New Books in Historical Fiction

Sixteen is a difficult age, lodged somewhere between childhood and adulthood. In 1755, young Noble Butler has just finished his apprenticeship as a carpenter, and he wants nothing more than to undertake more advanced training as a cabinetmaker (qualified to produce the beautiful furniture characteristic of prerevolutionary North America). But no one in Philadelphia will take him on as a prospective craftsman unless he can provide his own woodworking tools, and for that he needs cash. Noble has no money, and his father has a clear vision of his sons’ futures: expand the family farm and save craftsmanship for the off-season, when the family will need it to help the farm survive. But Noble has no desire to spend his life under Pa’s thumb. He sees a way out of his dilemma when Benjamin Franklin advertises for farmers to supply the troops fighting French and Lenapé warriors on the frontier. Presented with a moneymaking opportunity, Pa reluctantly agrees that Noble may volunteer and keep half his salary, so long as his older brother Enoch agrees to accompany the wagon. Pa doesn’t trust Noble, at sixteen, to bring horses, wagon, and cargo back safely. So Noble sets off along a war-torn trail that will test both his Quaker principles and his determination to define his own life, whatever his father’s plans for him may be. Janet Kastner Olshewsky‘s The Snake Fence (Quaker Bridge Media, 2013) is the first Young Adult (YA) novel to be featured on New Books in Historical Fiction. For more information and a sample chapter, check out Janet Olshewsky’s website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

There’s nothing quite like sitting down to write a novel about a man who, to quote Marie Macpherson, is blamed for “banning Christmas, football on Sundays,” and the like. What is one to do with such a subject, never mind making him interesting and sympathetic? Yet this is exactly what The First Blast of the Trumpet (Knox Robison Publishing, 2012) does for John Knox–best known as the dour misogynist who spearheaded the Scottish Reformation. Macpherson approaches Knox sideways through the character of Elizabeth Hepburn, a reluctant nun installed at the uncanonically young age of 24 as prioress of St. Mary’s Abbey to ensure the continued dominance of the earls of Bothwell (whose family name was Hepburn) over the abbey and its resources. Elizabeth’s determination to craft a life that suits her never wavers, despite the conflicting claims of her family, the lure of court politics, and the opposition of a male clergy bent on keeping women in their place. This wonderfully researched novel mixes history and fiction to reveal Scotland during its last century of independence in all its complexity, depravity, and richness; and as Elizabeth’s career increasingly intertwines with the childhood and youth of John Knox, the need for reform in the Scottish Catholic Church becomes ever clearer. The First Blast of the Trumpet is volume 1 of The Knox Trilogy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Claire Roth can’t believe her luck when the owner of Boston’s most prestigious art gallery offers her a one-woman show. Of course, there’s a catch: he asks her to copy a painting. A small price to pay to revive her stalled career, Claire thinks–until she discovers that the painting in question is Degas’s After the Bath, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as part of the greatest art heist in history. But as Claire wrestles with her conscience and tackles the Degas, she begins to suspect that the painting is no more “original” than her reproduction. Who forged it, and how has the imitation defied detection for so long? The answers depend on another moral line crossed more than a century ago. The Art Forger (Algonquin Books, 2012) has as many layers as one of Claire’s paintings. Join us as B. A. Shapiro talks about boundaries and choices, forgery and art, celebrity and value, the viewpoint of a visual artist, the trials of publishing and the joys of writing a bestselling novel–and “Belle” Gardner, who once walked lions down a Boston street and shocked the stuffy Brahmins with her low-cut gowns. Note that the present-day portion of The Art Forger takes place in 2011, not in 1991, as mentioned in the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Morocco in 1924 has political factions to spare. A rebellion in the Rif Mountains threatens to oust Spain from its protectorate in the north–a response to Spanish mistreatment of the local population, itself driven by the desire to avenge seven centuries of Moorish domination. The Germans worry about the iron mines barred to them by the revolt. South of the mountains, the French fight in vain to defend a line drawn without regard to traditional tribal or geographical boundaries. Britain fears that it will lose access to the Mediterranean if the French succeed. Meanwhile, the Rifi, under the leadership of the Abd-el-Krim brothers, are not the only leaders determined to rule an independent Morocco. The corrupt but charismatic Raisuli (al-Raisuni) has no intention of standing aside for a pair of military upstarts, however gifted. Into this hotbed of unrest strolls a moving picture crew intent on filming the desert at sunrise. The crew includes Mary Russell, the wife and partner of Sherlock Holmes. When the great detective himself returns from a side trip to discover that Mary was last seen days before, heading into the mountains in the company of an unknown child, her unexplained absence pulls Holmes and Russell into a web of threads that criss-cross to create a true garment of shadows. Join me as I discuss Garment of Shadows (Bantam Books, 2012)–the latest wonderful addition to Mary Russell’s memoirs–with Miss Russell’s faithful literary agent, Laurie R. King. Mary Russell Holmes has her own blog, which she maintains with some regularity as new volumes of her adventures appear. She has been supplying her agent with manuscripts for some time: the first volume is The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. To find out why Russell abandoned the hallowed halls of Oxford to work for Flytte Films, read The Pirate King, the previous book in the series. Either way, seek her out. You will not regret the decision. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

