The Unvanquished

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

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

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.

On her twenty-sixth birthday in 1976 Los Angeles, Dana Franklin is yanked to a Maryland plantation whenever Rufus Weylin, a red-haired boy who will grow up to enslave her ancestors, is about to die—and she has to keep him alive or never be born. Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel is time-slip historical fiction of the early nineteenth-century South: each stay is longer, her white husband Kevin is stranded with her, and the past does not return her whole.

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.

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.