Historical Fiction

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Enter Ghost

Isabella Hammad

What does it mean to perform a tragedy when your own life is shaped by one? After a painful love affair, British-Palestinian actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her sister, reconnecting with a homeland she has long kept at a distance. There, she joins a daring theatrical production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the occupied West Bank, playing Gertrude alongside a company of Palestinian actors determined to bring the play to life despite political restrictions, personal rivalries, and the daily realities of occupation. As rehearsals progress, Sonia begins to reconsider her relationship with Palestine, her family, and her own identity. Weaving Shakespearean tragedy with contemporary Palestinian experience, Isabella Hammad’s powerful novel explores displacement, resistance, and the transformative potential of art when simply telling a story becomes an act of defiance.

An Unlasting Home

An Unlasting Home

How do you belong to a country you have spent your life wanting to leave? In Kuwait, philosophy professor Sara faces the threat of execution after being accused of blasphemy for teaching Nietzsche. As she awaits trial, she revisits the lives of the women who shaped her: two grandmothers and two mothers whose stories stretch across Kuwait, Iraq, India, Lebanon, and the United States. Spanning nearly a century of upheaval, migration, and changing social expectations, this sweeping family saga explores the complicated ties between women, their homeland, and the histories they inherit. Can Sara find a place for herself in a world where home can be both a refuge and a prison?

Every Rising Sun: A Retelling of The One Thousand and One Nights

Every Rising Sun: A Retelling of The One Thousand and One Nights

Before Shaherazade became the legendary storyteller who captivated a king for a thousand and one nights, she was a young woman whose words set an empire ablaze. In twelfth-century Persia, Shaherazade discovers a dangerous secret about the king’s wife, Fataneh. When she reveals the truth, the king’s fury unleashes a wave of executions, as he begins marrying and beheading a new bride each night. Haunted by the consequences of her actions, Shaherazade volunteers to become his next wife, determined to stop the bloodshed. Armed with her intelligence, political instincts, and extraordinary gift for storytelling, she begins weaving tales that keep the king listening until dawn. But survival demands more than captivating stories: as courtly intrigues intensify and the Crusades threaten the region, Shaherazade must navigate a world of shifting alliances, dangerous desires, and ruthless power. Reimagining one of literature’s most enduring legends, Every Rising Sun celebrates the power of storytelling, the resilience of women, and the courage to challenge a fate that seems inevitable.

Temple Folk

Across generations of Black Muslim life in America, ten interconnected worlds of faith, family, and belonging unfold. A daughter haunted by her father’s ghost struggles to reconcile his legacy with the truth; a mother caring for her disabled son revisits a life-altering experience; and a federal agent spying on a prominent member of the Nation of Islam confronts the contradictions of his own life. Set against the complex social and spiritual landscape of Black Muslim communities, these stories explore the tension between religious conviction and human imperfection, tradition and independence, and the desire to belong and the need to question. With compassion, subtle humour, and remarkable insight, Temple Folk offers an intimate portrait of people navigating the distance between who they believe they should be and who they really are.

United States 2023

The Last Pomegranate Tree

The Last Pomegranate Tree

After spending twenty-one years imprisoned in a remote desert prison, Muzafar-i Subhdam, a Kurdish peshmerga fighter, is finally released. His thoughts turn immediately to his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was arrested. Determined to find the child he has spent decades imagining, he embarks on a journey through Iraqi Kurdistan, a land scarred by dictatorship, war, and political upheaval. But his search leads to a bewildering discovery: there may be three young men who share his son’s name, their lives intertwined by a history of violence and coincidence. Blending magical realism, dark fable, and historical fiction, Bachtyar Ali creates a dreamlike world in which memory and truth are difficult to separate. Beneath its fantastical narrative lies a devastating examination of how war destroys families and reshapes entire societies. Yet the novel also offers hope, suggesting that compassion, friendship, and love can endure even after extraordinary suffering.

The Cursed Friend

The Cursed Friend

Beatrice Salvioni

Italy, 1935. Francesca is a respectable girl from a bourgeois family, but she longs for a life beyond the suffocating rules of her small town. Her attention is drawn to Maddalena, a fearless outsider whom everyone calls the Cursed One. When Francesca lies to protect her, an unexpected friendship begins—one that will challenge everything she has been taught about obedience, morality, and what it means to be a girl. As fascism tightens its grip on Italy, the two friends confront prejudice, violence, and a society determined to keep women in their place. Fierce and emotionally charged, this novel explores the transformative power of female friendship and the courage it takes to resist injustice.

Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck

In East Berlin in 1986, nineteen-year-old Katharina meets Hans, a married writer in his fifties, by chance on a bus. Drawn together by their shared passion for music, literature and art, they begin an intense affair that transforms both their lives. Initially filled with excitement and tenderness, their relationship gradually becomes increasingly controlling and destructive, as jealousy, manipulation and emotional cruelty undermine their intimacy. Meanwhile, the world around them is undergoing its own dramatic transformation. As the German Democratic Republic approaches collapse, the political ideals and certainties that have shaped their lives begin to crumble. Erpenbeck intertwines the deterioration of the couple’s relationship with the dissolution of East Germany, creating a powerful parallel between private disillusionment and national upheaval. Through precise, evocative prose, she examines the complicated relationship between love and power, the persistence of nostalgia, and the difficulty of recognising when devotion has become oppression. Winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, Kairos is both an intimate portrait of a destructive relationship and a profound meditation on history, memory and the cost of holding on to the past

The Great Reclamation

The Great Reclamation

Set against the dramatic transformation of twentieth-century Singapore, The Great Reclamation follows Lee Ah Boon, a gentle boy growing up in a coastal fishing village during the final years of British colonial rule. More interested in playing with his childhood companion, Siok Mei, than in fishing, Boon discovers he possesses an extraordinary ability: he can locate mysterious, shifting islands rich with fish that no one else can find. His discovery gives him a newfound purpose within his community and deepens his connection to Siok Mei. But history soon disrupts their sheltered world. The Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the rise of political resistance, and Singapore’s journey towards independence bring profound changes to the village. As the government pursues ambitious land reclamation projects in the name of progress, Boon and Siok Mei find themselves on opposing sides of an increasingly divided society. Blending historical fiction, magical realism, and an intimate love story, Heng’s novel explores the costs of modernisation, the legacies of colonialism, and the tension between personal loyalty and collective progress. Through Boon’s journey, the novel asks what it means to call a place home when the land itself—and the society built upon it—is constantly changing.

A Disappearance in Fiji

A Disappearance in Fiji

Set in Fiji in 1914, A Disappearance in Fiji follows Akal Singh, a 25-year-old Indian police sergeant whose promising career in Hong Kong has been derailed by a professional mistake. Transferred to the British colonial outpost of Fiji as punishment, Akal feels isolated and longs to return to India or Hong Kong. His prospects change when an Indian woman named Kunti disappears from a sugarcane plantation, prompting accusations of kidnapping and attracting unwanted public attention. Assigned to investigate, Akal encounters conflicting accounts from plantation owners, Indian indentured labourers, and Indigenous Fijians. As he uncovers inconsistencies in their stories, he begins to suspect that the disappearance reveals something far more troubling than a simple missing-persons case. Blending historical mystery with social commentary, Rao explores colonial racism, caste prejudice, and the exploitation of indentured Indian workers. Through Akal’s investigation, the novel reveals the inequalities underpinning colonial Fiji while examining how a detective’s understanding of justice can change when he confronts the realities of those living under oppressive systems.

Vanishing Maps

Cristina García

Vanishing Maps returns to the García family, whose history of exile, migration, and political upheaval was introduced in Dreaming in Cuban. Moving between Cuba and the United States, the novel follows members of a family whose lives have been shaped by displacement, fractured relationships, and the complicated legacy of revolution. As the characters navigate different generations and cultural environments, they confront the question of what it means to belong to a country that may exist more vividly in memory than in everyday life. García explores the ways family histories are inherited, reinterpreted, and sometimes deliberately forgotten. Blending personal drama with the wider history of the Cuban diaspora, the novel examines how migration reshapes identity and how the search for home can continue long after a person has physically left it.

Name of the Rose

Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose is a historical mystery set in an Italian Benedictine abbey in 1327. William of Baskerville, a Franciscan friar with a sharp analytical mind, arrives with his young assistant Adso of Melk just as a series of mysterious deaths begins to trouble the monastery. As William investigates, he discovers that the abbey’s extraordinary library contains forbidden knowledge and that disagreements over religious doctrine have created dangerous rivalries among the monks. The investigation becomes a struggle over the relationship between faith, reason, and the control of information. Eco combines medieval history, detective fiction, and philosophical debate to explore censorship, institutional authority, and the power of books. The novel asks whether knowledge can remain free when institutions fear the consequences of questioning established beliefs, revealing how the pursuit of truth can become dangerous in a world governed by rigid authority.

Dictator Calls

A Dictator Calls explores the relationship between literature and political power through a fictionalised account of the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak and his interactions with Joseph Stalin. After Pasternak receives an unexpected telephone call from the Soviet dictator, the episode becomes a defining moment in his life, exposing the dangerous uncertainty faced by writers under authoritarian rule. Kadare examines how a seemingly brief conversation can reveal the enormous imbalance between an artist and a political leader whose decisions can determine a person’s survival. Blending historical detail with literary reflection, the novel considers the compromises writers make to continue working under censorship and the ways political authority attempts to control artistic expression. Kadare also reflects on the complicated relationship between writers and the regimes that both suppress and exploit them. The book examines fear, conscience, and the enduring struggle to preserve intellectual freedom under dictatorship.

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