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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador romances históricos. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador romances históricos. Mostrar todas as postagens

terça-feira, 25 de fevereiro de 2020

Thomas Cromwell, na ficção histórica - Hilary Mantel (NYTBooks)

Para quem gosta de romances baseados na história real, eis aqui uma história real – a do promotor da reforma anglicana, de Henrique VIII, e que pereceu por ela, decapitado pelo rei – por quem pesquisa minuciosamente a vida do seu personagem antes de produzir um romance histórico em torno dela.

For Hilary Mantel, There’s No Time Like the Past

“Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” the first books in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, have sold millions. Now the two-time Booker Prize winner is finishing the job with “The Mirror and the Light.”
Ellie Smith for The New York Times
BUDLEIGH SALTERTON, England — Hilary Mantel has a recurring anxiety dream that takes place in a library. She finds a book with some scrap of historical information she’s been seeking, but when she tries to read it, the words disintegrate before her eyes.
“And then when you wake up,” she said, “you’ve got the rhythm of a sentence in your head, but you don’t know what the sentence was.”
As deflated as she feels upon waking, the dreams have been instructive, Mantel said.
“There’s always going to be something slightly beyond your comprehension, but you must go reaching for it,” she told me last month. “If you thought the record was the whole story, the dream is teaching you how fragile the record is.”
To an unusual degree for a novelist, Mantel feels bound by facts. That approach has made her latest project — a nearly 1,800-page trilogy about the 16th-century lawyer and fixer Thomas Cromwell — more complicated than anything she’s undertaken in her four decades of writing.
The trilogy, which began in 2009 with “Wolf Hall,” traces Cromwell’s unlikely rise, from his origins as a blacksmith’s son to the court of King Henry VIII. It concludes with Mantel’s next book, “The Mirror and the Light,” an account of the last four years of Cromwell’s life, as he amasses more wealth, influence and power but loses the king’s favor and later, his head.
The Cromwell series has turned Mantel into a literary celebrity and something of a national icon. The first two books collectively sold more than five million copies and have been translated into more than 30 languages. Both “Wolf Hall” and its 2012 sequel, “Bring Up the Bodies,” won the Booker Prize, making Mantel the first woman to win twice, and the first author ever to win for a sequel. The books were adapted into an award-winning pair of plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company and a BBC mini-series. In 2015, Prince Charles anointed Mantel with the title of Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, the equivalent of knighthood, prompting some in the press to sneeringly draw comparisons between the modern-day royals and the louche, back-stabbing behavior of the Tudors.
Henry Holt and Company, via Associated Press
Throughout her rise to prominence, Mantel has remained aloof. She’s never been part of the London literary establishment and seems to prefer the company of her long-dead characters to the demands of being a public figure. For the past decade, she and her husband Gerald McEwen, a retired geologist, have lived in Budleigh Salterton, an idyllic village on the coast of Devon.
She’s far from shy, though. A staunch iconoclast, Mantel has occasionally stirred controversy with her heterodox attitudes about British royalty and politics. In 2013, the tabloids pounced on comments she made during a lecturein which she called the Duchess of Cambridge “a shop-window mannequin” with no personality. A year later, she angered conservative British politicians and set off another media maelstrom when she published a short story that imagined the planned assassination of Margaret Thatcher by an I.R.A. sniper.
“She was imprisoned in her own home for a week while the press went absolutely bonkers,” said her literary agent Bill Hamilton, who called the episode “incredibly funny, if inconvenient for her.”
More recently, Mantel has been hounded by the British press over the delayed publication of “The Mirror and the Light,” which is due out next month but was originally planned for release in 2018. The lag set off speculation that Mantel suffered from writer’s block, or was distracted by the stage and television adaptations, or was procrastinating because she couldn’t bear to kill Cromwell. Expectations for the novel, which were high to begin with, are now stratospheric, and Mantel felt pressure to deliver a worthy ending.
“The reason it took so long is that it’s difficult, and that is a totally sufficient explanation,” Mantel said, sounding bewildered and slightly irritated. “But that’s not an explanation that has any news value, so people are looking for a dramatic story of the whole process breaking down.”
Writing “The Mirror and the Light,” which at nearly 800 pages is the longest and most intricately plotted book in the trilogy, was at times a grueling undertaking. In the final months of writing, Mantel, who is now 67 and has endured chronic pain and illness throughout her adult life, kept herself on a punishing schedule. She didn’t realize what a toll the project had taken on her until she was done.
Now that she’s finished the grim final chapter of Cromwell’s story, Mantel says she’s done with historical fiction and plans to focus on writing plays, an entirely new medium for her. She’s abandoning the genre in part because she feels she doesn’t have the stamina to take on a big research project, and because she can’t imagine finding another historical figure as appealing as Cromwell.
“I’m not going to meet another Thomas Cromwell, if you think how long he’s been around in my consciousness,” she said.
◇ ◇ ◇

‘They’re more real and solid to you than actual people.’

