Long before I fell in love with History as an academic subject, I fell in love with stories. And as the granddaughter of Caribbean immigrants, true stories of my grandparents’ early lives could transport me to another place as vividly as fiction. So although I have studied History to Master’s level, where I specialized in the legacy of slavery, it is always to fiction that I turn to breathe life into the past. My favourite books are those that are unsettling in the unfamiliarity of the world they create, and yet deeply moving because, at heart, the characters are motivated by timeless and human things like grief, ambition, or love.
It’s 1834 and slavery has ended. In Barbados, Rachel flees her plantation in search of her stolen children, embarking on a journey to reassemble the pieces of her family. Inspired by the brave women of the Caribbean who really did search for their children after emancipation, this is a story of hope, a mother’s fierce love, and what it means to be free.
This book is a sweeping, multi-generational epic that is, at its core, about the destruction of the great American forests.
Annie Proulx writes so breathtakingly about the natural world, and is also able to conjure such vivid characters through the generations.
But what I love most about this book is how it connects unexpected places – like 16th Century Canada and Japan, or 18th Century California and New Zealand – reminding us that history is not confined to any one place.
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From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests.
In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins. Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to…
This is not a book about history so much as one that has history suffused through it.
To me, it so perfectly captures what I love most about the Caribbean – the way that the past is always close to the surface. Derek Walcott writes so movingly about St Lucia, which is where my grandmother was born.
This is a book that is made for re-reading – I have read it at least three times now, and every time I spot a new line or a new image to savour.
Omeros is the grand epic poem told in multiple chapters from Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott.
With circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, Omeros simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events--the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement--and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.
“One of the great poems of our time.” —John Lucas, New Statesman
Some of the images in this book – like the moment when Sethe, the protagonist, shrugs off her dress to reveal the whip scars on her back – will stay with me to the grave.
This novel is brutal and beautiful in equal measure. Anyone who wants to explore the forgotten parts of Black history owes a huge debt to Toni Morrison, and she fills such a heart-wrenching story with such a vivid cast of characters.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
This novel is about the experience of the Windrush generation – the Caribbean people who moved to Britain after the Second World War.
Andrea Levy so perfectly captures the experiences of these people that I feel like I can see my own grandparents on the page.
But what I love most about this book is that it sees itself as telling a part of British history – showing how the Caribbean and Britain were connected, but also exploring with equal empathy the experiences of white British characters during and after the War.
As someone mixed race, it is so rare to find books that speak to both sides of my heritage, and this is one of them.
Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Queenie's neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. Through the stories of these people, Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.
Hilary Mantel’s trilogy following the life of Thomas Cromwell is absolutely peerless as far as historical fiction goes.
One of my favourite challenges of the genre is how to take a time and place that is completely unfamiliar, where characters are motivated by ideas and concepts that modern readers find strange, and yet still find that kernel of universal feeling that allows a reader to anchor themselves in the text.
This novel in particular does that perfectly, showing the desperate ambition and cunning of both Cromwell and Anne Boleyn.
The result is completely captivating – and means that the story unfolds as if its final destination is not fixed, even though we all know what must happen in the end.
The second book in Hilary Mantel's award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, with a stunning new cover design to celebrate the publication of the much anticipated The Mirror and the Light
An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists.
'Our most brilliant English writer' Guardian
Bring Up the Bodies unlocks the darkly glittering court of Henry VIII, where Thomas Cromwell is now chief minister. With Henry captivated by plain Jane Seymour and rumours of Anne Boleyn's faithlessness whispered by…
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood. Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program. Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…
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