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

INTERVIEW BY LESLIE S. LOWE Since she was a very young child, Charlotte Clutterbuck has loved words and figuring out how to put them together—­­‘Grammar is the ground of all’, as one of her favourite authors, William Langland, puts it. In her adult life, she has published a wide range of stories, poems, essays, film-scripts, journal articles and literary criticism. She is now working on The Gannet Quartet, a series of novels set in stone-age Scotland. Living on an estuary on the Central Coast of New South Wales with her wife, she spends a lot of time birdwatching, tending her vegetable ga ..read more

BY TRISH MACENULTY If it hadn’t been for Frances Perkins, America’s first female Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many more Americans would be suffering and, as author Stephanie Dray points out, some of us might not be here at all. Dray says that without Perkins’ efforts, “We would have grown up in a much more dangerous and cruel world, though I’m not sure I would have grown up at all. I don’t think my family would have survived the Great Depression without Frances, so I feel I owe her a personal debt of gratitude. And I consider it an honor that I get to tell her story — ev ..read more

BY KATE BRAITHWAITE Queen Victoria, until recently Britain’s longest serving monarch, was mother to nine children, grandmother to forty-two, and great-grandmother to eighty-seven. Of those forty-two grandchildren, twenty-two were girls. Clare McHugh’s latest novel, The Romanov Brides (William Morrow, March 2024), features two of them, Alix and Elizabeth of Hesse, daughters of Victoria’s third child, Princess Alice. When I hear the name Romanov my mind jumps to Anastasia and her three sisters, but in The Romanov Brides, we learn the story of their mother, Alix, wife of Nicholas II, and her olde ..read more

Are you contemplating including a character with a disability in your next historical novel?  If you need to research how people with disabilities were treated in the past, here are some books and websites that can get you started and perhaps give you story ideas.  I’m listing works here on people with disabilities in general, and plan to offer more resources on specific types of disability in future articles. PRINT WORKS ON DISABILITIES IN HISTORY Many print books have bibliographies which can lead you to further sources beyond this list.  I have included ISBN numbers for easie ..read more

In her debut novel, Queen Hereafter: A Novel of Lady Macbeth (Harper Perennial, October 2023), Isabelle Schuler creates a breathtaking story that centres around the historical character known to many from Shakespeare’s play. How did you decide to write a novel based on Lady Macbeth? As an actress, I had the privilege to play Lady Macbeth in a few different contexts, and in studying the text more deeply I was so compelled by her character – her ambition, her single-mindedness, her drive, but also her struggle against what is expected of a woman in her position. For such a towering presence she ..read more

INTERVIEW BY J. K. KNAUSS In his study cubicle at Princeton’s Tower Club, Stewart Lytle aspired to follow the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway. He did not become a war correspondent like the young Hemingway, but landed on aircraft carriers, crawled through the mud with Marine snipers and flew in the backseat of fighter jets as a national Pentagon correspondent for dozens of U.S. newspapers. When a man related the story of his parents’ harrowing escape from evil forces in the Spanish Civil War, Stewart jumped at the chance to write Love in War, his own For Whom the Bell Tolls. There is a Kind ..read more