Mantel and I met over two wet, windy days in Budleigh Salterton, where she lives with McEwen. Their apartment looks out on a stretch of rocky beach, and the choppy waves were gray and a dull red, stained from the eroding sandstone cliffs.
Apart from a few knickknacks — a stuffed lion and dog perched in a window seat, as if guarding the premises — and a robust library full of classics by Jane Austen, T.S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, their apartment felt like a secular shrine to Tudor England, with shelves of books on Cromwell and his contemporaries, and titles about medieval fashion, food and metallurgy. Hanging in the hallway was a photograph of Mantel standing in front of the famous Hans Holbein oil painting of Cromwell: stout, beady-eyed, vaguely threatening. (In “Wolf Hall,” when Cromwell worries that the portrait makes him look like a murderer, his son replies, “Did you not know?”)
With her pale skin, wispy graying blond hair and wide, arresting light-blue eyes that are ringed with a deeper blue, Mantel has an almost ethereal appearance. She moves deliberately, a habit she acquired after living for decades with chronic pain, and seems to glide rather than walk. She spoke slowly and so softly at times that I worried my recorder wouldn’t pick up her voice over the rumble of the waves and rain.
Talking about the book feels surreal after years in near isolation, she said. “I’ve been like someone in a religious order who’s taken a vow of silence. It’s strange, because all that time I was listening to the past, and now I’m almost talking for a living, and it feels very frivolous and empty compared to the stillness that there used to be in every day.”
Though I expected to find her in mourning, it became clear as Mantel began to talk about Cromwell that for her, he isn’t really gone. She writes and speaks about him in the present tense. After finishing the final novel, she began working on a stage adaptation of “The Mirror and the Light,” so Cromwell is still very much in her head.
John Lamparski/WireImage, via Getty Images
“She talks with him as if he’s a living presence,” said Ben Miles, who played Cromwell in the 2014 Royal Shakespeare Company stage adaptation and is expected to resume the role when “The Mirror and the Light” has its premiere. “She seems to know him intimately but is always striving to understand him.”
During rehearsals, Miles and Mantel acted as each other’s muses. He asked her questions about Cromwell’s childhood, family life and religious beliefs, and her detailed answers informed his performance. In turn, his queries and insights into the character helped to shape the third book, sometimes sending her on a different trajectory than she’d been planning and leading her to an even deeper investigation of Cromwell’s psyche.
They’ve become such close collaborators that when Mantel decided to adapt “The Mirror and the Light” herself, rather than handing it off to a playwright, she chose Miles to co-write it with her.
Mantel has never written for the theater before, and she is taking an unorthodox approach, using her source material to develop something almost entirely new. “If you’re an adapter, you feel so bound to the original text, but I don’t have to put in a single word from the book if I don’t want to,” she said. “Most of what I’ve written now is completely fresh. It’s not obliged to the book.”
Mantel’s work on the play has also kept Cromwell and his contemporaries vivid in her imagination. Even when she’s not at her desk writing, she can still hear them chattering away.
“Once those voices begin, it’s like having the radio on in the background for 15 years. It never actually fades. It runs continuously with whatever else you’re doing, and that means you’re never off duty to the book, you never stop working on it. You fall asleep with it, you wake up with it,” she said. “There’s a point where you’re living with these people and only with them. They’re more real and solid to you than actual people in your life.”
◇ ◇ ◇

‘I am used to “seeing” things that aren’t there.’

