The Most Anticipated Historical Fiction Books of Fall 2024
As a genre, historical fiction is by its very nature eclectic. After all, it can and does often contain multitudes. From tales of ancient Greece and Arthurian Britain to stories set in Victorian-era London and colonial America, it features books that run the gamut in terms of both time period and subject matter.
Such is the case this Fall, as the publishing industry ushers in a season of change by releasing a positive avalanche of new titles that touch on all those eras, and throw in a few spooky season-adjacent picks (body snatching anyone?) on top.
Here are seventeen of the biggest historical fiction titles hitting shelves this Fall.
Cecil the Lion Had to Die by Olena Stiazhkina, translated by Dominique Hoffmann
Release Date: September 3 from Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Why We’re Excited: The story of four families whose lives change radically when the Soviet Union collapses, an independent Ukraine is born, and neo-imperial Russia occupies Ukraine’s Crimea and parts of the Donbas. Rich and timely historical fiction with a multifaceted view of the conflict in the region and Ukrainian history.
Publisher’s Description: In 1986 Soviet Ukraine, two boys and two girls are welcomed into the world in a Donetsk maternity ward. Following a Soviet tradition of naming things after prominent Communist leaders from far away, a local party functionary offers great material benefits for naming children after Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 to 1933. The fateful decision is made, and the local newspaper presents the newly born Ernsts and Thälmas in a photo on the front page, forever tying four families together.
The Mesmerist by Caroline Woods
Release Date: September 10 from Doubleday
Why We’re Excited: This historical fiction murder mystery set in late 19th century Minnesota in which three disadvantaged women in a charitable home must band together to bring down a serial killer is inspired by a real crime spree.
Publisher’s Description: Before hypnotism, there was Mesmerism. And in 1894 Minneapolis, in the wake of a national financial crisis, spiritualism of every stripe is all the rage, and women are dying under mysterious circumstances. But until a new guest lands at the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers, refusing to speak or explain her arrival, the sordid stories of unexplained deaths seem unconnected. Faith’s reticence is quickly interpreted as malevolence, setting the house abuzz with whispers of dark magic.
Abby, a staunch Quaker, lifelong supporter of progressive causes, and the Bethany Home’s treasurer, thinks the rumors of mystical powers swirling around Faith are nonsense, but she recognizes the danger of a good story. Unwilling to allow the Home’s important mission to be clouded by scandal, Abby tasks Faith’s roommate, May, with tracing Faith’s path to the Bethany Home.
May is desperate to end her year at Bethany Home engaged and on track to her happily-ever-after—even if her prince charming is Hal, a man she’s not sure she can trust. She uncovers a Minneapolis she never expected as she begins digging into Faith’s shadowy background, and her investigation brings her closer to polite society and Hal than she could have dreamed. The more May learns, the more she’s forced to question the motives of everyone around her, including Abby and Faith, and as more women turn up dead, May must reevaluate the future she wants, and which lies she’s willing to tell, for whom.
The Witch of Colchis by Rosie Hewlett
Release Date: September 10 from Sourcebooks Landmark
Why We’re Excited: For whatever reason publishing seems to move in cycles when it comes to telling stories of historical or mythological women, and at the moment we’re in a period that seems eager to reckon with our cultural perception of Medea, the daughter of King Aeëtes, who figures prominently in the story of Jason and the Argonauts. But while she’s a large part of the reason Jason’s quest is successful, she’s primarily remembered as a monster, a dark sorceress and murderer who killed her own children out of jealousy and rage. Hewlett’s story joins Eilish Quinn’s Medea as 2024’s second empathetic reimagining of the reasons behind her choices.
Publisher’s Description: A disgraced daughter. A fearsome witch. A woman more myth than mortal.
Medea, princess of Colchis, longs for a different life. Since childhood, she has been shunned from her family, tormented by her people, and treated with shame. All because of a unique and dangerous talent: witchcraft.
But when a dashing young hero, Jason, arrives to claim the famed Golden Fleece, Medea sees her opportunity for escape. Her offer to help Jason sets in motion a journey that will test every ounce of strength, magic, and loyalty she has. A journey that will see her battle monsters, dethrone kings, and confront a love more brutal than any before.
A journey that will ultimately end in betrayal, bloodshed, and a dark power impossible to forget.
To the Bone by Alena Bruzas
Release Date: September 10 from Rocky Pond Books
Why We’re Excited: A dark, vivid piece of YA historical fiction about the early colonies in America, To the Bone follows the story of Ellis, who arrives in James Fort as an indentured servant and discovers her dreams of a better life requires surviving in a brutal, often violent landscape. Unlike anything else on this list—or our Fall YA installment, where it also appears— in all the best ways.
