Location is key in these history-inspired novels whose settings include Alabama in the 1960s and Washington during the McCarthy era.
1. ‘The Briar Club,’ by Kate Quinn
Quinn’s thriller-esque works are mostly set in wartime, but in this intriguing novel a different fight is underway: the Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism. The novel opens in the aftermath of a murder and then quickly flips back five years to 1950 at the Briarwood, a D.C. boardinghouse for women. Each resident is hiding something because of mid-20th-century notions fueled by hom*ophobia, racism, misogyny and the politics of fear. The talented Quinn captures this period with dead-on accuracy. All the women’s secrets will come to light, with the biggest of them revealed in the novel’s last pages. It’s a knockout. (William Morrow, July 9)
2. ‘Shelterwood,’ by Lisa Wingate
The centuries-long mistreatment of Native Americans in Oklahoma is the formidable backdrop in this bracing novel whose storylines take place in 1909 and 1990. Valerie Boren-Odell, a newly minted National Park Service law enforcement officer in southeast Oklahoma, crashes into a mystery when the century-old remains of three girls are found in a cave on park property. In 1909, 11-year-old Olive Augusta Peele is on the run with her Choctaw foster sister in a desperate attempt to escape their abusive stepfather. In that time, protections for children were nearly nonexistent, and Wingate brings the point home through a biting account of how grafters, politicians and oil barons kidnapped and often killed orphaned Native children to steal their inherited timber and oil-rich lands. Wingate ably draws the storylines together, forcing readers to confront a shameful piece of American history. (Ballantine)
3. ‘The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye,’ by Briony Cameron
History takes to the high seas in the swashbuckling tale of a ship builder — a rare profession for a 17th-century woman – who morphs from indentured servant into the captain of her own ship. When the story begins, Jacquotte Delahaye, a mixed-race woman (who may have existed or may be an amalgam of legends), is living and working in Santo Domingo. Readers will feel the ship deck shifting and pitching as Delahaye shoots, duels and brawls her way through danger and power plays while falling in love with a woman who also embraces the seafaring life. The novel’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” sensibilities are tempered with accounts of the mistreatment of women, enslaved people and multiracial characters. The author’s lively and compassionate writing style is addictive. (Atria)
4. ‘The Seventh Veil of Salome,’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The author of “Mexican Gothic” places the 1950s Hollywood studio system under a glaring spotlight in this multi-timeline novel about the making of an epic film and the story that inspired it. When Mexican actress Vera Larios is cast in a big-budget swords-and-sandals picture as the temptress Salome, she’s soon feeling the sting of racism and sexism on and off the set. Moreno-Garcia is a hypnotic raconteur who ably builds tension as a White actress’s resentment of Larios reaches a fever pitch. In a parallel story set in the 1st century, Salome, the granddaughter of King Herod, is embroiled in royal intrigue and politics leading up to her infamous Dance of the Seven Veils and the beheading of a biblical prophet. This novel burns more slowly than some of Moreno-Garcia’s others, but the payoff in the closing chapters is incandescent. (Del Rey, Aug. 6)
5. ‘54 Miles,’ by Leonard Pitts Jr.
In this richly imagined novel, readers link arms with the brave men and women attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965, a turning point in the civil rights movement. On that day, people of all colors joined John Lewis, Hosea Williams and others in Selma, Ala., on a walk that ended in violence. Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize winner, uses the marchers’ strife as a backdrop for the story of one family and the traumas they carried for generations. When Luther Hayes was 9, he witnessed the lynching of his parents. Forty-two years later, he recognizes the White man who instigated the killings and must make a difficult choice. His sister, Thelma, is hiding the truth about an act of violence perpetrated against her, and her 21-year-old son, Adam, who was attacked on the Pettus Bridge, is reeling from the discovery of a family secret. Trauma is the framework for this gut-wrenching novel about the nonviolent protest movement supported by Martin Luther King Jr. and those who wanted the battle for civil rights to move in a different direction. Deep down, this astonishing novel is about people wanting America to fulfill its promise that freedom is for everyone. (Agate, July 23)
Carol Memmott is a writer in Austin.
