This content material accommodates affiliate hyperlinks. While you purchase via these hyperlinks, we could earn an affiliate fee.
This checklist of historic fiction novels was initially printed in our historic fiction publication, Previous Tense. Join it right here to get historic fiction recs straight to your inbox!
It’s wild to suppose we’re 100 years away from the Roaring Twenties–particularly given the present state of the world. Not a lot roaring in regards to the 2020s, but, however then once more we nonetheless have time. And simply because the 2020s aren’t fairly dwelling as much as the hype of the Nineteen Twenties doesn’t imply we are able to’t get pleasure from some nice twenties historic fiction. In reality, that looks like all of the extra motive to decorate up for no motive, keep inside, and browse in regards to the Jazz Age. You may get pleasure from mixing collectively a very authorized drink whilst you’re at it, as a result of that’s one benefit we are able to get pleasure from over the Nineteen Twenties. And whilst you’ll see that it wasn’t all good instances and flapper attire by any means, these Prohibition-era historic fiction books will nonetheless whisk you away to a different time–a minimum of for a short while.
Wild Girls and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce
A movie scholar is interviewing 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour, a girl he believes rubbed elbows with Louis Armstrong and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux in her time as a dancer in Nineteen Twenties Chicago. However the Chicago of 100 years in the past wasn’t simply filled with flappers in glittering attire and powerful drinks, it was additionally a time of mobsters and homicide. And Honoree isn’t positive she able to let go of all her previous secrets and techniques.
Josephine Baker’s Final Dance by Sherry Jones
Based mostly on the lifetime of legendary performer, activist, and spy, Josephine Baker’s Final Dance brings her unbelievable story to life. The novel begins along with her early years impoverished in America and follows her rise to fame as a showgirl, showcasing her enduring spirit and keenness for equality.
Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham
In 1921, mobs of white residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma attacked Black residents and destroyed greater than 25 sq. blocks of one of many wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the USA on the time — so rich, in truth, it was also referred to as “Black Wall Road.” When a seventeen-year-old woman in current day discovers a skeleton on her household’s property, she has no thought the historical past it can reveal. Informed in a twin timeline, following a twenty-first-century biracial Black teen and a white and Native teen, pressured to make troublesome decisions on the night time of the Tulsa bloodbath.
Useless Useless Women by Nekesa Afia
Murders are occurring left and proper in Nineteen Twenties Harlem, and younger Black women like Louise Lloyd are ending up lifeless. She’s doing her finest to remain alive, although, spending her days working at a café and her nights at Manhattan’s hottest speakeasy. However then a physique is discovered on the café and Louise is arrested with an ultimatum: assist the police clear up the murders or be made an instance of by the decide. Now Louise is caught between the legislation and a murderous mastermind in a lethal recreation of cat and mouse.
In search of extra? Try these 20 Should-Learn Books Set within the Nineteen Twenties.