Publisher’s Description: After the long journey from England, Ellis arrives in America full of hope. James Fort is where a better life will begin for her: where she will work as an indentured servant to Henry Collins and his pregnant wife, gain financial security, and fall deeply in love with bold, glorious Jane Eddowes.
But as summer turns to fall, Ellis begins to notice the cracks in this new life—the viciousness of the colonists toward the Indigenous people and the terrifying anger Henry uses to control his wife and Ellis—leaving her to wonder if she has sentenced herself to a prison rather than a new home.
Then winter arrives and hunger grips the Fort. Ellis is about to learn that people will do whatever it takes to survive.
The Wildes: A Novel In Five Acts by Louis Bayard
Release Date: September 17 from Algonquin Books
Why We’re Excited: This historical fiction reimagining of the Oscar Wilde scandal in 1860s England gives the spotlight to the famous playwright’s family—his wife, Constant, and sons Cyril and Vyvyan. Structured like a Wilde play, Bayard’s work is sharply written and emotionally poignant, with an emotional core that feels timelier than many will likely expect.
Publisher’s Description: In September of 1892, Oscar Wilde and his family have retreated to the idyllic Norfolk countryside for a holiday. His wife, Constance, has every reason to be happy: two beautiful sons, her own work as an advocate for feminist causes, and a delightfully charming and affectionate husband and father to her children, who also happens to be the most sought-after author in England. But with the arrival of an unexpected houseguest, the aristocratic young poet Lord Alfred Douglas, Constance gradually—and then all at once—comes to see that her husband’s heart is elsewhere and that the growing intensity between the two men threatens the whole foundation of their lives.
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera
Release Date: October 1
Why We’re Excited: An intriguing book about future Mexican president Benito Juárez and the 18 months he spent in New Orleans following a dispute with then-president Santa Anna. (Juárez was exiled from December 1853 until June 1855.) A chaotic and strangely hopeful story of a future revolutionary.
Publisher’s Description: New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first Indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.
The Stone Witch of Florence Anna Rasche
Release Date: October 8 from Park Row
Why We’re Excited: This immersive historical fiction novel about medieval Florence follows the story of a woman exiled after being accused of witchcraft for using alternative heaving methods to help cure those suffering from the plague. But when she’s summoned home to help solve a mystery surrounding stolen holy relics, she is given the chance to change her fate for good.
Publisher’s Description: 1348. As the Black Plague ravages Italy, Ginevra di Gasparo is summoned to Florence after nearly a decade of lonely exile. Ginevra has a gift—harnessing the hidden powers of gemstones, she can heal the sick. But when word spread of her unusual abilities, she was condemned as a witch and banished. Now the same men who expelled Ginevra are begging for her return.
Ginevra obliges, assuming the city’s leaders are finally ready to accept her unorthodox cures amid a pandemic. But upon arrival, she is tasked with a much different mission: she must use her collection of jewels to track down a ruthless thief who is ransacking Florence’s churches for priceless relics—the city’s only hope for protection. If she succeeds, she’ll be a recognized physician and never accused of witchcraft again.
But as her investigation progresses, Ginevra discovers she’s merely a pawn in a much larger scheme than the one she’s been hired to solve. And the dangerous men behind this conspiracy won’t think twice about killing a stone witch to get what they want.
The Murderess by Laurie Notaro
Release Date: October 8 from Little A
Why We’re Excited: This haunting true crime novel recounts the story of Winnie Ruth Judd, one of the twentieth century’s most notorious and enigmatic killers.
Publisher’s Description: It’s October 1931. When Winnie Ruth Judd arrives at the Los Angeles train station from Phoenix, her shipping trunks catch the attention of a suspicious porter. By the time they’re pried open, revealing the dismembered bodies of two women inside, Ruth has disappeared into the crowd.
The search for, and eventual apprehension of, the Trunk Murderess quickly becomes a headline-making sensation. Even the Phoenix murder house is a sideshow attraction. The one question on everyone’s lips: How could a twenty-six-year-old reverend’s daughter and doctor’s wife―petite, pretty, well educated, and poised―commit such a heinous act on two people she’d called “my dearest friends in the world”? Everyone has their theories and judgments, but no one knows the whole truth.
The Specimen by Jaima Fixsen
Release Date: October 15 from Poisoned Penn Press
Why We’re Excited: This intriguing mix of little-known historical fiction and grisly true crime is haunting in more ways than one.
Publisher’s Description: 1826. Isobel Tait finds herself, by chance, staring at a tiny human heart floating in a jar. It should be of little consequence; Dr. Burnett is renowned for his collection of oddities and medical specimens, and this, a juvenile heart with a damaged mitral valve, is not the strangest thing on display. Except that the condition is rare, and that Isobel’s young son, who has been missing for months, suffered from the ailment.