Mantel in many ways is perfectly suited to the task of excavating and reanimating the past. Ever since she was a child, she’s been prone to visions of ghosts and spirits. “I am used to ‘seeing’ things that aren’t there,” she writes in her memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost.”
Growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Hadfield, a village in Derbyshire, Mantel was obsessed with myths, folklore and the supernatural. Before she was old enough to read, she insisted that relatives read to her tales from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. “I had a head stuffed full of chivalric epigrams, and the self-confidence that comes from a thorough knowledge of horsemanship and swordplay,” she writes.
At 18, she went to the London School of Economics to study law, with the hope of becoming a barrister, but she couldn’t afford to continue with professional training. By then, she’d met McEwen. They married when they were 20 and moved to Manchester, where he found a teaching position and she worked various jobs and started writing.
Around that time, Mantel’s health began to deteriorate. A doctor dismissed her symptoms as a bid for attention and referred her to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist gave her tranquilizers and an antipsychotic drug and told her to stop writing.
Years later, when Mantel and McEwen were living in Botswana, she researched her symptoms and diagnosed herself with endometriosis. Doctors confirmed her suspicions, and when she was 27, she had surgery to remove her uterus and ovaries. The pain didn’t abate, and Mantel suffered from complications that still afflict her: her weight increased, her legs swelled, she felt exhausted and alien to herself.
Her illness made a normal day job impossible: “It narrowed my options in life, and it narrowed them to writing,” she said.
Mantel finished her first book, a novel about the French Revolution titled “A Place of Greater Safety,” in 1979, and sent it to publishers and agents, but no one wanted a 700-plus page historical novel by an unknown writer. She wrote a second book, a brisk, darkly comic contemporary novel, “Every Day Is Mother’s Day,” which became a critical success when it was published in 1985.
Over the next two decades, she published seven other novels and developed a cult following. Though her books vary in their subject matter, style and tone, they are bound by recurring themes: her fascination with transformation and the unseen realm, with myths and archetypes.
When she was writing her novel “Beyond Black,” about a medium who channels the voices of the dead, Mantel realized she was creating a road map for the Cromwell trilogy. “I was thinking, this isn’t just about a medium,” she said, “it’s about how to induce the necessary frame of mind to let the past enact itself.”
◇ ◇ ◇

‘The real story is better than anything I can come up with.’

When she began writing “Wolf Hall” in 2005, Mantel was still relatively obscure. She was also entering a saturated marketplace for Tudor historical fiction, territory that had already been mined by novelists like Philippa Gregory, Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir.
Mantel had been fascinated by Cromwell for decades, ever since she learned, while she was attending a convent-run high school in Cheshire, about Cromwell’s role in dissolving the country’s monasteries. In her research, she found he was often reduced to a thuggish caricature. “I realized that some imaginative work is due on this man,” she said.
She deployed the same methods she used for “A Place of Greater Safety,” gathering as much historical evidence as she could find, then using the facts to stitch together a narrative. Whenever she hit a roadblock, she would write another section of the story.
In her office, in an apartment up the hill from her home, Mantel showed me the card catalog she used to keep track of Cromwell’s whereabouts, so that she didn’t mistakenly put him in the wrong place at the wrong time. A card I pulled out at random read, “31 July 1536, TC could be at Cookham or Sunninghill.”
Even though as a novelist, she has license to invent, Mantel dreads the thought of contradicting an available historical fact. “If you started out with the attitude that the truth is optional, I couldn’t take any pleasure in it at all,” she said. “I know that the real story is better than anything I can come up with.”
By bringing a historian’s rigor to her fiction, Mantel has had a profound impact on history itself. Before “Wolf Hall,” Cromwell was often cast as a cartoonish villain who persecuted the pious and helped a lustful king dispatch of unwanted wives. Mantel rehabilitated Cromwell, depicting him as a strategist and visionary, and convincing some scholars to re-evaluate his place in history.
“Hilary has reset the historical patterns through the way in which she’s reimagined the man,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford theology professor who published a new Cromwell biography in 2018. “It’s fiction which is extraordinarily probable, and it’s remarkably like the Cromwell I’d been excavating myself.”
There was never any question how Cromwell’s story would end. Not long after she wrote the opening of “Wolf Hall” — a young Thomas Cromwell lies bleeding on the cobblestones, beaten by his abusive father — she wrote about his beheading.
“All I had to do was fill in the middle,” Mantel said, then laughed. “There wasn’t a day when I woke up and thought, ‘Today I have to kill Cromwell,’ because I’d already killed him and brought him back to life so many times.”
As Mantel spoke about Cromwell and how he endures for her, it reminded me of a moment in “The Mirror and the Light” when Cromwell realizes that he’s losing the king’s confidence, and thinks of his beloved master, Cardinal Wolsey, who still speaks to him from the grave.
“The dead are more faithful than the living,” Cromwell thinks. “For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.”

