Author Picks: 4 Historical Fiction Reads Based on True Events

REGENERATION is the first book in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy and explores class, identity, trauma, and the fragility of memory through the relationships between key male characters who live through the horrors of World War I. Inspired by first-person narratives—including that of her own grandfather—Barker focuses on a group of British officers in treatment for shell shock at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart War Hospital, basing her work on the interactions between war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers. The people that populate this book are a mix of fictional characters and characters drawn from history, and the blending of them is remarkable. Individually, the characters are compelling, but it’s their interactions with one another that drive home the shattering effects of war on the human psyche and the frailty of recovery.

I’m a big fan of George Saunders, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” being one of my favorite short stories, gorgeously set in a bizarre historical theme park. I approached LINCOLN IN THE BARDO with the requisite awe and was bowled over. Innovative and deeply touching, it explores a moment of history that’s both intimate and far-reaching. Inspired by accounts of Abraham Lincoln’s personal grief following the loss of his beloved son, this book is a marvel. Willie Lincoln, a child as lovable as he is serious, looms large, as do a chorus of well-meaning, bickering ghosts. Blurring the boundaries between the dead and the living with a genius that is Saunders’s own, this book had me crying and laughing.

Based on the murder of a landowner and his housekeeper in 1840s Canada, this book is a perfect weaving of factual events and fiction. Incarcerated for life, housemaid Grace Marks, the convicted murderer, tells her life story to a doctor. The power shifts are subtle and explore social injustice, fractured identity, and the construction of memory. Grace herself is wonderfully elusive, and the tale she spins continues to resonate long after reading.

Taking inspiration from the bloodshed that took place in the 1850s around the Texas-Mexico border, Cormac McCarthy paints a hellish world. Awe-inspiring landscapes and unspeakably cruel acts of violence make this a difficult novel to navigate. The human characters are universally inhumane, and there is no truly relatable anchor—not even Kid, a boy who accompanies a group of renegades led by the nihilistic Judge Holden on a scalp-hunting expedition. For all this, the imagery is vivid and stark and the writing compelling. Judge, for one, is a deeply disturbing character who will haunt your nightmares.

THE NIGHT SHIP is available now!

1629: A newly orphaned young girl named Mayken is bound for the Dutch East Indies on the Batavia, one of the greatest ships of the Dutch Golden Age. Curious and mischievous, Mayken spends the long journey going on misadventures above and below the deck, searching for a mythical monster. But the true monsters might be closer than she thinks. 1989: A lonely boy named Gil is sent to live off the coast of Western Australia among the seasonal fishing community where his late mother once resided. There, on the tiny reef-shrouded island, he discovers the story of an infamous shipwreck…​