![]() ![]() Setting: Norway and the United States, late 19th Century Tell me you yourself wouldn’t run through quicksand to acquire this book, and I won’t believe you. Anyway, it’s about a famed spiritualist and a non-believer who wind up joining forces to solve a murder… and then find themselves embroiled in a crime. No, bestselling author Sarah Penner’s book is a canny romp through the Victorian zeitgeist that cemented Conan Doyle’s interests in spiritualism, a world in which science and rationalism clashed with spectacle and illusion and all of those things clashed with a preoccupation with ghosts and the occult. The good news is that it’s definitely much better than the kind of book old Conan Doyle probably would have thought it was (which is to say, a nonfiction book about people who were successfully able to contact the spirit world). I don’t know if this is at all useful to mention, but I can almost guarantee you that Arthur Conan Doyle would have run through quicksand just to get his hands on a book with this title. As a side note, I’ve long believed that historical fiction is only to be trusted when the author is willing to describe bad smells to set the scene, and this book is full of truly disgusting odors. Natt och Dag is particularly adept at savagely ripping the notion of a “civilized age” apart and showing the raw suffering underneath. ![]() The watchman of The Wolf and the Watchman returns to solve a new crime, this one the brutal murder of a tenant’s daughter on the eve of her wedding to a seemingly sensitive nobleman. I adored Niklas Natt och Dag’s brilliantly cynical debut, The Wolf and the Watchman, and The City Between the Bridges is just full of filth and cynicism, the perfect combination for depicting the late 18th century and its terrible iniquities. Niklas Natt och Dag, The City Between the Bridges: 1794 Anyway, now you, too, can speculate on who would win that fight. There are alas no crossovers, although I imagine the characters in the punk novel could easily beat up the characters in a Bret Easton Ellis novel (although the Ellis characters would throw some witty repartee in there that would probably be just as wounding). As always, I noticed a bit of a 20th century bias when putting this together, so please put older settings that you’ve enjoyed recently in the comments!Īs a funny note, there are not one, but two books on this list set in Los Angeles in 1981, one featuring the preppies and the other following LA’s burgeoning punk scene. It’s been an amazing year for historical fiction (just like every year is an amazing year for historical fiction!), so I thought I’d round up some of the best, most richly textured tapestries of history that the fiction world has to offer.
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