Best Historical Fiction

 “In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Europe still held intact its gift for understanding ancestral images and symbols. Its people knew how and when to interpret the design on a column, a particular figure in a painting or a simple sign on the road, even though only a minority had, in those days, learned to read and write. With the arrival of the Age of Reason, the gift for interpreting such languages was lost, and with it, a good part of the richness bequeathed to us by our ancestors. This book makes use of many of those symbols as they were conceived once upon a time. But it also intends to restore to the modern reader the ability both to understand them and to benefit from their infinite wisdom.” Father Agostino Leyre is part of a secret order, faithful to the Pope and to the highest powers in the Dominican Order. He was trained to decipher messages. In Rome, he collects letters from an anonymous witness detailing operation of a sorcerer in the lands of Ludovico il Mor...

 Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western Art. At the age of 37, when he committed suicide, he was largely unknown despite having completed over 2,000 works of art that would later go on to become some of the most important and valued in the world. This story is told from the point of view of Vincent’s personal physician, Dr. Gachet, who was a pioneer in the humane treatment of the mentally ill and a great lover of the arts. Camille Pissarro recommends his friend-doctor to Theo van Gogh, who is looking for the right doctor for his brother Vincent. Dr. Gachet, as a young student, “cared deeply about medical problems, but what he wanted to talk about was art. (…) And thus over the years he came to know them all – Courbet and Manet, Pissarro and Cezanne, Monet and Renior, Sisley and Guillaumin.” Vincent comes under Dr. Gachet’s care already after the incident with slashi...

 Inspired by a true story, “the Washington Children’s Home Society donated a baby boy to be raffled off at the great Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909. (…) 1909 was also the height of Washington State’s suffrage movement. (…) Also during that time workers from China were being smuggled into North America despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Young women were still being sold as Mui Tsai in China, or Karayuki-san in Japan, often ending up in the United States, where they worked as slaves or indentured servants, more than fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation.” This story begins in 1902. Young is “the bastard son of a white missionary and a Chinese girl, (…) an outcast in both of their worlds.”  Desperately poor, his mother sends him at the age of 5 to America with a supposed uncle. A so called uncle is a white merchant in an elegant suit, who takes Young and many other kids on his ship. The sailors are blackbirders; “sailors who sold poor Chinese to...

 Author’s Note: “This book isn’t about the Jesus found in the New Testament, but the Jesus who was left out – the enlightened Jesus. The gospel writers are silent about “the lost years,” as they are known, covering the span in Jesus’s life between the ages of twelve and thirty.” This story is based on the premise that Jesus wanted “us to reach the same unity with God that he had reached. (…) To do that, Jesus has to be brought into the scheme of everyday life. He worries about violence and unrest; he wonders if God is listening; he is intensely absorbed in the question, “Who am I?”” In the village of Nazareth, two types of people lived, “people of the mountains and people of the roads, that is, those who stayed at home and those who traveled. (…) But Jesus was rare. He was of the mountains and the roads both.” What Jesus and his brother James witness is the continuous rise of Zealot rebels against Romans. And wonder themselves which path to pick? “The Zealots had bitterly d...