One night in the Russian imperial province of Courland, an eleven-year-old boy more than a little drunk on his parents’ champagne slips away from his aristocratic manor and heads for the village that houses his family’s Latvian farmhands. It is Christmas 1905, two months after Emperor Nicholas II of Russia’s October Manifesto has turned his autocracy into the semblance of a constitutional monarchy, and the subject peoples of his empire are restive. In Courland, a province governed by Baltic barons who descend from the thirteenth-century chivalric orders of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights, that hope for change centers on the populace’s desire for independence from its German overlords–even more than from the Russian Empire itself. Thus begins the story of Wiktor Rooks, a Baltic German boy who soon sees his family’s estate burned, its ancestral property lost, and his own future compromised. Wiktor yearns for the academic life, but family tradition requires him, as a second son, to become a soldier. He joins the Russian imperial army, which assigns him to spy on a unit full of Latvian soldiers fighting to rid themselves of men like him. Slowly he wins their trust, and the friendships he forms there–and the wartime atrocities he witnesses–send him into the ranks of the Latvian Red Riflemen. By 1918, he is guarding the new Soviet government. When Latvia achieves its independence in 1921, Wiktor’s fortunes change again, and he returns to the land of his birth. There he strives, once and for all, to overcome his past as the second son of a Baltic baron. But soon the forces of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia are massing, and tiny Latvia stands smack in their way. Follow  William Burton McCormick as he leads us along a less well-trodden but nonetheless fascinating historical path in his discussion of Lenin’s Harem. (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

“First do no harm.” Every doctor in the Western medical tradition swears to observe this basic principle of the Hippocratic oath before he or she receives a license to practice. Yet in Nazi Germany, doctors who had sworn to heal participated in grotesque medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners, conducted sterilization campaigns against their fellow-citizens, refused treatment to terminally ill patients, and supported euthanasia, eugenics, and antisemitism. How did they justify such a perversion of their calling? This is the question that Douglas R. Skopp addresses in Shadows Walking (CreateSpace, 2010), his extensively researched account of the intertwining lives–like the snakes on Aesculapius’s staff–of two fictional German doctors, the boyhood friends Johann Brenner and Philipp Stein, from 1928 to their final meeting near the end of World War II. The novel opens in Nuremberg in 1946, with Johann working under an alias as a janitor in the Palace of Justice, where the Allied trials of Nazi war criminals are underway. A chance meeting with his estranged wife–furious to discover that her husband has been hiding in the city for months–sparks in Johann a desire to explain in a letter the crimes he has committed since he last saw her, the reasons why he has allowed her to believe that he died in the last days of the war. Every paragraph of his letter leads into a flashback that reveals a segment of his past and pushes Johann farther down the road to Nazism and Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Philipp, as a German Jew, experiences the shrinking horizons and worsening abuse that Nazism inflicted on its victims. Because of its subject matter, Shadows Walking is not easy to read, but it is an important book, well worth the investment of time and energy. Skopptraces the path by which fundamentally decent people can descend into barbarism if they forget the importance of compassion. It could happen in Germany–and did. It could happen here. It could happen anywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Well-brought-up Victorian ladies don’t expect their childhood nemeses to write from out of the blue, pleading for help because, as the nemesis so tactfully puts it, “what lady of my rank would associate with persons who investigate crimes?” In this case, the crime is murder, and the summons brings Lady Emily Hargreaves post-haste from London to aid and support Contessa Emma Barozzi–nee Callum, and the nemesis from Emily’s past–whose husband the Venetian police suspect of dispatching his own father with a medieval stiletto and fleeing with Emma’s inheritance, a cache of illuminated Renaissance manuscript books. Although tempted to refuse Emma’s plea for help, Emily cannot abandon a fellow Englishwoman in the midst of crisis–or turn down an opportunity to overcome the petty dislikes of childhood. Moreover, Emily, through no fault of her own, has amassed a certain amount of experience in solving deadly crimes in London, Vienna, Istanbul, and rural France. With her husband, an agent of the British crown, she plunges into an unfamiliar, sometimes terrifying, but appealing world of art, gondolas, canals, decaying palazzi, back streets, brothels, bookstores, carnival figures, and ancient noble families with unresolved feuds that predate Romeo and Juliet. Soon Emily begins to suspect that the key to the mystery lies four centuries in the past, with links to the fifteenth-century ring found clasped in the victim’s dead hand. This is the seventh of Lady Emily’s adventures, which began with And Only to Deceive. The next in the Lady Emily series, Behind the Shattered Glass, is due off-press in October 2013. On what Tasha has in store for her characters after that, you will have to listen to the podcast. She is a wonderful speaker: I promise you will not be disappointed. And, of course, read Death in the Floating City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

