The Long Song

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

A healer’s daughter navigates slavery’s end and dangerous secrets (SAH Prize 2021).

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.

Five Russian families move through court, love, and the Napoleonic invasion as 1805 becomes Borodino and Moscow burns. Tolstoy’s epic is Napoleonic historical fiction on a national scale—ballrooms and battlefields, Pierre and Natasha, and the question of who makes history.

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 1830 on Faith Plantation in Barbados, eleven-year-old George Washington Black is taken from the cane fields to serve Christopher “Titch” Wilde, who is building a hydrogen balloon he calls the Cloud-cutter—and when a death puts a bounty on Wash, the two cut the tether and flee. Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel is adventure historical fiction of the 1830s, from an enslaved boy’s escape out of Barbados through Virginia, the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London, and Morocco.