BY CAROLINE WILSON Camille Aubray’s newest novel, The Girl from the Grand Hotel (Blackstone Publishing, 2024), transports readers to the dazzling Côte d’Azur, just in time for the first Cannes Film Festival in September 1939. The novel’s heroine Annabel Faucon has fled New York in the wake of her parents’ deaths, hoping to start fresh with her Oncle JP, who manages the Grand Hotel in Cannes. She is taken on as an employee, eager to assist with the Hollywood glitterati descending on the hotel in the month before the opening of Cannes Film Festival. Annabel serves as personal assistant to the ag ..read more

If you’ve written a historical novel or nonfiction work published (or to be published) in January 2024 or after, send the following details via our contact form by July 7 to be featured here: author, title, publisher, release date, and a blurb of one sentence or less. Please edit your blurbs down to one sentence before submitting; space is limited, and concise blurbs are appreciated. Details will appear in the August 2024 issue of HNR. Submissions may be edited. In Jason Monaghan’s Blackshirt Conspiracy (Level Best, Oct. 2023), fascist plots swirl around the British king and his American mistr ..read more

WRITTEN BY TRISH MACENULTY “The vampire I play is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. I have the face of a vampire, but the heart of a feminist.” —Theda Bara In spite of the fact that she was an international sensation during the silent film era and starred in more than forty films, Theda Bara (unlike Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford) is not well known. There’s a reason for her relative obscurity: most of the films in which she appeared burned in a fire in 1937. Only four films survive along with a few clips and photographic stills from others. Bara’s heyday only lasted a few years (1 ..read more

WRITTEN BY SARAH HENDESS In Kate Quinn and Janie Chang’s new book, The Phoenix Crown (William Morrow, 2024), a pair of unlikely friends team up to solve a mystery just as San Francisco is devastated by the massive 1906 earthquake. Less dramatically, but still unexpectedly, the authors were brought together by a calamitous experience of their own. “We met in 2017 after the Historical Novel Society conference, where our publisher sent us from Portland to Canada on a three-author, three-city tour with our mutual friend Jennifer Robson,” the authors said via email. “Everything that could possibly ..read more

INTERVIEW BY DAVID CONNON Alison Morton writes award-winning thrillers featuring tough but compassionate heroines. In her ten-book Roma Nova series, SUCCESSIO, AURELIA, INSURRECTIO and JULIA PRIMA have been selected as Historical Novel Society’s Editors’ Choices.  Her latest, EXSILIUM, plunges us back to the late 4th century, to the foundation of Roma Nova. She blends her fascination for Ancient Rome with six years’ military service and a life of reading historical and thriller fiction. On the way, she collected a BA in modern languages and an MA in history.  She now lives in France ..read more

INTERVIEW BY LESLIE S. LOWE Katherine Mezzacappa is an Irish author living in Italy. Her Booker-nominated The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight) was published in April 2024 and The Ballad of Mary Kearney (Addison & Highsmith) will follow in early 2025. Writing as Katie Hutton, she is the author of four novels with Zaffre, the first of which made the last fifteen in the HNS New Novel Competition in 2018. Twenty of her short stories have been published world-wide. How would you describe this book and its themes in a couple of sentences? It’s 1584 and an unsuspecting girl is plucked from an orpha ..read more

BY JENNY QUINLAN Robert Dugoni is well-known as an author of contemporary thrillers and mysteries, including the Tracy Crosswhite, Charles Jenkins, and David Sloane series, with over two dozen books published, millions of copies sold, and legions of fans. But his new novel, A Killing on the Hill, is his first foray into the world of historical thrillers, and he found his way there the same way so many historical novelists do: he stumbled across a true story that grabbed his imagination and wouldn’t let go. His wife’s grandmother once told Dugoni that “life is just the blink of an eye,” and he ..read more

INTERVIEW BY ELLEN IRWIN Author Louise Mangos – also writing as L.S. Mangos – grew up in the UK but has spent more than half her life in Switzerland, where she currently lives with her husband and two sons. Her latest novel, The Secrets of Morgarten, is a medieval mystery, which was recently a finalist in the Page Turner Awards. Louise also writes full-length psychological suspense, prize-winning short stories and flash fiction, and enjoys an active life in the Alps. How would you describe this medieval mystery and its themes in a few sentences? The Secrets of Morgarten is ..read more

BY IRENE COLTHURST Tales in which readers can see lovers spend a period at the peak of their joint happiness are rare in historical fiction.  Usually, the other more adventurous demands of the story only permit brief tender moments. Yet in The Book of Thorns (Graydon House, 2024), Hester Fox provides one of her co-protagonists with a lovely, full blissful romantic interlude. This is an impressive feat in a book set in the run-up to the Battle of Waterloo and on the battlefield. Those protagonists are two young women, Cornelia and Lijsbeth, who flee the constraints of their early lives. Th ..read more

BY TRISH MACENULTY When Piper Huguley — author of the acclaimed novel By Her Own Design: A Novel of Ann Lowe, Fashion Designer to the Social Register (William Morrow, 2022) about the African-American woman who designed Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress — visited book clubs, she noticed how segregated they are. As a literary scholar, she also noticed how white women wrote about interracial friendship far more frequently than Black women. When Black women did write about the subject, it was often with another white author. So when she discovered a connection between Alice Roosevelt Longworth, eldes ..read more