When does history become performance art? In 1936, Joseph Stalin set out to eliminate any communist leader with sufficient prestige to threaten his monopoly on power. In what became known as the Great Terror, he instigated a series of show trials, with scripts written by his political police and entirely false charges, designed to cover up the mistakes of his forced industrialization and collectivization drives by blaming his rivals–especially his arch-rival, Leon Trotsky, by then in exile from the USSR. The first trial succeeded in terms of Stalin’s larger goal: the political police convinced the defendants to confess to their “crimes” in open court. Convicted of plotting against Stalin, the leaders were promptly shot. The purges rippled out from the center, sweeping up hundreds of thousands of mid-level bureaucrats and intellectuals throughout the Soviet Union. But the international community remained skeptical of trials that relied solely on confessions. So for the next show trial, held in 1937, Stalin’s police selected five witnesses to corroborate the faked charges against a new group of defendants. Julius Wachtel‘s Stalin’s Witnesses (Knox Robinson Publishing, 2012) explores the identity, careers, and psychology of these five men–and especially of Vladimir Romm, a journalist, diplomat, and Soviet spy who served in Washington, DC, for two years before his recall and arrest in August 1936. In Stalin’s Russia, fiction often seemed less fantastic than history. To understand the tragedy wreaked on individual lives by the state as performance artist, you can’t do better than to read Julius Wachtel’s Stalin’s Witnesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

It’s 1789, and despite the troubles in France, Emil Larsson, a sekretaire in the Customs Office in Stockholm, has life pretty much where he wants it. His job brings him lucrative under-the-table deals with pirates, smugglers, and innkeepers–not to mention a dashing red cape that appeals to the ladies–and he has managed to parlay his skill as a gambler into a partnership with the mysterious Mrs. Sparrow, owner of a prestigious private club dedicated to games of chance. But when the head of the Customs Office announces that every sekretaire must marry if he wishes to keep his post, Emil sees his carefree existence slipping away. Mrs. Sparrow offers to help by casting an octavo–a set of eight predictive cards representing key figures whom Emil must identify and manipulate to achieve his predicted future of love and connection. As Emil moves about the Town (Stockholm), every encounter assumes new meaning. Is this his Prisoner? His Key? His Courier? We don’t know, and neither does he. But as Emil’s quest continues, the stakes rise. The situation in France deteriorates; and the future of the Swedish monarchy and its king, Gustav III, increasingly hinges on Emil’s ability to decipher his octavo and influence the contest between Mrs. Sparrow and the fascinating Uzanne–mistress of the fan, foe of the king, and the person most likely to prevent Emil from attaining his goals. Fans of historical mystery and political intrigue will love Karen Engelmann‘s “irresistible cipher between two covers–an atmospheric tale of many rogues and a few innocents gambling on politics and romance in the cold, cruel north”–as Susann Cokal characterizes The Stockholm Octavo (ecco Books, 2012) in the New York Times Book Review (December 9, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Illegitimacy doesn’t mean much in today’s Europe and North America. In an age when we celebrate many different kinds of families, “bastard” has become an epithet thrown, most often inaccurately, at someone who upsets you. But that was not always true. In early 19th-century Russia, for example, you could marry in one church only to have the marriage denied in another, leaving your children unable to inherit, stripped even of your name. This reality defined the lives of fictional people, such as Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and real ones–for example, Alexander Herzen, the Russian socialist writer who took refuge in London after falling foul of Tsar Nicholas I. It defines the life of Nicolas Nijinsky, hero of The Estate of Wormwood and Honey (Russian Estate Books, 2012). Nicolas’s early life as the cherished only son of a rural nobleman vanishes in an instant when his mother dies and his father remarries. As a child, he cannot understand why abuse and mistreatment infringe on his carefree life or why his beloved father exiles him to an elite military school, where his fellow cadets do not hesitate to throw his questionable birth in his face. His only friend is Sergey, the equally despised son of a noncommissioned officer killed at the Battle of Borodino. Soon Sergey becomes the scapegoat for another rich man’s son, and Nicolas must face his tormentors alone. Until, fifteen years later, his fortunes change, and he returns to his childhood home with Sergey at his side and one goal in mind: to settle scores with those who drove him away. Follow us into the past as Julian Berengaut kicks off New Books in Historical Fiction by discussing The Estate of Wormwood and Honey. For Russian literature buffs everywhere. I am your host, C. P. Lesley, and I hope you will join me for many such conversations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction