books occasionally arrive in pairs—meaning that out of nowhere a topic that has received little attention convinces two or more writers that it is novel-worthy, and those authors p...
ListenJudithe Little, “Wickwythe Hall” (Black Opal Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For some reason, books occasionally arrive in pairs—meaning that out of nowhere a topic that has received little attention convinces two or more writers that it is novel-worthy, and those authors p...
ListenCharlene Ball, “Dark Lady: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer” (She Writes Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emilia Bassano loves many things: music, poetry, Latin, herbs. Born to a family of Italian musicians living in sixteenth-century London, Emilia benefits from early fostering in the household of a c...
ListenElizabeth Peters and Joan Hess, “The Painted Queen” (William Morrow, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Even a novelist with thirty-five books under her belt would find it difficult to finish someone else’s series, set in a relatively unfamiliar part of the world and a century earlier than the fictio...
ListenBeverly Jenkins, “Chasing Down a Dream: A Blessings Novel” (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Blessings Series continue with a heartwarming novel, Chasing Down a Dream (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017), about what makes a family when trials test relationships. And in Henry Adams, Kansas...
ListenT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (SUNY Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Dorothy Sterling wrote her book about nineteenth-century black women in America, she stated in the introduction that the book was not a definitive history of black women but a sourcebook to le...
ListenLinnea Hartsuyker, “The Half-Drowned King” (Harper, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ragnvald Eysteinsson is returning from years raiding in Ireland under the leadership of Solvi and focused on winning a contest with his fellow sailors when Solvi attacks. Ragnvald falls into the fj...
ListenBeatriz Williams, “Cocoa Beach” (HarperCollins, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The State of Florida might have been designed for Prohibition. Its long coastline, its proximity to the Caribbean sources of rum, and (in 1922) its vast stretches of undeveloped coastline made it a...
ListenMarlene Banks, “Ruth’s Redemption” (Lift Every Voice, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s A Love Story. Set in the 1800s, Ruth’s Redemption (Lift Every Voice, 2012), is an unusual depiction of the lives of slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil War America. Although a slave, Bo is ed...
ListenKathy Wilson Florence, “Jaybird’s Song” (Kathy Wilson Florence, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Josie Flint, known as Jaybird, narrates her story of life in Atlanta during the turbulent South as Jim Crow laws come to an end. Her school desegregates. The country meanders through new ideas brou...
ListenGabrielle Mathieu, “The Falcon Flies Alone” (Five Directions Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Peppa Mueller has a lot going for her. The daughter of a deceased Harvard professor who gave her an eclectic upbringing, she is heir to his fortune, and Radcliffe has accepted her application for u...
ListenMichelle Cox, “A Girl Like You: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel (She Writes Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s January 1935. Prohibition has just ended, but the Great Depression has not, and much of Chicago remains under the grip of the crime lords who profited from the trade in illegal liquor. Eightee...
ListenAssaph Mehr, “Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic” (Purple Toga Publications, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Assaph Mehr‘s Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic (Purple Toga Publications, 2015) is Egretia, a town in a fantasy world modeled on the Roman Empire, and the occasion is the cr...
ListenTiffany Reisz, “The Night Mark” (Mira Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
So many people hope to find the perfect soul mate, but suppose you do, only to lose the person you love just as your life together is getting off to a beautiful start? Faye Morgan reacts by tumblin...
ListenMarlene Banks, “Son of A Preacher Man” and “Greenwood and Archer” (Lift Every Voice, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human n...
ListenRonald E. Yates, “The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles” (Xlibris, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Journalism, history, biography, memoirs, and historical fiction overlap to some degree. The first two focus on provable facts, but the facts must be arranged to form a coherent story, and that requ...
ListenBren McClain, “One Good Mama Bone” (Story River Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Once in a while, a novel comes along that is just extraordinary, in the best sense of that word. Bren McClain’s One Good Mama Bone (Story River Books, 2017) falls into this category. In little more...
ListenHelen Rappaport, “Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen” (Harper Design, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The term historical fiction covers a wide range from what the mystery writer Josephine Tey once dubbed “history with conversation” to outright invention shading into fantasy. But behind every story...
