Historical Fiction Books to Read This Winter That Are Actually Interesting

1928, Miyoung has dreams too big for her tiny farming village in Japan-occupied Korea. She dreams of becoming a teacher, avoiding an arranged marriage, and writing her own future. When she is offered the chance to live with her older sister in Japan, her dreams are within reach, but it will mean leaving her sick mother behind.

Once in Kyoto, Miyoung realizes that anti-Korean sentiment is on the rise, and she must pass as Japanese if she expects to survive. Her Japanese name, Miyoko, helps her find a new calling as a nurse, but as time passes, she fears her true self is slipping away. She seeks solace in a Korean church group and, within it, finds something she never expected: a romance with an activist that reignites her sense of purpose and gives her a cherished son.

As war looms on a new front and Miyoung feels the constraints of her adopted home tighten, she is faced with a choice that will change her life―and the lives of those she loves―forever.

Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor, Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. In 1581, young Emilia Bassano’s lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theater productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.

In 1965, the world is changing, and nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. She meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost. But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959: On the grounds of a grand country house, a local man makes a terrible discovery. Police are called, and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most baffling murder investigations in the history of South Australia. Many years later, Jess is a London journalist in search of a story. A phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother Nora is seriously ill in the hospital. At Nora’s house, Jess discovers a true crime book chronicling a long-buried police case: the Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. It is only when Jess skims through its pages that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this notorious event—a mystery that has never been satisfactorily resolved.

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There they try to reclaim their lives. The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path.

1348. As the Black Plague ravages Italy, Ginevra di Gasparo is summoned to Florence after nearly a decade of lonely exile. Ginevra has a gift—harnessing the hidden powers of gemstones, she can heal the sick. But when word spread of her unusual abilities, she was condemned as a witch and banished. Now the same men who expelled Ginevra are begging for her return. Ginevra obliges, assuming the city’s leaders are finally ready to accept her unorthodox cures amid a pandemic. But upon arrival, she discovers she’s merely a pawn in a much larger scheme.

2019: Kate flees London for Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great aunt she barely remembers. But her great aunt had a secret. It lurks in the bones of the cottage, hidden ever since the witch hunts of the 17th century.

1619: When Altha was a girl, her mother taught her their magic, a kind not rooted in spell casting but in a deep knowledge of the natural world. But unusual women have always been deemed dangerous.

1942: As World War II rages, Violet is trapped in her family’s grand, crumbling estate. She longs for her mother, who was rumored to have gone mad before her death. The only traces Violet has of her are a locket bearing the initial W and the word weyward scratched into the baseboard of her bedroom.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life.

When Kitty Karr Tate, a white icon of the silver screen, dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the St. John sisters, three young, wealthy Black women, it prompts questions. A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty’s affairs than deal with the press. But in one of Kitty’s journals, she finds the truth behind Kitty’s ascent to stardom from her beginnings in the segregated South, which threatens to expose a web of unexpected family ties, debts owed, and debatable crimes.

On the cusp of 80, newly retired pharmacist Augusta Stern is adrift. When she relocates to an active senior community in southern Florida, she unexpectedly crosses paths with Irving Rivkin, the delivery boy from her father’s old pharmacy―and the man who broke her heart 60 years earlier. In 1920s Brooklyn, when Augusta’s mother dies and Great Aunt Esther moves in, Augusta can’t help but be drawn to Esther’s curious methods―unconventional remedies, mysterious arrays of powders and potions—and she impulsively uses Esther’s most potent elixir with disastrous consequences. Sixty years later, confronted with Irving, Augusta is still haunted by the mistakes of her past. What happened all those years ago, and how did her plan go so spectacularly wrong?

1826. Isobel Tait finds herself, by chance, staring at a tiny human heart floating in a jar. It should be of little consequence; Dr. Burnett is renowned for his collection of oddities and medical specimens, and this, a juvenile heart with a damaged mitral valve, is not the strangest thing on display. Except that the condition is rare and that Isobel’s young son, who has been missing for months, suffered from the ailment. Missing persons cases are all too common in Edinburgh, but Burnett is obsessed with his specimens—how far would he go to acquire a new one? Determined to investigate, Isobel joins his staff as the keeper of his collection. What she’ll unearth, though, is far worse than any of her nightmares.

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake. Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. Their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine the cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime, and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. As the trial nears and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into an unlikely friendship. Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?