New Historical Fiction at the Top of My List

I’ve mentioned this one already as one of the biggest books out this spring, so it making an appearance as one of my most highly anticipated historical fiction releases this year makes sense.

Here’s what I said about it before: Through Nikki, who has returned to North Carolina at the request of her estranged grandmother, we learn about past queens of Appalachia. During the visit, Mother Rita tells Nikki about her great-great-great grandmother, Queen Luella, who lived on the very land they stand on. There was a kingdom called Happy Land, where formerly enslaved people made memories of African kingdoms flesh. Now, it’s up to Nikki to reclaim what they established, lest it be taken from her family like everything else.

New Stephen Graham Jones is always cause for celebration, and his latest offers up his usual Indigenous-centered horror. This time, it largely takes place out west, in 1912. It’s also full of sweet, sweet revenge.

The diary of a Lutheran pastor from 1912 is found a hundred years after it was written, and what is in it is almost unbelievable. The pastor recorded his interviews with a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who can not seem to die, and who has a taste for blood. Good Stab is connected to a slow massacre that traces all the way back to the very real Marias Massacre, in which 217 Blackfeet people were killed by the U.S. Army.

Jerkins’ (Caul Baby) latest has this vital duality. It’s about the lasting consequences of slavery, just as it is about the power of love. It’s 1865, and Harrison has been discharged from the Union Army as a free man, so he tries to reunite with his love, Tirzah. His plans get rearranged, though, after he settles with another woman after a tragedy. Then there’s Tirzah, who teaches at the Freedman’s School. She sees an ad in the paper looking for her and knows it’s Harrison looking for her, but the state of the world, despite her new freedom, means reuniting with him is full of risk. Jerkins’ narrative sweeps over generations, and 150 years later, in 2019 Harlem, Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party, and he gives her a crumbling, aged love letter. The question of whether their connection was some sort of cosmic reconciliation, started generations ago, arises.

This is quite the unique romantasy. For one, it takes place in an Ancient Rome-inspired world, and I can’t say I’ve read anything before that did. Secondly, it’s a legal thriller that follows an 18-year-old girl who is trying to find out who tried to kill her four years ago. Her name is Sarai, and she now works as a Petitor, or a prosecutor who can detect lies with magic. She ends up getting assigned to the most vicious and sadistic of the four ruling judges, Tetrarch Kadra, who also happens to be the prime suspect in a string of murders that are very similar to Sarai’s attempted murder. But this is still a romantasy, and if you hadn’t already guessed, Sarai starts finding Kadra’s charm hard to resist, even as she plots his destruction by night.

Cañas’s The Hacienda had me by the throat when it first came out. Listening to it on audiobook had me looking over my shoulder. The atmosphere was rich—very gothic, very demure. That’s why her latest—which has a demonic possession (!!)—is on this list. I also got an advanced copy of it and am super excited to get into it.

It’s 1765 when a plague strikes Zacatecas, Mexico. Alba is privileged and able to flee with her wealthy parents to her fiancé Carlos’s isolated mine. But then other things start happening: she starts having strange hallucinations, sleep walking, and having very violent convulsions. There’s also the matter of that thing that cold angry thing that’s lurking just beneath her skin.

Elías is Carlos’s cousin. He is off to the New World to make his own way outside of his family’s greed, but he can’t seem to stop thinking about Alba and the growing tension between them…or the way she’s started to deteriorate as the demon’s desires grow stronger.