ListenBernard Cornwell, “The Flame Bearer” (Harper, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Here at New Books in Historical Fiction, we don’t often interview the same author twice. Bernard Cornwell is an exception. As I note in my introduction to this podcast, since I last interviewed him...
ListenUrsula LeCoeur, “The Devious Dubutante” (Royal Street Publishing, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
So far, this podcast has focused on straight historical fiction rather than historical romance. Although love stories have a way of creeping into novels whatever their genre, books that focus on in...
ListenKate Braithwaite, “Charlatan” (Fireship Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paris, 1676. At the house of the fortuneteller Catherine Montvoisin (La Voisin), while two hooded forms watch, a wayward priest burns a piece of parchment in a spell designed to awaken the passions...
ListenMartha Conway, “Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery” (Noontime Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s 1921, and Prohibition is in full swing, but you wouldn’t know it from the nightclubs and speakeasies of Chicago, where bathtub gin mingles with homemade bourbon distilled from trainloads of co...
ListenLinda Kass, “Tasa’s Song” (She Writes Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Although the Holocaust inflicted extreme brutality wherever it occurred, the specific events associated with the violence differed from one place to another. In Tasa’s Song (She Writes Press, 2016...
ListenC.P. Lesley, “The Swan Princess” (Five Directions Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For more than three centuries after the Mongol conquest of 1240, the rulers of the Golden Horde played a major role in Eurasian politics, both directly and indirectly. One of the states most affect...
ListenAshley E. Sweeney, “Eliza Waite” (She Writes Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cypress Island, September 1896: a tragedy has left a young widow, mourning her child, living alone in a cabin on this isolated spot near Bellingham Bay in the very new state of Washington. Once a m...
ListenHana Samek Norton, “The Serpent’s Crown” (Cuidono Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, the grip of European knights on the Holy Land has begun to loosen. The Muslim forces under Saladin have won a major victory, and the crusaders have so far fo...
ListenLauren Belfer, “And After the Fire” (Harper, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s May 1945, and a pair of American GIs in occupied Germany find themselves at what appears to be an abandoned estate. When they enter, they discover a resident, reduced to burning valuable books...
ListenKristen Harnisch, “The California Wife” (She Writes Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sara Thibault and her new husband, Philippe Lemieux, grew up in Vouvray, amid the French vineyards that dot the Loire Valley. But when the phylloxera blight of the 1870s devastates their families b...
ListenDiane McKinney-Whetstone, “Lazaretto” (Harper, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A hundred years before Ellis Island became a processing center for immigrants wishing to enter the United States, Philadelphia had the Lazaretto, a quarantine hospital where every ship entering the...
ListenLaini Giles, “The Forgotten Flapper: A Novel of Olive Thomas” (Sepia Stories, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theatre, near Times Square in New York. She wears a green outfit in flapper style, and she’s just a little annoyed to realize that no one is scared of her, even tho...
ListenWeina Dai Randel, “The Moon in the Palace” (Sourcebooks, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In four thousand years of Chinese history, Empress Wu stands alone as the only woman to rule in her own name. She died in her eighties after decades of successful governance, but her sons could not...
ListenMary Doria Russell, “Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral” (Ecco Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Wild West of Zane Grey and John Wayne movies, with its clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians (never called Native Americans in this narrative), bears little resemb...
ListenAnjali Mitter Duva, “Faint Promise of Rain” (She Writes Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1530, Babur the Tiger, the self-proclaimed ruler of Afghanistan, moved south and conquered the northwest section of what was then known as Hindustan. Babur, although accepted as padishah and emp...
ListenJoan Schweighardt, “The Last Wife of Attila the Hun” (Booktrope Editions, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Long before Genghis Khan set off to conquer the known world, the pattern of steppe warriors attacking–and often defeating–settled empires was well established. Only a few names of those who led the...
ListenCourtney J. Hall, “Some Rise by Sin” (Five Directions Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The reverberations of Henry VIII’s tumultuous reign continued to echo long after the monarch’s death. England teetered into Protestantism, then veered back into Catholicism before settling into an ...
ListenLiza Perrat, “Blood Rose Angel” (Triskele Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The year 1348 is not a good time to be a healer in Europe. Midwife Heloise lives in a cottage outside Lucie-sur-Vionne, where she walks an awkward line between villagers who need her services and o...
ListenJeannine Atkins, “Little Woman in Blue: A Novel of May Alcott” (She Writes Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Even people who have never read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and its two sequels (Little Men and Jo’s Boys) probably have at least a vague memory of hearing about the March girls–Meg, Jo, Beth,...
ListenVirginia Pye, “Dreams of the Red Phoenix” (Unbridled Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Of the brutal conflicts that characterized the twentieth century, none equaled in scale the catastrophe that struck China when the Japanese occupied the northern part of the country just as the Civ...
ListenSarah Kennedy, “The King’s Sisters” (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many historical novels explore the highways and byways of Tudor England, especially the marital troubles of Henry VIII, which makes it all the more pleasant when an author approaches that much-visi...
ListenLucy Sanna, “The Cherry Harvest” (William Morrow, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many novels look at World War II–what happened, why it happened, how the world would have changed if the war had never occurred or had taken a different course. In The Cherry Harvest (William Morro...
ListenGlen Craney, “The Spider and the Stone: A Novel of the Black Douglas” (Brigid’s Fire Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Scotland, 1296: William Wallace is leading the resistance against the English while the clans fight one another as fiercely as they attack the invaders from the south. Two candidates in particular ...
ListenLisa Chaplin, “The Tide Watchers” (William Morrow, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From World War I, we jump back more than a hundred years and across an ocean. Napoleon, still First Consul, has convinced the surrounding nations to accept a series of treaties that he violates as ...
ListenAlan Geik, “Glenfiddich Inn” (Sonador Publishing, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Boston in 1915 is a town on the move. Prohibition creates opportunities for corruption and evasion of the law. Stock scandals and political machinations keep the news wires humming. Women agitate f...
ListenErika Johansen, “Queen of the Tearling” (HarperCollins, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Once in a while, we here at New Books in Historical Fiction like to branch out. This month’s interview is one example. Erika Johansen‘s bestselling Queen of the Tearling (HarperCollins, 2014) blend...
ListenSally Cabot Gunning, “Satucket Trilogy” (William Morrow, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this podcast I talk with author Sally Cabot Gunning about law in the Satucket Trilogy: The Widow’s War, Bound, and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke (Harper 2006, 2008, 2010). Gunning is an accomplis...
ListenGeorge Stein, “Sing Before Breakfast: A Novel of Gettysburg ” (George Stein, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From July 1 to July 3, 1863, the fields around the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, were the site of an intense battle involving more than 160,000 men from the Union and Confederate armies, ...
ListenSusan Follett, “The Fog Machine” (Lucky Sky Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Even without the almost daily headlines reporting racial injustice in Ferguson, New York City, Cleveland, Madison, and elsewhere, it would be difficult to grasp that fifty years have already passed...
ListenAnn Swinfen, “The Testament of Mariam” (Shakenoak Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In a town in eastern Gallia, circa 65 AD, an old woman learns that she has lost the last of her siblings, a man she has not seen for thirty years. The news propels her back into memories of her pas...
ListenAlix Christie, “Gutenberg’s Apprentice” (HarperCollins, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From sixteenth-century Venice we move back a century and travel north to Mainz, Germany, where a “madman” named Johannes Gutenberg has invented a radical new method of making books. Like any techno...
ListenLaura Morelli, “The Gondola Maker” (Laura Morelli, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As the son and heir to the workshop of sixteenth-century Venice’s premier gondola maker, Luca Vianello has his career, his marriage, and his place in society mapped out for him. True, his stern fat...
ListenPhillip Margolin, “Worthy Brown’s Daughter” (Harper, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The year is 1860, months before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. Officially, slavery does not exist in Oregon, but the brand-new U.S. state has no compunction about driving most African-American...
ListenNadia Hashimi, “The Pearl That Broke Its Shell” (William Morrow, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Women in the Western world take many things for granted: the right to an education and a career, to walk in the street unaccompanied, to make personal decisions, to choose a marriage partner–or whe...
ListenOliver Ready (trans.), Vladimir Sharov, “Before and During” (Dedalus Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Historical fiction, by definition, supplements the verifiable documentary record with elements of the imagination. Otherwise, it is not fiction but history. These elements often include invented ch...
ListenKate Quinn, “The Serpent and the Pearl” (Berkley Trade, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
No fan of Renaissance history can ignore the far-reaching influence–or the legendary corruption–of the Borgia family. From Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, to his scheming, possibly mu...
ListenLaurel Corona, “The Mapmaker’s Daughter” (Sourcebooks, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In North America, the year 1492 is inextricably linked to Columbus’s discovery of the West Indies, funded by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. But in Spain itself, the year brought two ev...
ListenDmitry Chen, “The Pet Hawk of the House of Abbas” (Edward and Dee, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the Saxons and Danes warring in the British Isles, this month’s interview skews dramatically eastward and dives back two centuries in time, although the circumstances of war and unrest will se...
ListenBernard Cornwell, “The Pagan Lord” (HarperCollins, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As fans of Uhtred of Bebbanburg know, England in the ninth and tenth centuries is just an idea–a hope held by the kings of Wessex that they may someday unite the lands occupied by the Angles and Sa...
ListenLibbie Hawker, “The Sekhmet Bed” (Running Rabbit Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty seems both impossibly distant in time and disconcertingly present. Over 250 years, the dynasty produced several of the rulers best known to modern Western culture: A...
ListenTara Conklin, “The House Girl” (William Morrow, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lina Sparrow can’t believe her luck when the boss at her fancy New York law firm offers her a once-in-a-lifetime chance: find a suitable plaintiff for a class-action suit to be lodged against the U...
ListenPamela Mingle, “The Pursuit of Mary Bennet” (William Morrow, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It seems fair to say that a large proportion of the English-speaking reading public has encountered Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice, either on the page or in one of the many adaptat...
ListenJames Aitcheson, “Sworn Sword” (Sourcebooks, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The chivalric society of medieval Europe resembled a pyramid, with each man sworn to serve the lord above him in a social hierarchy that reached up to the king. A warrior without a lord had no futu...
ListenJessica Brockmole, “Letters from Skye” (Ballantine Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In March 1912, a college student at the University of Illinois takes time away from his usual pursuits–painting the dean’s horse blue, climbing dorm walls with a sack of squirrels, reading Hucklebe...
ListenLee Smith, “Guests on Earth” (Algonquin Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On the night of March 9, 1948, fire consumed the Central Building at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Although people at the time recognized that the fire had been set, th...
ListenJames Forrester, “Sacred Treason” (Sourcebooks, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
London, December 1563. Elizabeth I–Gloriana, the Virgin Queen–has ruled England for five years, but her throne is far from secure. Even though Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister Mary, the idea of ...
ListenCarol Strickland, “The Eagle and the Swan” (Erudition Digital, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 476 CE, according to the chronology most of us learned in school, the Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages began. That’s how textbook chronologies work: one day you’re studying the Romans, and ne...
ListenYangsze Choo, “The Ghost Bride” (HarperCollins, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Malaya, 1893. Pan Li Lan, a beautiful eighteen-year-old, has watched her Chinese merchant family decline since the death of her mother from smallpox during Li Lan’s early childhood. Her father live...
ListenVirginia Pye, “River of Dust” (Unbridled Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Few possibilities terrify parents more than the kidnapping of a child. Guilt, grief, helplessness, anger, and immobilizing fear mingle to create an emotional stew with a mix of ingredients that var...
ListenJanet Kastner Olshewsky, “The Snake Fence” (Quaker Bridge Media, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sixteen is a difficult age, lodged somewhere between childhood and adulthood. In 1755, young Noble Butler has just finished his apprenticeship as a carpenter, and he wants nothing more than to unde...
ListenMarie Macpherson, “The First Blast of the Trumpet” (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There’s nothing quite like sitting down to write a novel about a man who, to quote Marie Macpherson, is blamed for “banning Christmas, football on Sundays,” and the like. What is one to do with suc...
ListenB. A. Shapiro, “The Art Forger” (Algonquin Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Claire Roth can’t believe her luck when the owner of Boston’s most prestigious art gallery offers her a one-woman show. Of course, there’s a catch: he asks her to copy a painting. A small price to ...