A phantom pulse beats in Isobel’s ears. She knows something here isn’t right.
Missing persons cases are all too common in Edinburgh, where people simply vanish like mist. But Burnett is obsessed with his specimens – how far would he go to acquire a new one? Determined to investigate, Isobel joins his staff as the keeper of his collection. What she’ll unearth, though, is far worse than any of her nightmares…
The Rhino Keeper by Jillian Forsberg
Release Date: October 22 from History Through Fiction
Why We’re Excited: Based on the true story of a Dutch sea captain who traveled with an Indian rhinoceros called Clara across 18th-century Europe (during a time when almost no living European would have ever seen one before), this particular historical fiction release has strong “you’re going to read it in book club” vibes.
Publisher’s Description: 2022 – College student Andrea Clarkson uncovers a historical mystery while studying abroad in Holland. From hidden desk drawers come unusual historical documents featuring a rhinoceros. On a lichen-covered eighteenth-century grave, the same animal is carved. When an expanding river forces exhumation, what she finds buried there is life-changing. Andrea faces her nightmares to retrieve what a grave robber steals: valuable proof of a long-forgotten history.
1740 – Ship captain Douwemout van der Meer has something not seen in two hundred years: the only rhino in Europe, called Clara. Douwemout and Clara tour Europe, enthralling peasants and queens, hoping to change popular views that rhinos are man-eating beasts. Absolute wonder follows, but when a priest sees idol worship and becomes hell-bent on destroying her, Clara, Douwe, and the lives of her bonded caretakers are at risks.
As Douwe becomes protectively dedicated to adventuring with Clara, unexpected love finds him, and his heart starts to tear. Will he choose a life with a traveling wonder-beast forever, or can love exist in many forms for the rhino keeper?
Eleanore of Avignon by Elizabeth DeLozier
Release Date: November 5 from Dutton
Why We’re Excited: This story of a healer in fourteenth-century Avignon on the eve of the Black Death is so realistic and well-drawn drawn you may be shocked to learn that Eleanore wasn’t actually a real person.
Publisher’s Description: Provence, 1347. Eleanore (Elea) Blanchet is a young midwife and herbalist with remarkable skills. But as she learned the day her mother died, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is draw attention to herself. She attends patients in her home city of Avignon, spends time with her father and twin sister, gathers herbs in the surrounding woods, and dreams of the freedom to pursue her calling without fear.
In a chance encounter, Elea meets Guigo de Chauliac, the enigmatic personal physician to the powerful Pope Clement, and strikes a deal with him to take her on as his apprentice. Under Chauliac’s tutelage she hones her skills as a healer, combining her knowledge of folk medicine with anatomy, astrology, and surgical techniques.
Then, two pieces of earth-shattering news: the Black Death has made landfall in Europe, and the disgraced Queen Joanna is coming to Avignon to stand trial for her husband’s murder. She is pregnant and in need of a midwife, a role only Elea can fill.
The queen’s childbirth approaches as the plague spreads like wildfire, leaving half the city dead in its wake. The people of Avignon grow desperate for a scapegoat and a group of religious heretics launch a witch hunt, one that could cost Elea—an intelligent, talented, unwed woman—everything.
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers
Release Date: November 12 from Mariner Books
Why We’re Excited: An art therapist in 1960s London grows finds her life turned upside down by a mysterious patient who has spent decades living in complete isolation with his elderly aunts in a decrepit Victorian house. A story of loneliness, isolation, and connection, delicately told.
Publisher’s Description: The London suburb of Croydon,1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she’s an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor.
One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she’s admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company. Westbury Park becomes his refuge.
When it emerges that William is not only sane but a talented artist, Helen comes to see him as something of a personal project. But as she tries to solve the puzzle of the Hidden Man’s past, Helen’s own carefully constructed life of secrets begins to unravel…
The Sunflower House by Adriana Allegri
Release Date: November 12 from St. Martin’s Press
Why We’re Excited: This story of a secretly Jewish woman who works at a Nazi maternity home during the notorious Lebensborn Program is both harrowing and hopeful.
Publisher’s Description: In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’s life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it’s 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret―her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling.
One fateful night after losing everyone she loves, Allina is forced into service as a nurse at a state-run baby factory called Hochland Home. There, she becomes both witness and participant to the horrors of Heinrich Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program.
The Story of the Forest by Linda Grant
Release Date: November 12 from Zando
Why We’re Excited: This multi-generational saga, which follows one family’s journey from Latvia to Liverpool, is a meditation on memory, love, and legacy.
