Historical

Indie Corner – Jaimee Wriston

Back to the Indie Corner series I’m thrilled to talk with Jaimee Wriston Colbert again. In this Indie Corner, we explore her new novel How Not to Drown (written as Jaimee Wriston). We’ve chatted before  at Dragonfly about her books Wild Things and Vanishing Acts. So when I found a […]

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The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma

In a small town in western Nigeria, four young brothers take advantage of their strict father’s absence from home to go fishing at a forbidden local river. They encounter a dangerous local madman who predicts that the oldest boy will be killed by one of his brothers. This prophecy unleashes […]

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The Year Without Summer, Guinevere Glasfurd

Author Guinevere Glasfurd tells Historia how a local news story showed her the way to write her sweeping climate change novel, TheYear Without Summer, which was shortlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award in 2020. –Historia Mag Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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Infinite Country, Patricia Engel

Infinite Country is a multi generational family saga about a Colombian family with mixed citizenship status. The story is told through different family members perspectives, time periods, and Andean mythology. The heartache and hope interwoven into this fractured family due to the US’s atrocious immigration policies was so visceral. I […]

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How Beautiful We Were, Imbolo Mbue

“We should have known the end was near.” So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Goodreads Reviews Back to […]

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The Four Winds, Kristin Hannah

Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great […]

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Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan

Aljaz Cosini is leading a group of tourists on a raft tour down Tasmania’s wild Franklin River when his greatest fear is realized—a tourist falls overboard. An ordinary man with many regrets, Aljaz rises to an uncharacteristic heroism, and offers his own life in trade. Trapped under a rapid and […]

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Betty, Tiffany McDaniel

“A girl comes of age against the knife.” So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence–both from outside the family, and […]

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Crooked Hallelujah, Kelli Jo Ford

Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine–a mixed-blood Cherokee woman– and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels […]

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Dr. Wangari Maathai Plants a Forest, Rebel Girls

From the world of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls comes the historical novel based on the life of Dr. Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist from Kenya. Wangari lives in a magical place in rural Kenya where the soil is rich for planting, the trees abundant, and the […]

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Animal’s People, Indra Sinha

Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People looks at the Bhopal gas explosion in India – one of the most horrific environmental disasters of the 20th-century. A poisonous gas leak from a US-owned pesticide plant killed several thousand people and injured more than half a million. –The Independent Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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Heart Wood, Shirley DicKard

Complete title: Heart Wood — Four Women, for the Earth, for the Future Heart Wood is a compelling family saga set in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. Its characters shift from one generation to the next, as do the struggles they face in saving their homestead from the ravages […]

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Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It’s difficult to highlight the eco-horror in this one without spoiling the twist, but suffice it to say, the Doyles have a hefty supernatural secret. In Mexican Gothic, the horror isn’t in nature turning against people but is in the way that extraction of natural resources helps entrench colonial powers […]

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The Yield, Tara June Winch

Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Deep River, Karl Marlantes

Layered with fascinating historical detail, this is a novel that breathes deeply of the sun-dappled forest and bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind. At its heart, Deep River is an extraordinarily ambitious exploration of the place of the individual, and […]

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