Historical Fiction

The Cherokee Rose

by Tiya Miles A rerelease of a previously published book following a substantial revision, The Cherokee Rose is a work of fiction written by a historian at the top of her field.  Miles is a professor at Harvard University and the Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study, and if you haven’t read her fantastic works of…

The Radcliffe Ladies Reading Club

by Julia Bryan Thomas Overall: I was attracted to this book as I went to Harvard, and I looked forward to getting to know more about my predecessors at Radcliffe College. Radcliffe was the women’s college adjacent to Harvard founded in the late 19th century; the two merged completely in 1999. The Radcliffe Ladies’ Reading…

The Sweetness of Water

by Nathan Harris Overall: Lyrical and introspective, The Sweetness of Water tells the story of two families in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.  Prentiss and Landry are brothers, formerly enslaved Black men, who have decided to leave Georgia but don’t yet know where they’re going or how they’ll get there.  Meanwhile, George…

Hungry Ghosts

By Kevin Jared Hosein Overall: A tragic novel set in Trinidad in the 1940s, Hungry Ghosts introduces us to a small but complicated corner of the Caribbean. The reader meets the residents of a sugar cane barracks, once home to indentured servants on the nearby plantation but now home to entire impoverished families doing their…

The Mitford Affair

by Marie Benedict Overall: I’m fascinated by the Mitford sisters and have read several biographies about them as well as many of Nancy Mitford’s books. This work of historical fiction looks at the lives of three of the sisters, Nancy, Diana, and Unity, in the years leading up to World War II. Diana famously divorces…

Yellow Wife

by Sadeqa Johnson Overall: Yellow Wife takes on one of the most thorny and difficult topics of slavery, forced marriage between an enslaved woman and her master. Pheby Delores Brown may have grown up as a favored child on an isolated plantation, illegally taught to read by her master’s sister, given piano lessons, and allowed…

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