Publisher’s Description: It’s 1913 when Mina, the young and carefree daughter of a Jewish merchant, roams into a forest on the edge of the Baltic Sea looking for mushrooms. Instead, she encounters a gang of unruly, charismatic Bolsheviks―an adventure that will become the stuff of familial lore for generations to come. Intending to save her from further corruption, and in an act that forever changes the trajectory of their family’s life, Mina and her eldest brother, Jossel, board a ship to England.
There the threat of a different war looms large. When WWI hits, Jossel is sent to the front, where he keeps a severely wounded soldier in his unit alive ‘til morning by telling him tales―including that his sister Mina will marry him if he survives. The soldier lives and asks for Mina’s hand, their marriage uniting two growing trade dynasties. But over time Mina and Jossel will learn that not everyone in their family has survived the wars and pogroms, even as they and their offspring struggle to build new lives in Liverpool in the midst of ever-shifting discriminations.
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
Release Date: December 3 from Doubleday
Why We’re Excited: This third installment of Pat Barker’s excellent Trojan War retelling, The Voyage Home, follows Agamemnon’s return to Mycenae following Troy’s destruction and everything that awaits him there. The series shifts its focus from Trojan slave girl Briseis, to doomed prophetess Cassandra and her handmaid Ritsa, whose arrival in Greece is the start of a violent turn of events.
Publisher’s Description: Continuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, this new novel centres on the fate of Cassandra — daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be heeded. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.)
Psychologically complex and dangerously driven, Cassandra’s arrival in Mycenae will set in motion a bloody train of events, drawing in King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and daughter Electra. Agamemnon’s triumphant return from Troy is far from the celebration he imagined, and the fate of the Trojan women as uncertain as they had feared.
The Shadowed Land by Signe Pike
Release Date: December 3 from Atria Books
Why We’re Excited: The third installment in Signe Pike’s The Lost Queen series continues the complex political intrigues and and bloody battles between Britons, Picts, Scots, Angles, Christians, and other kingdoms during the Arthurian period.
Publisher’s Description: Kingdom of Gododdin, AD 580: After defeating the Angles at the Battle of the Caledonian Wood, Languoreth, her daughter Angharad, brother Lailoken, and the warrior Artúr mac Aedan are reunited. But all too soon, fate pulls each back to their own path.
Artúr receives a mysterious summons from his father in Dalriada. Languoreth and Lailoken return to Strathclyde with the dangerous former bishop Mungo in tow, determined to maintain the fragile peace between the Christians and the people of the Old Way. Meanwhile, Angharad must travel deep into the shadowed land of the Picts, hoping to become the initiate of Briochan, a druid who practices the secret Celtic art of summoning weather.
As they rise to their destinies, they are pushed to impossible new frontiers as each must decide whether they are willing to do what it takes to be the heroes their harrowing days demand.
The Resurrectionist by A. Rae Dunlap
Release Date: December 24 from Kensington
Why We’re Excited: Grave robbing and body snatching were both regular occurrences in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Men known as resurrectionists were infamous for stealing fresh corpses from graveyards and selling the bodies to be used as anatomical specimens in medical schools. This makes sense in a twisted sort of way—after all, doctors can’t learn to treat illness and disease if they can’t study the human body. But the industry that built up around this activity was….let’s just call it less than savory at best and often downright dangerous at worst. In Dunlap’s novel, Scottish medical student James cozies up to a body snatcher in the hopes of helping his education, but finds himself caught in a deadly conflict.
Publisher’s Description: Edinburgh, Scotland, 1828. Naïve but determined James Willoughby has abandoned his posh, sheltered life at Oxford to pursue a lifelong dream of studying surgery in Edinburgh. A shining beacon of medical discovery in the age of New Enlightenment, the city’s university offers everything James desires—except the chance to work on a human cadaver. For that, he needs to join one of the private schools in Surgeon’s Square, at a cost he cannot afford. In desperation, he strikes a deal with Aneurin “Nye” MacKinnon, a dashing young dissectionist with an artist’s eye for anatomy and a reckless passion for knowledge. Nye promises to help him gain the surgical experience he craves—but it doesn’t take long for James to realize he’s made a devil’s bargain . .
Nye is a body snatcher. And James has unwittingly become his accomplice. Intoxicated by Nye and his noble mission, James rapidly descends into the underground ranks of the Resurrectionists—the body snatchers infamous for stealing fresh corpses from churchyards to be used as anatomical specimens. Before he knows it, James is caught up in a life-or-death scheme as rival gangs of snatchers compete in a morbid race for power and prestige.
James and Nye soon find themselves in the crosshairs of a shady pair of unscrupulous opportunists known as Burke and Hare, who are dead set on cornering the market, no matter the cost. These unsavory characters will do anything to beat the competition for bodies. Even if it’s cold-blooded murder . . .
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB