Sometimes we all need to take a break from our current world. A wonderful way to do this is to read historical fiction that transports us to a distant time and place, filled with rich details and fully developed characters.
Perhaps this is escapism, but the best historical fiction not only teaches us about a different era, it often sheds light on our contemporary conundrums as well.
The following novels take readers to faraway eras and explore the reverberations of the past on the present. As James Baldwin wrote, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us.”
“A Long Petal of the Sea” by Isabel Allende. Literary icon Allende is best known for her early masterpieces, such as “The House of the Spirits,” that have a strong streak of magical realism, but her canon covers a wide range of genres.
“A Long Petal of the Sea” is a sweeping historical saga about two young people — an army doctor and a sheepherder turned pianist — who flee Spain after Franco’s rise to power. They immigrate to Chile, where they build new lives. But having escaped fascism once, they must face it again after the 1973 Chilean coup d’état.
In the ensuing decades, they find themselves in exile anew, struggling to define homeland and belonging. Allende’s insights into the rising and waning of dictatorships resonate strongly today.
The book’s title is borrowed from Pablo Neruda’s description of Chile as “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” Neruda himself is an important character in this satisfying historical novel.
“The East Indian“ by Brinda Charry. Set in 17th-century India, England and colonial Virginia, this novel follows the travails of an orphaned Tamil boy from Southern India.
Our narrator takes on the name Tony and seeks his fortune in London, hoping to learn medicine. After several months in London, Tony is abducted and forced to work as an indentured servant in Jamestown. Tony faces discrimination and hardship, but pursues his goals of training as a healer.
While set squarely in the 1600s, Tony’s meditations on race and identity feel contemporary. Throughout his journeys, he is strengthened by the stories he remembers — both the tales of Hindu deities told by his grandmother and a Shakespeare play he saw at the Globe Theatre while in London — that help him to make sense of his new experiences.
This work of fiction is inspired by a 1635 historical register of indentured servants in Virginia that listed a “Tony East Indian.”
“The Book of Salt” by Monique Truong. Binh, the Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, describes his time with his employers in 1930s Paris. We know from “The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book” (published in 1954 and controversial due to a recipe for “hashish fudge”) that the couple indeed employed a live-in Vietnamese cook. However, little is recorded about him, and his poignant backstory is Truong’s fictional creation.
From behind the kitchen door, Binh shrewdly observes the couple’s quirks and their renowned literary salons at 27 rue de Fleurus. Binh’s reasons for exile from his homeland are slowly revealed. As his Mesdames prepare to travel to America and his older brother urges him to return to Vietnam, Binh must decide on his own future.
Truong’s prose is lush, and the novel is filled with sensuous descriptions of Binh’s culinary creations.
“The Moor’s Account” by Laila Lalami. In 1527, a Black Muslim named Estebanico was one of only four survivors of an ill-fated Spanish expedition that landed at present-day Florida and wandered the southwestern U.S. for eight years. The other three survivors were Spaniards, who published accounts of the expedition. Although he is considered the first person of African descent to explore North America, Estebanico’s voice has been lost to history — until now.
In Lalami’s riveting fictional account of the expedition, Estebanico narrates it all. The gruesome details of the expedition — disease, starvation, killing — are balanced by lyrical descriptions of the natural world and evocative memories of the whitewashed walls and creaky blue door of his childhood home.
Estebanico intends to correct the sanitized narratives of his Castilian counterparts and does not shy away from chronicling the Spaniards’ brutalities. He hopes the reader will find in his tale “truth in the guise of entertainment.”
For more historical fiction reading suggestions, check out a Library booklist at spl.org/historicalfiction.
– Paige
This column was originally published in the Seattle Times as part of our monthly column, and reprinted with permission.