Best Historical Fiction

  Jacqueline in Paris reimagines Jacqueline’s junior year abroad, which later turns out to be her favorite year in her life and one of her greatest influences. In August 1949, Jacqueline breaks away from the Vassar College in New York, which felt isolated and constrained. She is making her way to Paris as she craves to experience freedom and what Paris has to offer: experimental theater, modern dance, and love. She boards with de Renty family. Soon after her arrival, she finds out that Madame de Renty with her husband were part of a spy ring during the war. Her husband died in prison and she managed to survive. In north Germany, in the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbruck, where very few survived. Jacqueline has a hard time imagining it as she knows Madame with a gentle voice and dressed in bright colors, but now, she recalls some cries in the morning hours. After the war, the communists become the new enemy. Some start working as spies for the government again. Madame volunteers

  Corfu Island, 1947. The time period is beautifully breathed into this story from the first pages, when we meet a young girl named Katerina and her father, Laki. She is considered a lucky one; as a provincial girl she receives an education thanks to a new teacher, who has no tolerance for ignorance of such views as provincial girls not receiving education. Former teacher was passionate about expressing his views against the monarchist citizens of Corfu, who were brainwashed in their support of the royal family and deaf to the plight of the poor Greeks. His political views were seen as extreme and he was seen as not fit to be a teacher of their children. Laki is a staunched supporter of the monarchy, but the teacher’s words continue to play in his mind. The Communists were the ones who led the resistance and fought so valiantly against the Germans. That was initially, but now, those who refuse to support the Communist party are being slaughtered. He witnesses his own people turning a