Category: book Nook
Jed Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder is one of the new
historical fiction titles that publishers and booksellers predict will be
hot this fall.
OTHER HISTORICAL FICTION OUT THIS FALL
The Law of Dreams
By Peter Behrens (Steer Forth, $24.95)
Set during the Great Potato Famine of 1847.
Billy Boyle: A World War II Mystery
By James R. Benn (Soho, $23).
Boston Irish cop becomes Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's investigator during World
War II.
Human Traces
By Sebastian Faulks (Random House, $25.95)
Starts in 1876; traces beginnings of psychiatry.
Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome
By Robert Harris (Simon & Schuster, $26)
First in a trilogy about orator Cicero and his struggle for power in Rome.
Due Sept. 19.
Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette
By Sena Jeter Naslund (William Morrow, $26.95)
Portrait of the royal who never said "Let them eat cake."
Due Oct. 3.
The Rising Tide: A Novel of the
Second World War
By Jeff Shaara (Random House, $27.95)
Focuses on the North African front.
Due Nov. 7
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
The colossal success last year of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, a novel
that imagined the life of Dracula set against the background of numerous
world
events, has publishers hoping that book-buying consumers are hungry for more
historical fiction.
The broad definition of historical fiction throws many books into this
thriving category. Mystery, thriller, conspiracy and religion hybrids pepper
the
genre.
Recent hit novels, including Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and Cold
Mountain by Charles Frazier, weave historical settings around fictional
characters.
Frazier's Thirteen Moons (Random House, $26.95, on sale Oct. 3) is eagerly
awaited. The 19th-century-set novel is the tale of an orphan who lives
alongside
the Cherokee.
Publisher Henry Holt is placing its bets on The Interpretation of Murder
($26) by Jed Rubenfeld, a thriller centered on Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to
New
York.
"The Interpretation of Murder can definitely trace its family tree roots to
the success of The Historian," says Brad Parsons of Amazon.com. "It is
certainly
on our list as a hot book to take a look at this fall."
Elaine Petrocelli of Book Passages in Corte Madera, Calif., says she will
recommend Mary: A Novel by Janis Cooke Newman (MacAdam/Cage, $26) to
readers.
This novel about Mary Todd Lincoln "is a perfect example of why historical
fiction works when it's in the right hands," she says. "You come away
feeling
you really know Mary, and it's very true to the time."
Valerie Koehler of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston is a fan of the
post-Civil War novel On Agate Hill (Algonquin, $24.95) by Lee Smith, out
Sept. 19, and
Dark Angels by Karleen Koen (Crown, $25.95), set in the Restoration era
court of England's King Charles II.
"People like to read historical fiction for the same reasons they like to
watch the History Channel,"
Koehler says. "If it's done right, it takes you to another place, but you
have to make sure that world is a real world and you keep it consistent."
But it isn't easy.
"It's really a challenge to write historical fiction because just writing a
decent novel is difficult enough," says Thomas Mullen, whose debut novel,
The
Last Town on Earth (Random House, $23.95), is about a fictional town in
Washington state that quarantines itself during the 1918 flu epidemic.
"You have to be accurate to the historical time period and about the ways
people spoke and the ways in which men and women interacted," Mullen says.
"It's
a whole other level of things you need to get right for the novel to work."
Yes, I love this genre, because it really speaks true, and loud. I'll take time to check these author's out.