Conjure Women

An enslaved woman’s escape reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal train—and faces America’s brutal history.

From the Civil War to the Great War, the Hamiltons and the Trasks settle the Salinas Valley, and two generations of brothers replay Cain and Abel—land, a woman named Cathy, and the Hebrew word timshel, thou mayest. John Steinbeck’s novel is Gilded Age family-saga historical fiction of California: a valley’s making, and a family’s argument with fate.

In Civil War Concord, the March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—keep house while their father is at the front: theatricals, letters, poverty, and the question of who they will become when girlhood ends. Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel is Victorian American historical fiction of sisterhood and ambition, a New England home-front saga readers still search by title.

In 1873 Cincinnati, escaped slave Sethe is still not free: Sweet Home’s horrors follow her, and the ghost of the baby she killed rather than see returned to bondage takes flesh as a hungry young woman called Beloved. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning novel is Reconstruction historical fiction of slavery’s afterlife—memory, motherhood, and a haunting that will not stay buried.

Two families—one Northern, one Southern—are torn by the approach of the Civil War.

Linked stories follow two half-sisters’ lineages across centuries of African and American history.