New Books in Historical Fiction Marshall Poe

In 2007 Ukraine, following the death of her husband, Yefim Shulman, Nina finds a letter he wrote to the KGB confessing the secret he’d kept for over 50 years. If it came out that his unit was wiped out and he was taken as a prisoner of Germany during WWII, he would have been considered a traitor to the USSR. After surviving the Red Army, Nazi prison camps and forced labor, Yefim decides to keep the secret of his survival, and invents a story for his wife and children. In the post-war regime, the wrong lie can mean exile or death, and when years later, his presence is demanded by the KGB, he knows that it’ll be easier for him and his family if he’s completely honest. Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a story of Jewish survival, Russian deception, secrecy, and societal disfunction, and the struggle of Ukrainians to endure another war.
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author who grew up in Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She has an MA in Journalism from New York University, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, TIME, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, BBC Radio, USA Today, KQED, San Francisco Chronicle, The Telegraph, and Narrative. She has won several writing awards, including the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing and the NATJA award. Sasha lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.
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Few destinies are more challenging than life in the orbit of a man obsessed with expanding his power at all costs. Such is the fate endured by Ivan Ivanovich (Ivan the Young), eldest son of Russia’s Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) and the narrator of A. Engels’s novel, A Fool for an Heir.
While his father focuses on extending his reach into neighboring principalities and overcoming the legacy of a brutal civil war, little Ivan dreams of becoming a hero like those in the chronicles he reads with his tutor. The sudden, violent death of the boy’s mother forces him into the world of men, where he masters the skills of sword and bow, as well as the art of command. Yet even as Ivan marries and has children of his own, he remains in his father’s shadow.
Appalled by the older Ivan’s attacks against other lands—including some ruled by members of his own family—and by the cruel suppression of dissent both there and at home, Ivan the Younger increasingly feels driven to defend his father’s victims, especially one whom he sees as closer than a brother. He realizes only too late that his focus on the oppressed has blinded him to the presence of a deadlier, more determined enemy as ruthless as his sire.
Although set almost six hundred years ago, this novel derives an uncanny resonance from the war launched by Russia against Ukraine in 2022, where the justification of annexation and subjugation developed by Ivan III still play out in current events.
A. Engels writes historical fiction set in medieval Eastern Europe. A Fool for an Heir is her debut novel.
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.
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Inspired by the legends of Amazon women warriors told by ancient Greek historian Herodotus and evidenced by recent archaeological discoveries in Central Asia, Akmaral (Regal House Publishing, 2024) is the latest historical fiction novel by author Judith Lindbergh. Through the story of its eponymous main character, a nomadic warrior woman living in the Central Asian steppe in the 5th century BCE, Akmaral vividly brings to life the histories, cultures, and lifestyles of the ancient Sauromatae. In this episode, Judith joins me to talk about the Sauromatae, conducting historical research as a fiction writer, and what contemporary readers can learn about our current world through stories of the past.
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Stella St. Vincent, a thirty-something copy editor in 1980s New York, has survived a relationship with her mother, Celia, so complicated that even the words “my daughter” give Stella pause. Celia lived life to the fullest, reinventing herself and discarding anything that no longer pleased her, including Stella’s father, whom Celia refused even to name. And when Stella rebelled by becoming the exact opposite of her mother—disciplined, buttoned-down, reliant on schedules to guarantee safety—Celia did her best to push her daughter out of that comfort zone before distancing herself from Stella as well. So the bequest in Celia’s will is no accident: Stella inherits $8,000, a ticket to Paris, and instructions to spend all the money before returning home.
Stella resists until her employer forces her to take a leave of absence. Even then, Stella spends weeks in Paris scheduling every meal and sightseeing tour—until a strange shopkeeper intent on selling a beautiful dress designed by Yves St. Laurent sends Stella on a journey that will expose her to a lost nineteenth-century painting, the artist who created it, her own past, and the sensory experiences that she has denied herself for so long.
Captivating and beautifully written, The Paris Novel (Random House, 2024) contrasts the eternal story of a young woman finding herself with a historical mystery involving a nineteenth-century artists’ model whose own quest to chart a new course for her life challenged the conventions of her time.
Ruth Reichl—author of numerous books about food, former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and editor in chief of Gourmet Magazine from 1999 to 2009—has also written two novels: Delicious! (2014) and The Paris Novel (2024).
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.
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In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonising decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In that devastating split second, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiaodeng, is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. All Xiaodeng remembers of the fateful morning is betrayal.
Thirty years later, Xiaodeng is an acclaimed writer living in Canada with a caring husband and daughter. However, her newfound fame and success do little to cover the deep wounds that disrupt her life, time and again, and edge her toward a breaking point. Xiaodeng realises the only path toward healing is to return to Tangshan, find her mother, and get closure.
Spanning three decades of the emotional and cultural aftershocks of disaster, Zhang Ling’s intimate epic Aftershock (Amazon Crossing, 2024) explores the damage of guilt, the healing pull of family, and the hope of one woman who, after so many years, still longs to be saved.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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When Samuel Fiddes and Hailey MacIntyre meet by chance in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1878, their worlds appear to be far distant from each other. Samuel lives with his little sister, Alison, in a tenement—the two of them scrabbling to keep themselves fed and clothed. Hailey enjoys a comfortable middle-class life, although the expectations placed on her as a young woman restrict her future not simply to marriage and motherhood but to a union with the “right” man, defined in terms of wealth and prestige.
Despite this social gap, Samuel and Hailey form an instant bond after he rescues her younger brother from a near-fatal run-in with a careless carriage driver. Both know that Hailey’s parents disapprove of their friendship, never mind a budding romance, but a mix of attraction and teenage rebellion draws them together.
Then fate intervenes. Financial disaster strikes the MacIntyre family just as things start to look up for Samuel and Alison. Hailey’s father decides to move his family to Washington Territory, where he plans to oversee a coal mine. A few months later, Samuel sets off with Alison to follow them. But the Seattle of 1880 is nothing like what any of them expect. It will take a lot of time and effort, it turns out, for Samuel and Hailey to find each other in their wild and heavenly place.
Robin Oliveira is the New York Times bestselling author of three previous works of historical fiction. A Wild and Heavenly Place (Putnam, 2024) is her latest novel.
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.
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