Recommended Reading: Historical Fiction

In 1866, tragedy strikes at the exclusive Windfield School. A young student drowns in a mysterious accident involving a small circle of boys. The drowning and its aftermath initiate a spiraling circle of treachery that will span three decades and entwine many lives.

This novel tells the story of Okonkwo, the leader of an Igbo (Ibo) community who is banished for accidentally killing a clansman. The novel covers the seven years of his exile to his return, providing an inside view of the intrusion of white missionaries and colonial government into tribal Igbo society in the 1890s.

The ghost of a real-life historical figure helps elderly Catherine da Costa convince her granddaughters to travel across Europe with her and helps them find a link between past and present by leaving mysterious journal entries along their travel route.

Sadie, the abandoned wife of the slave Jim from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn details her romance with Jim, an ambitious young slave, his decision to run away with a young white boy named Huck Finn, and the bleak repercussions of that decision for her and their children.

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother's monumental courage and the journey of a nation.

When an Iowa patriarch decides to turn over his thriving farm to his three daugters, he sets off a series of tragic events that will eventually rip apart his family in this Pulitzer Prize winner.

Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.

On the outskirts of a small town in 1940s Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. Here, lives intertwine and unravel.

A Korean woman's life as a sex slave for the Japanese during World War II. The novel is narrated in part by the mother, in part by her American daughter who is a newspaper reporter in Hawaii. Not until her mother's death did the daughter learn what terrible experiences lay behind the screams her mother uttered in her dreams.

Cambodian child soldier Arn Chorn-Pond defied the odds and used all of his courage and wits to survive the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge