Maybe it’s the luck of the publishing draw, maybe the emotional weather, but my choices for the 10 best historical novels seem to have more bite than in past years. Here they are, ready to be argued about, in alphabetical order.
Black Butterflies
By Priscilla Morris
A searing portrait of the siege of Sarajevo during the early months of the Bosnian war, as experienced by an artist who, having sent her family to safety in England, becomes stranded in her beloved city while daily life descends into a desperate struggle for survival. Although her studio has been destroyed in the relentless bombing and she has lost touch with her husband and daughter, she finds solace in the tenacity of her friends and neighbors.
Burma Sahib
By Paul Theroux
In the autumn of 1922, a 19-year-old Etonian named Eric Blair becomes an officer in the British forces ruling over the Burmese sector of the Raj. Expecting to find himself through his work, instead he discovers just how ill-suited he is to the whole imperial project. Theroux’s nicely sardonic evocation of these few years suggests that the tensions and hypocrisy of colonial life played an important part in forming the writer who would soon be known as George Orwell.
Clear
By Carys Davies
Ivar is the last inhabitant of a tiny remote island, speaker of a dying language and caretaker of a dying tradition. When an impoverished minister is hired to evict him, an unexpected — and deeply affecting — bond is formed. In the final days of mid-19th-century Scotland’s Highland Clearances, the fate of Ivar’s homestead is sealed, but perhaps some of his heritage can be salvaged.
The Empusium
By Olga Tokarczuk
The Polish Nobelist’s subtle and provocative response to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” is likewise set in a German sanitarium on the eve of World War I. Subtitled “A Health Resort Horror Story,” it’s a good deal more. As its young hero submits to the ministrations of his doctors and the musings of his fellow patients, larger — and often darker — philosophical arguments unspool.
Held
By Anne Michaels
The Canadian poet’s multigenerational family saga was a finalist for Britain’s Booker Prize. An elegant jigsaw of images and observations, it begins in the trenches of World War I with a soldier’s impressions of what’s essentially a “450-mile grave” and ends in the near future as one of his descendants explores the streets of a city on the Gulf of Finland.
James
By Percival Everett
A brilliantly subversive — and often slyly humorous — retelling of Mark Twain’s classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” as seen from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved runaway companion. Of course, Jim turns out to be a far more complicated character than Twain’s original would suggest. Among the final contenders for the Booker Prize, this novel just won the National Book Award.
Star 111
By Lutz Seiler
An autobiographical picaresque that reconstructs the exhilarating yet often terrifying experiences of individual East Germans in that brief period between the collapse of the Communist regime and reunification. Its central character, a 26-year-old aspiring poet, drifts through East Berlin’s anarchic underground squatter scene after his parents abandon their home and flee to a refugee camp in the West.
This Strange Eventful History
By Claire Messud
Inspired by the French-Algerian heritage of her own grandparents, Messud eloquently explores seven decades and several generations of one itinerant family’s quest for a sense of belonging. Beginning in 1940 and ending in the present day, her narrative moves gracefully between North Africa and Europe, with detours to North and South America and even Australia.
The Wildes
By Louis Bayard
A wonderfully witty and often heartbreaking depiction of the consequences of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous downfall — not for the playwright himself, but rather his wife and two sons. After the initial marital implosion in rural England, the narrative moves to the Ligurian coast, where Constance Wilde lives in exile under an assumed name. Then it’s on to the battlefields of World War I France, followed by a stop in 1920s Soho, where the youngest Wilde comes face to face with the man who, as his mother once put it, “set off an explosion that never stops exploding.”
You Dreamed of Empires
By Álvaro Enrigue
An acerbically comic take on the Spanish conquest of Mexico, this rollicking tale pokes delicious (and often hallucinatory) fun at both the indolent court of Moctezuma and the bickering, befuddled entourage of the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Neither side has much of a clue about the other, with predictably disastrous consequences.
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