Best Historical Fiction

  Margery Kempe (1373-1438) was “a mystic living in the full stream of worldly life – she triumphed in transforming herself from a desperate housewife into an intrepid world traveler and lifelong pilgrim.” England, 1392. Margery is a daughter of a trader. At the age of nineteen, the seas claim the man she loves. Thus, she marries a man her family picks for her, almost twice her age, to avoid cloistered life. Life behind the walls is not meant for her. She knows that there is so much more beyond some walls or beyond her town of Lynn. She has seen York and she craves to explore other places. While continuously giving births and to keep herself sane, she makes “weekly visits to Master Alan, the holy and high-learned anchorite who reads” books to her and feeds her mind and spirit. Now pregnant with her fourteenth child, her visions which started with her first birth have intensified strongly and she can’t stop them. She feels that she needs to act on it. And fearing that another pregna...

  Based on a true story. Against all odds, WWII brings two people from two corners of the world. They both have the same mission to defy the Germans. She passes a note to him through the wire of the compound as she is searching for her brother. He can’t forget this young lady disguised as an elderly woman. Slovenia (part of former Yugoslavia), 1942. Bruce Murray is a prisoner of war at Stalag camp on the outskirts of Maribor. Through a barbed wire, he receives a note from a woman. A note written in a language he doesn’t understand. Maribor, 1942. Josefine Lobnik carries a package of documents from one partisan group to another when she encounters Bruce at Stalag camp. Recently, her brother was captured by Germans and now she searches for him. She passes a note to a stranger at a camp asking if her brother is there. Both stories go back in time and interestingly reveal backgrounds of both characters. Through his story, we get a more frivolous approach to war, at first. With his two ...

    The Dust Bowl during the 1930s was the worst environmental disaster in the US history, accompanied by the collapse of the economy and the effect of massive unemployment, resulting in massive migration of people from the Great Plains and other parts of the country to California. California was advertised as the land of milk and honey. Was it so? Texas, 1921. Elsa Wolcott is twenty-five-years-old. She was a sickly child forced to stay home and not able to finish her schooling. Within the comfort of her own room, she continues to take adventures from the pages of her books she devours. At her age, she is considered a spinster and unmarriageable one as declared by her mother since men desire attractive women and Elsa is not. Dalhart in Texas is part of the flat, Great Plains stretching as far as eyes could see, “a sea of prosperous land. (…) … A gold mind of wheat and corn.” Despite the Great War, Dalhart experienced “booming economic times.” This “making everyone in town ...

  In 1662 Boston divorce is almost unheard of. But under the strain of abuse, does the impossible become the plausible? Even if under the threat of death by hanging? Mary Deerfield notices a pattern with her husband Thomas. He drinks, he hits her, and then goes away and drinks more. When he is busy at the mill that usually puts him in good spirits. Thus, drinking “only as much cider and beer as he needed to quench his thirst.” But one day, he stabs a fork into her hand flatly placed on the table to discipline her. And he isn’t even drink-drunk. According to the law, a husband has a write to discipline his wife. He doesn’t seem to see his brutality, but Mary does, and she’s reached the breaking point. She has heard of the word before. And it’s divorce. There are some who envy her because of her parents’ wealth and privilege “in ways that few others were in Boston.” Her father, a renowned merchant, knows the governor and the magistrates, and he would know what to do to begin this...