ListenLaurie R. King, “Garment of Shadows” (Bantam Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Morocco in 1924 has political factions to spare. A rebellion in the Rif Mountains threatens to oust Spain from its protectorate in the north–a response to Spanish mistreatment of the local populati...
ListenWilliam B. McCormick, “Lenin’s Harem” (Knox Robinson, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One night in the Russian imperial province of Courland, an eleven-year-old boy more than a little drunk on his parents’ champagne slips away from his aristocratic manor and heads for the village th...
ListenDouglas R. Skopp, “Shadows Walking” (CreateSpace, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“First do no harm.” Every doctor in the Western medical tradition swears to observe this basic principle of the Hippocratic oath before he or she receives a license to practice. Yet in Nazi Germany...
ListenTasha Alexander, “Death in the Floating City” (Minotaur Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Well-brought-up Victorian ladies don’t expect their childhood nemeses to write from out of the blue, pleading for help because, as the nemesis so tactfully puts it, “what lady of my rank would asso...
ListenJulius Wachtel, “Stalin’s Witnesses” (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When does history become performance art? In 1936, Joseph Stalin set out to eliminate any communist leader with sufficient prestige to threaten his monopoly on power. In what became known as the G...
ListenC. P. Lesley, "Song of the Sisters: Songs of Steppe and Forest 3" (Five Directions Press, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Everywhere young Russian noblewoman Darya Sheremeteva turns, someone in her circle of family and friends reminds her that she exists to serve a single purpose: to marry a powerful man selected by h...
ListenKaren Engelmann, “The Stockholm Octavo” (Ecco Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s 1789, and despite the troubles in France, Emil Larsson, a sekretaire in the Customs Office in Stockholm, has life pretty much where he wants it. His job brings him lucrative under-the-table de...
ListenMolly Greeley, "The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh" (William Morrow, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The world created by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice has established a place for itself in contemporary culture that few other novels can match, yet amid the countless spinoffs, some stand out. ...
ListenJulian Berengaut, “The Estate of Wormwood and Honey” (Russian Estate Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Illegitimacy doesn’t mean much in today’s Europe and North America. In an age when we celebrate many different kinds of families, “bastard” has become an epithet thrown, most often inaccurately, at...
ListenFrancis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” (Greywolf Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing ...
ListenFinola Austin, "Bronte's Mistress" (Atria Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It seems likely that most of our listeners have at least heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Many also know that Charlotte and Emily had two other talent...
ListenJennie Fields, "Atomic Love" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Inspired by Leona Woods, the only woman who worked on the Manhattan Project, Atomic Love (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) tells the story of Rosalind Porter, a physicist recruited by Enrico Fermi to joi...
ListenP. K. Adams, "Midnight Fire" (Iron Knight Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most novels about the sixteenth century written in English take place in Italy, France, or England—with the occasional foray into Spain or Portugal. P. K. Adams’ Jagiellonian Mystery series is a we...
ListenLinda Stewart Henley, "Estelle" (She Writes Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most people think of Edgar Degas as a French painter of ballerinas. But few have heard that his mother came from New Orleans or that he spent five months in that city between October 1872 and Febru...
ListenBryn Turnbull, "The Woman before Wallis" (Mira Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most modern Americans can identify the names Wallace Simpson and Gloria Vanderbilt. But Simpson was not the first divorced American to win the heart of Great Britain’s future if short-reigned King ...
ListenJohn DeSimone, "Road to Delano" (Rare Bird Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In John DeSimone's Road to Delano (Rare Bird Books, 2020), it's 1968, and Cesar Chavez is organizing the United Farm Workers to fight for decent working conditions and basic human rights, while gro...
ListenElsa Hart, "The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne" (Minotaur Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lady Cecily Kay has just returned to England when she encounters Sir Barnaby Mayne. It’s 1703, Queen Anne is on the throne, and London’s coffee houses are buzzing with discussions of everything fro...
ListenErika Rummel, "The Road to Gesualdo" (D. X. Varos, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Italian Renaissance introduced—or reintroduced—many valuable concepts to society and culture, giving rise eventually to our modern world. But it was also a time of fierce political infighting, ...
ListenBill LeFurgy, "Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore"?(High Kicker Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Bill LeFurgy's Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore?(High Kicker Books), Sarah Kennecott is a brilliant young doctor who cares deeply about justice for murder victims after her own fami...
ListenWill Thomas, "Lethal Pursuit" (Minotaur, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
London, 1892. Private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn have been tasked by the Prime Minister to deliver a satchel to the Vatican. The satchel contains a document desperately desired...
ListenJanie Chang, "The Library of Legends" (William Morrow, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Perhaps in anticipation of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the armistice, or just the reality that the last survivors will not be with us much longer, World War II has dominated the genre of histo...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenChip Jacobs, "Arroyo" (Rare Birds Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Two guys named Nick Chance, both with clairvoyant dogs named Royo, both inventors living in Pasadena, California – in 1913 and 1993. The original Nick, who starts out working on an ostrich farm, is...
ListenJanice Hadlow, "The Other Bennet Sister" (Henry Holt, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is well known that the novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817), which enjoyed at best a modest success during her lifetime, have become ever more popular in the last fifty years or so. They support a ...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenMari Coates, "The Pelton Papers" (She Writes Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Like the better-known and perhaps luckier Georgia O’Keeffe, the American painter Agnes Pelton also found her unique vision in the western desert. As Mari Coates details in our conversation, Pelton ...
ListenMaya Rodale, "An Heiress to Remember" (Avon Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As Maya Rodale notes early in this interview, romance novels tend not to get the same respect as other categories of fiction, historical or otherwise. Here, and in her Dangerous Books for Girls, sh...
ListenLaura Waterman, "Starvation Shore" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Laura Waterman talks about her novel, Starvation Shore (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), which relies upon memoirs, letters, and diaries to reconstruct the life of the Greely Party as it attem...
ListenEmily Strelow, "The Wild Birds" (Rare Bird Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
An orphaned young woman disguises herself as a boy in order to escape the dangers of being alone in 1870’s San Francisco. A group of castoffs destroy the bird population of the Farallon Island by s...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenGabrielle Mathieu, "Girl of Fire" (Five Directions Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the fantasy medieval land of Trea—a conservative society that despite its worship of the goddess Amur respects her human daughters only as wives and mothers—eighteen-year-old Berona has limited ...
ListenJoan Schweighardt, "Gifts for the Dead" (Five Directions Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Last summer, massive fires in the Amazon rain forest provoked environmental concerns around the world. But the history of exploitation—of the natural world of the rain forest and the people living ...
ListenSerena Burdick, "The Girls with No Names" (Park Row Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Effie Tildon loves her older sister, Luella. Sixteen to Effie’s thirteen, Luella has long taken the leading role in deciding what the two sisters do, even when it leads them in directions their par...
ListenKatherine Kayne, "Bound in Flame" (Passionflower Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Leticia Liliuokalani Lang, better known as Letty, has good intentions, but her strong will and quick temper tend to get in her way. Banished from her Hawaiian home due to a conflict with her stepmo...
ListenKathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...
ListenCharles Todd, "A Cruel Deception" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Writing novels—never mind entire series—takes determination, persistence, imagination, and craft. Charles Todd has added to those natural challenges the joys and complications of creating a single ...
ListenTalia Carner, "The Third Daughter" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As revealed by the title of Talia Carner’s latest novel, The Third Daughter (William Morrow, 2019), her heroine, Batya, has two older sisters. Both ran off with men their parents could not tolerate...
ListenSofia Grant, "Lies in White Dresses" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Francie Meeker and her best friend, Vi Carothers, bought into the promise offered to middle-class, especially white, women in the mid-twentieth-century United States: find a man with a good career,...
ListenGill Paul, "The Lost Daughter" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Grand Duchess Maria Romanova arrives in Ekaterinburg in 1918 with her parents, the former Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra. After months of house arrest in the deep interior of Russia, the ...
ListenLinnea Hartsuyker, "The Golden Wolf" (Harper, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When I spoke with Linnea Hartsuyker back in 2017, her epic saga was just beginning. The first novel opens with her hero, Ragnvald, seeing a vision of a golden wolf who will unite the feuding kingdo...
ListenKate Braithwaite, "The Girl Puzzle" (Crooked Cat Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nellie Bly is in some respects a household name, yet the passage of time has erased many of her accomplishments from popular memory. One of the first well-known female journalists, she wrote for Jo...
ListenLaury Silvers, “The Lover” (Kindle Direct Publishers, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Zaytuna just wants to be left alone to her ascetic practices and nurse her dark view of the world. But when an impoverished servant girl she barely knows comes and begs her to bring some justice to...
ListenLauren Willig, "The Summer Country" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Emily Dawson inherits a plantation in Barbados from her grandfather, Jonathan Fenty, in 1854, she is not quite sure what to make of the bequest. Emily, an English vicar’s daughter, has long be...
ListenC. W. Gortner, "The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna" (Ballentine Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
101 years have passed since the murder of the Imperial Family of Russia at Yekaterinburg, but their appeal has not diminished. Indeed, interest in the Romanovs is at a historic high as television ...
ListenAna Johns, "The Woman in the White Kimono" (Park Row Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Naoko Nakamura is only seventeen when she falls madly in love with an American navy man. It’s 1957, and the US occupation of Japan has ended just a few years before, leaving bitter memories in the ...
ListenAnn Weisgarber, "The Glovemaker" (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When a strange man knocks on Deborah Tyler’s door one January evening in 1888, she faces a difficult decision. She can guess that her visitor is a criminal, because who else would travel to her iso...
ListenElsa Hart, "City of Ink" (Minotaur Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If there is one thing more fun than discovering a new (to oneself) author, it is discovering a new author with a series already well underway. In City of Ink (Minotaur Books, 2018), the third of El...
ListenMadeline Miller, "Circe" (Little, Brown and Company, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Circe is an immortal naiad, the daughter of the Sun God, Helios. Ignored or belittled by her divine kin because of her human-sounding voice, dull-colored hair, and quiet manner, she turns to her li...
ListenLiza Perrat, "The Swooping Magpie" (Triskele Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lindsay Townsend is doing well at her high school in Wollongong, Australia. She’s pretty and popular and smart enough that she can spend as much time at the beach as she does hunched over her books...
ListenRosellen Brown, "The Lake on Fire" (Sarabande Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Against the backdrop of a gritty 1890’s Chicago teaming with labor problems, filthy sweatshops, and putrid stockyards, two young immigrants struggle to survive. Chaya and her brilliant younger brot...
ListenC.P. Lesley, "Song of the Siren" (Five Directions Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since being sold into slavery as a child and working her way up to becoming concubine and mistress for several different men, Lady Juliana's survival has depended on her allure. Then her place in t...
ListenJoan Neuberger, "This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most of the time, this podcast focuses on the products of those who create historical fiction—specifically, novels. But what goes into producing a work of historical fiction—especially in a dictato...
ListenKate Quinn, "The Huntress" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we think of World War II, we envision a catastrophe of massive proportions: millions killed in concentration camps, on the battlefield, during bombing raids and in the nuclear explosions that ...
ListenPam Jenoff, "The Lost Girls of Paris" (Park Row Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Although World War II has long been a favorite subject in both literature and history, a new interest seems to have developed in the multiple roles played by women during the war. In The Lost Girls...
ListenYang-Sze Choo, "The Night Tiger" (Flatiron Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Night Tiger (Flatiron Books, 2019) is much more than just a fantasy novel—it’s also a mystery, a historical novel, and a love story. Yang-Sze Choo accomplishes all this in one deft package. Set...
ListenTerry Gamble, "The Eulogist" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Olivia Givens and her family leave Ireland in 1819, they have no idea that they are distant victims of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia four years before. They know only that the crops are fai...
ListenP. K. Adams, "The Greenest Branch" (Iron Knight Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a remarkable woman by any standards. Known for her musical compositions and mystical prayers, Hildegard was also Germany’s first recognized...
ListenFrancis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” (Greywolf Press, 2012) from 2012-03-30T14:51:33
Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing ...
ListenFrancis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” (Greywolf Press, 2012) from 2012-03-30T14:51:33
Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing ...
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