Historical Fiction

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Kololo Hill
Kololo Hill
Neema Shah
In 1972, Ugandan Asians are given just ninety days to leave the country under President Idi Amin’s expulsion order. For Asha and Pran, newly married and working to secure their future, the decree means abandoning the family business and the life they have built. Pran’s mother, Jaya, must also leave the home she has known for decades. As violence escalates in Kampala and people begin disappearing, the family faces an uncertain journey to Britain, where refuge does not necessarily mean belonging. Arriving in a country that feels unfamiliar, they must rebuild their lives while carrying the emotional weight of everything they have lost. But their struggle is complicated by a devastating secret surrounding their expulsion—one that threatens to fracture the family just when they need one another most. Moving between the green hills of Kampala and the terraced streets of London, Kololo Hill explores displacement, family loyalty, and the meaning of home. Inspired by the history of Uganda’s Asian community and the author’s own family heritage, this moving novel reveals how political upheaval can reshape lives across generations.
Uganda United Kingdom 2021
2
We Are All Birds Of Uganda
We Are All Birds Of Uganda
Hafsa Zayyan
In 1960s Uganda, Hasan is struggling to rebuild his life after the death of his wife. Just as he begins to find his footing, political upheaval and rising racial prejudice threaten everything he has worked for. As a member of Uganda’s South Asian community, Hasan faces an uncertain future in a country his family has long called home. The political climate deteriorates further under Idi Amin’s regime, which ultimately forces many South Asians to leave Uganda. Decades later, in London, Sameer appears to have everything: a successful career as a lawyer and the future he once dreamed of. Yet beneath his achievements lies a persistent sense of emptiness. An unexpected family tragedy draws him back into his family’s history, revealing the sacrifices, losses, and unanswered questions that shaped his identity. Moving between generations and continents, We Are All Birds of Uganda explores displacement, racial prejudice, inherited trauma, and the complicated meaning of belonging. Through Hasan and Sameer’s intertwined stories, Hafsa Zayyan examines how migration reshapes families and how the past continues to influence those who inherit its consequences.
Uganda United Kingdom 2021
3
When the Apricots Bloom
When the Apricots Bloom
Gina Wilkinson
Baghdad, 2002. Under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, three women find their lives entangled in a dangerous web of secrets, surveillance, and betrayal. Huda, a secretary at the Australian embassy, is ordered by Iraq’s secret police to befriend and spy on Ally Wilson, the wife of a Western diplomat. Refusing could endanger her teenage son, who faces the threat of forced recruitment into a brutal militia. Meanwhile, Rania, Huda’s estranged childhood friend and the daughter of a once-wealthy sheikh, struggles to protect her own daughter as her family’s fortunes collapse. Ally, too, carries secrets connected to her mother’s past in Iraq, and as the women’s lives intersect, they discover that trust can be both dangerous and necessary. Forced to navigate a society where even friendships can become instruments of control, they must decide how much they are willing to risk to protect their children and reclaim their freedom. Inspired by the author’s experiences reporting from Iraq, When the Apricots Bloom is a suspenseful novel about female friendship, motherhood, survival, and the impossible choices people face under an oppressive regime.
Iraq 2021
4
My First and Only Love
My First and Only Love
Sahar Khalifeh
After decades of exile, Nidal returns to her family’s ancestral home in Nablus, hoping to restore the crumbling house and reconnect with the land she left behind. As she revisits the memories of her childhood, she recalls falling in love with Rabie, a young freedom fighter whose ideals embodied her hopes for Palestine’s future. Their love unfolds against the final years of the British Mandate, when political upheaval, resistance, and the struggle for national independence transform ordinary lives. Years later, when Nidal and Rabie meet again, he encourages her to read the memoirs of her uncle Amin, revealing long-buried family secrets and the hidden history of her absent mother. Through intertwined stories of love, loss, and resistance, Sahar Khalifeh explores how political conflict fractures families, separates lovers, and reshapes personal destinies. This sweeping novel is both an intimate portrait of a woman confronting her past and a meditation on the enduring connection between love, memory, and homeland.
Palestine 2021
5
The Island of Missing Trees
The Island of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak
A Greek Cypriot boy and a Turkish Cypriot girl fall in love in 1970s Cyprus, meeting secretly beneath a fig tree in a tavern as ethnic tensions threaten to tear their world apart. Decades later, in London, their daughter Ada struggles with grief and a past her parents have never fully revealed. As family secrets emerge, a fig tree growing in their garden becomes a living connection to a homeland left behind. Narrated partly through the tree itself, this moving novel explores displacement, inherited trauma, forbidden love, and the fragile bonds between people, nature, and memory.
Cyprus 2021
6
Kin
Kin
Miljenko Jergović
Spanning the twentieth century, Kin is an expansive family saga that traces generations of one family through the turbulent history of the Balkans. Beginning with forgotten relatives and seemingly insignificant objects—a grandfather’s beekeeping journals, a rusty lighter, an old military raincoat—Miljenko Jergović reconstructs a world shaped by personal memories, family secrets, and historical upheaval. From the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the two World Wars to the Cold War and the Bosnian War of the 1990s, the novel follows the transformations of Sarajevo and the changing identities of the people who call it home. Blending memoir, fiction, and historical reflection, Jergović explores how political violence and shifting borders reverberate through ordinary lives. At its heart, Kin is a meditation on belonging, memory, and the fragile connections between generations—a tribute to a multicultural world threatened by nationalism, intolerance, and forgetting.
Bosnia and Herzegovina 2021
7
The Dog of Tithwal
The Dog of Tithwal
Saadat Hasan Manto
On the mountainous border between India and Pakistan, two groups of soldiers face each other in a tense military standoff. Their routine is interrupted by the arrival of a stray dog, an innocent creature that wanders between the opposing camps. The soldiers begin to claim the dog as their own, giving it names and interpreting its movements as signs of loyalty or betrayal. What begins as a seemingly harmless game gradually turns sinister, exposing the absurdity of nationalism and the cruelty of a conflict in which even an animal cannot remain neutral. With biting irony and devastating simplicity, Saadat Hasan Manto transforms this brief encounter into a powerful allegory of Partition and the violence produced by artificial divisions. The story asks what happens to humanity when political identity becomes more important than compassion—and when the innocent are made to pay for the hostility of others.
Pakistan 2021
8
The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro
The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro
Viola Ardone
Sicily, 1960s. Fifteen-year-old Oliva Denaro loves running through the countryside and dreams of a life beyond the strict rules imposed on girls. But when a local boy decides he wants her, Oliva discovers how little control a young woman has over her own future in a society ruled by tradition and shame. Inspired by a true story, this moving novel follows Oliva’s courageous struggle to reclaim her freedom in a world that expects women to remain silent. Through her determination, Viola Ardone explores the cost of defiance and the extraordinary strength it takes to say no when everyone expects you to obey.
Italy 2021
9
Beasts of a Little Land
Beasts of a Little Land
Juhea Kim
In 1917, Korea is under Japanese colonial rule, and the lives of its people are shaped by poverty, violence, and the struggle for independence. When ten-year-old Jade is sold by her desperate family to a courtesan school in Pyongyang, she enters a world where survival depends on learning to navigate rigid social hierarchies. After fleeing to Seoul, she meets JungHo, an orphan boy struggling to survive on the streets. Their bond becomes a defining force in both their lives, even as their paths diverge and JungHo becomes involved in the resistance movement. Spanning five decades, from the final years of the Korean Empire through colonial occupation and the upheavals of the twentieth century, this sweeping historical novel follows a cast of interconnected characters whose destinies are shaped by love, ambition, betrayal, and political turmoil. Moving between courtesan houses, bustling cities, and battle-scarred forests, the story explores what it means to fight for personal dignity and national freedom when the world seems determined to take both away.
South Korea 2021
10
The Orphanage
The Orphanage
Serhiy Zhadan
Set in eastern Ukraine during the war in Donbas, The Orphanage follows Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher who has spent his life avoiding politics and keeping his distance from the conflicts around him. When fighting reaches a neighbouring city, he must cross the front line to retrieve his thirteen-year-old nephew, Sasha, from a boarding school that has become increasingly dangerous. What should be a straightforward journey turns into a harrowing passage through a landscape devastated by shelling, military checkpoints, and collapsing infrastructure. As Pasha encounters soldiers, displaced civilians, and people struggling to survive, his familiar world becomes unrecognisable. With each step, he is forced to reconsider his loyalties, his responsibilities, and what it means to belong to a country at war. Written with stark lyricism and an unflinching eye for everyday suffering, Zhadan’s novel portrays the human cost of armed conflict. Beyond the physical dangers, it explores indifference, moral responsibility, and the difficult realisation that remaining neutral may no longer be possible. The Orphanage won the 2022 EBRD Literature Prize.
Ukraine 2021
11
The Arsonists' City
The Arsonists' City
Hala Alyan
The Arsonists’ City follows the Nasr family, whose members are scattered across Beirut and the United States but remain connected by their shared history and their ancestral home in Lebanon. When Idris decides to sell the Beirut house following his father’s death, his wife, Mazna, and their three adult children return to prevent the sale. Their reunion brings buried secrets, old romantic entanglements, and unresolved resentments to the surface. Through shifting timelines, Alyan reveals how the family came together and how migration, political conflict, and personal choices gradually shaped their relationships. Each family member has developed a different understanding of home, belonging, and responsibility, creating tensions that threaten to pull them apart. Against the backdrop of Lebanon’s turbulent history, the novel explores intergenerational trauma, cultural identity, and the complicated bonds that connect people to their families and places of origin.
Lebanon 2021
12
Three Apples Fell from the Sky
Three Apples Fell from the Sky
Narine Abgaryan
Set in the remote Armenian mountain village of Maran, Three Apples Fell from the Sky follows a close-knit community whose inhabitants live according to longstanding traditions, local legends, and a shared understanding of the world. When Anatolia, an elderly woman who has spent her life in the village, becomes convinced that she is about to die, an unexpected visit brings the possibility of a new beginning. Her story unfolds alongside those of other villagers, revealing old rivalries, unexpected affection, and the quiet resilience that sustains their community. Blending humour, folklore, and magical realism, Abgaryan portrays a place where hardship exists alongside everyday tenderness. The novel celebrates the strength of human connection, the importance of preserving cultural traditions, and the small miracles that can transform lives even in a community seemingly forgotten by the outside world.
Armenia 2021