Literary
My Last Empress
Samuel Pickens is a precocious young man at the beginning of this novel that spans life in Connecticut and China…
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
For a landlord, Ximen Nao wasn’t such a bad man. He was kind to his tenants, his wife, his concubine,…
The Tenants of the Hôtel Biron
Through a fictitious collection of manuscripts and letters, we learn of the famous artists that lived in Paris’s Hôtel Biron…
The House of Jasmine
This book is set in Alexandria, Egypt, during the Sadat era and is essentially a snapshot of Egyptian life and…
Sweet Tooth
For many members of the HNS, the early 1970s may not seem to be very historical. But Ian McEwan’s new…
The Soledad Crucifixion
What novel that opens with the voluntary Good Friday crucifixion of a Catholic priest in the mountains of northern New…
Beggar’s Feast
“Beggar at the feast! Master of the dance!” The chorus from the musical Les Misérables will ring in your ears…
Cervantes Street
This novel takes the biography of the creator of Don Quixote as the starting point for a tale of love…
The Reinvention of Love
With The Reinvention of Love, award-winning Canadian poet and novelist Helen Humphreys has deftly married the elaborate, factual lives of…
The Headmaster’s Wager
Percival Chen is the Chinese headmaster of an English-language school in Cholon, Vietnam, in the 1960s; he has run the…
About our Reviews
Over the last 15 years The Historical Novels Review (the society’s print magazine for our members) has published reviews of some 12,000 historical fiction books. We plan to upload them all and make them searchable here.
