Current Trends in Historical Fiction

Historical fiction is having a moment, with bookstore shelves, bestseller lists, and book club selections bursting with novels set in the past. In February 2022 alone, three historical novels appeared on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, set in 1954, The Christie Affair by Nina da Gramont, set in 1925, and The Lady’s Mine by Francine Rivers, set in 1875.

Who reads historical fiction? According to Rachel Kahan, executive editor at William Morrow, women make up the largest share of historical fiction readers. “We owe so much of the recent growth in the genre to women’s book clubs and readers groups and their tremendous social media word of mouth. Men certainly do enjoy historical fiction as well—particularly male authors such as Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O’Brian, and Ken Follett—but the numbers show that women are the most avid consumers, especially if you include the enormous sales of romance novels with historical settings.”

Amy Durant, editorial director at UK-based Sapere Books, where historical fiction, including crime and romance, makes up about 60 percent of their list, believes historical fiction “has always been popular and always will be.” Durant elaborated on the genre’s appeal, saying, “Reading is always escapism at some level, and one way of escaping is to take yourself away from the modern day and into the past. We personally like publishing historical fiction because it never feels dated. Some modern fiction can quickly fall out of favor as trends and opinions change, but historical fiction endures. We are looking for our books to have sales longevity rather than a huge publication-day boost that fades off.”

Sapere prefers to commission series over standalone titles and has found the most success with them. “We aim to foster long-lasting relationships with them, so we don’t really want to just publish one book with an author. We would like to work together with each writer on as many books as we can,” said Durant.

Historical fiction authors can’t skimp on research. “You can’t play fast and loose with the facts, and you need to be vigilant about anachronisms,” Kahan said. “For example, I once had an author write a novel about Lucrezia Borgia and have her marry someone who she did not actually marry in real life. That was a step too far; 10 seconds on Wikipedia and a reader would have spotted the inaccuracy and called the whole book into question.” Kahan mentioned another author who’d included clementines in a 19th-century US novel, but the fruit wasn’t sold in the country until the 20th century. “Getting details wrong or rearranging historical facts to suit your story can come back to bite you with reviewers and readers,” said Kahan.

Durant says authors should fact-check all the specifics they can, noting that some Sapere Books authors use contemporary newspapers “to track weather reports to make things as accurate as possible, and also to get a flavor of the language used at the time.”

Vanessa Riley, who’s written historical romance and fiction, such as 2021’s Island Queen (about Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, who was born into slavery and went on to become one of the wealthiest landowners in the colonial West Indies), does exhaustive research “to reconstruct not only the characters’ timelines but all the events that affected their world.” She tries to stick as closely to the facts as possible. When writing about characters who aren’t based on real people, Riley says it can be challenging “not having a diary of their daily activities and not knowing what their motivations are for their choices.”

However voluminous your research, Kahan stressed it’s crucial to avoid an info dump when introducing your characters and setting. “The best historical novelists are geniuses at weaving in all the background information so that it doesn’t overwhelm the reader and slow down the pace of the plot,” she said.

One type of historical fiction is centered around real people—some well known, others more obscure. USA Today bestseller The Social Graces by Renée Rosen is about the feud between Alva Vanderbilt and Caroline Astor; The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray is a GMA Book Club pick about Belle da Costa Greene, the real personal librarian to J.P. Morgan and first librarian and director of the Pierpont Morgan Library; and Carolina Built by Kianna Alexander is about real estate magnate Josephine N. Leary, who was born into slavery and freed at age nine.

There are pros and cons to writing about real historical figures. For Amy Belding Brown, whose novels Mr. Emerson’s Wife and Emily’s House are based on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Lidian, and Margaret Maher, the longtime maid to Emily Dickinson’s family, respectively, having primary source material makes her job easier. “I don’t have to come up with original names, birthdates, lifespans, and settings,” Brown said of such novels. “The children, neighbors, brothers, sisters, and other relatives are already established, and often there are pictures available to help with physical descriptions.”

During her research for Emily’s House, Brown learned that Maher had been responsible for preserving Dickinson’s poems despite being instructed by Dickinson to burn them. “Discovering that fact was the reason I chose Margaret as my point-of-view character,” said Brown. “For more than a century, Emily’s sister, Lavinia, has been given credit for ‘finding’ the poems. In actual fact, they’d been intentionally hidden and later saved by Margaret. This struck me as historically momentous and prompted me to put the novel in Margaret’s point of view.”

However, building a novel-length book out of a person’s biography is a major challenge for Brown because “people’s real lives rarely fall neatly into the beginning/middle/end shape of good fiction.” Brown said, to do justice to her novels, she has “to make important decisions about what parts of the character’s life to focus on. Depending on the amount of information available, this usually requires some inventing of situations and/or relationships.”

Some authors base their plotline around a pivotal historical event but create fictional characters, giving them more creative leeway. This is the path Addison Armstrong took with The Light of Luna Park, inspired by the real story of Dr. Martin Couney, who created incubator exhibits as attractions at Coney Island to try to save the lives of premature babies. The novel is narrated by a fictional nurse. “Having a real historical timeline established in advance is helpful in that it gives me a starting point,” said Armstrong, who used nonfiction books about Dr. Couney for some of her research. Even though her characters were fictionalized, Armstrong said some of the small details, such as how a middle-class woman’s stove would work in 1926 and what foods were available for takeout in 1951, were among the “most difficult to portray accurately.”

World War II is a popular period for historical fiction, with recent titles including The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles, The Rose Code by Kate Quinn, Radar Girls by Sara Ackerman, A Girl During the War by Anita Abriel, and The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel. Upcoming WWII fiction includes Shadows of Berlin by David R. Gillham (April), The Paris Showroom by Juliet Blackwell (April), and young adult thriller The Silent Unseen by Amanda McCrina (April). Amazon maintains a WWII historical fiction bestseller list.

“I think the appeal of World War II books is that they’re mostly stories of ordinary people living in an extraordinary time,” Kahan said. “We are living in extraordinary times now, and I think readers find it comforting and inspiring to hear stories about how previous generations survived and triumphed when it seemed civilization was hanging in the balance.”

Also, Tudor and Medieval fiction “always seem to be popular,” according to Durant, as well as war-time military thrillers, specifically naval and aviation fiction. Durant isn’t exactly sure why that’s the case but said, “I assume it’s because the Tudor period and the second-world-war period are very well known both here and in the US, so there is a wide readership actively searching for titles in those sub-genres.”

Bottom line: As far as what editors seek right now, Kahan says she’s looking for historical novels about real-life women “whose tremendous achievements have been left out of history books,” like the subjects of Island Queen and Sister Mother Warrior. For novels that aren’t based on real people, Kahan is seeking “character-driven stories that take you right into the heart of history. Sometimes the character is an extraordinary person, sometimes it’s an ordinary person in an extraordinary time.” She cited novelist Karen Brooks’s The Locksmith’s Daughter (set in Elizabethan England) and The Lady Brewer of London (set in Medieval England), saying, “The heroines of those novels didn’t exist in real life, but women like them certainly did.”