Archives de catégorie : Historical Fiction

THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA de Juliet Grames

One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy.

THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA
by Juliet Grames
Knopf, July 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.

Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When an old woman begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.

Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.

Juliet Grames is the best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Real Simple, Parade, and The Boston Globe, and she is the recipient of an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She is editorial director at Soho Press in New York.

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE de Julian Zabalbeascoa

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE is a daring, haunting, and, at times, darkly funny work of fiction that will both transport you to the treacherous days of the Spanish Civil War and bring into sharper focus the world we find ourselves in today.

WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE
by Julian Zabalbeascoa
Two Dollar Radio, Fall 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain to join the fight to preserve his country’s democracy from the fascists. Months earlier, a group of Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain’s newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

Isidro’s odyssey through war-ravaged Spain connects him to a diverse cast of characters on both sides of the war—a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her to fight against the fascists, a mother of two who is secretly an anonymous writer of liberal propaganda, and a fascist soldier determined to avenge his murdered captain, among several others. Through this chorus of voices, we follow Isidro and many others as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart.

Conceived as a unified piece of fiction and unfolding in chronological order, WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE has the scope and power of a traditional novel, though its episodic structure and shifting perspectives also call to mind books like Julia Philips’s Disappearing Earth and Phil Klay’s Redeployment.

A remarkable feat of research and imagination, Julian’s all too timely fiction brings both the Spanish Civil War, and, by extension, the many atrocities unfolding today, into stark relief, as Isidro and others navigate a country where cities are shelled beyond recognition, where the big lies of fascism have poisoned many members of society, and where even the most heinous acts of horror have quickly become permissible. 

“A stunning first novel, ambitious, intensely true, certain to be read for a long time. Zabalbeascoa is a phenomenon. » – Phillip Meyer, NY Times bestselling author of The Son and American Rust

“In the tradition of such master storytellers as Isaac Babel and Phil Klay, Julian Zabalbeascoa has written a piercing narrative set during the Spanish Civil War.  Alive with wonderful characters, moments of dread, bathos and humour, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here illuminates a crucial period of history.  This is a timely and important story.” – Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field,  Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“Julian Zabalbeascoa is the real deal, a major talent, and the story he’s telling here is both riveting and terrifying.”  —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls

A first-generation Basque-American (dual citizen), Julian Zabalbeascoa is a Visiting Professor in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches classes on Basque culture and the Spanish Civil War and leads annual study abroad programs to Donostia-San Sebastian, Havana, and Madrid. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. His interviews and reviews have appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature and The Millions.

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON d’Ellen Baker

Orphan Train meets Before We Were Yours meets Water for Elephants in this compelling multigenerational novel of survival, love, and the families we make.

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON
by Ellen Baker
Mariner Books, February 2024

In 1924, four-year-old Cecily Larson’s mother reluctantly drops her off at an orphanage in Chicago, promising to be back once she’s made enough money to support both Cecily and herself. But she never returns, and shortly after high-spirited Cecily turns seven, she is sold to a traveling circus to perform as the “little sister” to glamorous bareback rider Isabelle DuMonde. With Isabelle and the rest of the circus, Cecily finally feels she’s found the family she craves. But as the years go by, the cracks in her little world begin to show. And when teenage Cecily meets and falls in love with a young roustabout named Lucky, she finds her life thrown onto an entirely unexpected—and dangerous—course.

In 2015, Cecily is now 94 and living a quiet life in Minnesota, with her daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandson. But when her family decides to surprise her with an at-home DNA test, the unexpected results not only bring to light the tragic love story that Cecily has kept hidden for decades but also throw into question everything about the family she’s raised and claimed as her own for nearly seventy years. Cecily and everyone in her life must now decide who they really are and what family—and forgiveness—really mean.

Sweeping through a long period of contemporary history, THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON is an immersive, compelling, and entertaining family drama centered around one remarkable woman and her determination to survive.

Ellen Baker is the author of Keeping the House and I Gave My Heart to Know This. She has worked as a bookseller and event coordinator at an independent bookstore. Originally from the Upper Midwest, she currently lives in Maine.

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH d’Eliana Ramage

Told through an intricately woven constellation of narrative, it’s a novel of ambition and sacrifice, humor and desire, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths one woman goes to find space for herself.

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
by Eliana Ramage
Avid Reader Press, TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH is Eliana Ramage’s debut novel about a young, queer Cherokee woman relentlessly determined to become an astronaut. It’s a book whose expansive heart, powerfully realized characters, thematic richness, and ambitious sweep are reminiscent of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by way of Andy Weir, Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs) and Kelli Jo Ford.

Spanning almost thirty years, and several continents, it’s also a book that stretches to encompass the multifaceted lives of four different Cherokee women. There’s Steph Harper, our obsessive, determined, at times maddening aspiring astronaut, but also: her younger sister Kayla Harper, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous influencer and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Sixkiller, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah Harper, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who ran from an abusive husband back into the arms of the capital of the Cherokee Nation when her girls were young and who’s been afraid to look back ever since.

Each of these women is running from something across this novel — but ultimately, HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH asks what it could look like instead to run toward. Time and again, Ramage urges readers to find a way to hold, with empathy, more than one strand of history, more than one idea, more than one way of being Indian — or being anyone — in their heads at once. Hers is a debut about family and community, earthly fragility, women in STEM, complicity and reckoning, visibility in the face of generational erasure, and what it looks like to find pinpricks of hope even against a backdrop of darkness. I could not possibly love it more.

Eliana Ramage is a queer Cherokee Nation citizen living in Nashville. She was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been a Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellow, a Lambda Literary fellow, a Harpo Foundation Native American Residency Fellow at Vermont Studio Center, and a Tin House Scholar. One excerpt from this novel won the CRAFT Elements Short Fiction Prize, and another was chosen for The Masters Review Anthology. Her stories have also appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal and The Baltimore Review.

THE STAR ON THE GRAVE de Linda Margolin Royal

Inspired by the incredible true story of the Japanese diplomat who defied his government to save thousands from the Nazis.

THE STAR ON THE GRAVE
by Linda Margolin Royal
Affirm Press (Australia), February 2024
(via DeFiore and Company)

In 1940, as the Nazis sweep toward Lithuania, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara defies his own government and secretly issues thousands of visas to Jewish refugees desperate to flee. After the war, Sugihara is dismissed and disappears into obscurity.

In 1968 Australia, Rachael Margol, her father and her grandmother live disconnected from one another and haunted by unspoken tragedies. When Rachel announces her engagement to a Greek Orthodox man, it detonates a long-held secret. The Margols are actually the Margolins: they are Jewish, and her family has concealed their identity from her and the world. But why?

As Rachel struggles to understand this deception, an opportunity arrives to travel to Japan with her beloved grandmother to meet Sugihara, Rachel is determined to go but will a journey to Japan, and the secrets it uncovers, heal the Margolins or fracture them for good?

An extraordinary novel inspired by the true story of Sugihara, and the thousands of people – including the author – who owe him their lives. Chiune Sugihara has been called the « Japanese Schindler » and it’s estimated that 100,000 people are alive today because of him.

Linda Margolin Royal was born in Sydney, forever thankful her father and grandparents received life-saving transit visas from Chiune Sugihara in 1940, which enabled them to enter Japan and escape the Holocaust; and ultimately meant they could find a permanent, safe home in Australia in 1941. The remainder of her family were murdered in concentration camps. This work is a labor of love to which she is now devoting her life. She trained as a graphic designer and then copywriter, and spent 30 years in the advertising industry both in Australia and the US, writing TV, radio and press for major multinationals. THE STAR ON THE GRAVE is her first novel.