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terça-feira, 17 de dezembro de 2013

Trotsky: seu assassinato continua a ser um grande tema para historiadores e romancistas

Folha de S.Paulo, 17/12/2013 - 14h15

Escritor cubano reabre o debate sobre o assassinato de Trótski

da Livraria da Folha
Ouvir o texto
Divulgação
Autor trata de uma história coberta por inúmeras mistificações
Autor trata de uma história coberta por inúmeras mistificações
Em "O Homem que Amava os Cachorros", o escritor cubano Leonardo Padura apresenta um romance investigativo sobre o assassinato Leon Trótski e do assassino, Ramón Mercader.
No dia 21 de agosto de 1940, no México, Trótski foi assassinado a golpe de picareta. Josef Stálin (1879-1953) foi visto como o principal suspeito de encomendar o crime.
Eles tinham desavenças notórias e Stálin o considerava um rival, motivo que levou Trótski a deixar União Soviética.
A história de "O Homem que Amava os Cachorros" começa em 2004 e é narrada por Iván, que trabalha em uma clínica veterinária em Havana e pretende se tornar escritor.
O narrador encontra um homem que passa a contar detalhes sobre Mercader, como a adesão ao Partido Comunista espanhol, o treinamento em Moscou, a mudança de identidade e os artifícios para ser aceito na intimidade do líder soviético. Padura procura manter o texto fundamentado em documentação e pesquisas para não cair na mera especulação.
"A verdade histórica é um limite que não se deve violar, pois um livro também tem o poder da letra impressa, que tende a ter um sentido de credibilidade", disse Padura aJoca Reiners Terron. "Por isso eu sou muito respeitoso com minhas investigações históricas".
Lev Davidovich Bronstein nasceu em família judaica no dia 7 de novembro de 1879, na Ucrânia. Adotou o nome Leon Trótsky apenas aos 18 anos, quando foi preso por conspirar contra o czar. Amigo de Lênin (1870- 1924), foi exilado da Rússia diversas vezes. No final de 1917, ambos lideraram os bolcheviques e derrubaram o governo. Era o início da República Soviética da Rússia.
Mercader, que nunca afirmou ter sido enviado pelo ditador soviético, cumpriu pena por homicídio até maio de 1960. Ele viveu em Cuba e na União Soviética até morrer em Havana, em 1978. Seu corpo foi enterrado sob o nome de Ramon Ivanovitch López, em Moscou, e tem um lugar de honra no museu da KGB.
*
"O Homem que Amava os Cachorros"
Autor: Leonardo Padura
Tradução: Helena Pitta
Editora: Boitempo
Páginas: 600
Quanto: R$ 59,90 (preço promocional*)
Onde comprar: pelo telefone 0800-140090 ou pelo site da Livraria da Folha
Atenção: Preço válido por tempo limitado ou enquanto durarem os estoques. Não cumulativo com outras promoções da Livraria da Folha. Em caso de alteração, prevalece o valor apresentado na página do produto.
Texto baseado em informações fornecidas pela editora/distribuidora da obra.

quarta-feira, 11 de dezembro de 2013

Abebooks.com: 50 livros de ficcao historica (escolha o seu)

Já comprei um Soljenitsyn, Agosto 1914, por 6 dólares, frete grátis nos EUA. Tem muitas outras obras imperdíveis.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida   

50 Essential Historical Fiction Novels

Lily King
Abebooks.com, December 10, 2013

With Eleanor Catton's 2013 Booker Prize for The Luminaries falling so closely on the heels of Hilary Mantel's wins in 2009 and 2012, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies respectively, interest historical fiction has never been higher. No longer dismissed as bodice-rippers rife with anachronisms or dreary textbooks dressed up in barely discernible plots, historical fiction is gaining the respect of critics and readers alike, regularly appearing on shortlists for major literary awards and on bestseller lists around the world.
Generally speaking, historical fiction is any story that is set in a time period in the past, but depending on who you ask, the criteria can be more - or less - stringent than that. The Walter Scott Prize, created in 2010 to recognize excellence in UK, Irish, and Commonwealth historical fiction, limits the definition to events that take place at least 60 years before publication, during a historical period with which the author has no personal experience.
Regardless of how long ago an historical novel takes place, accuracy and authenticity of the historical setting are absolutely essential. But that doesn't just apply to the physical setting; the worldview of the characters, their values, mores, and general sensibilities must accurately reflect their era. Truly great historical fiction has the ability to portray those sensibilities in a way that can do more than just provide a glimpse into the past - it can also provide insight into contemporary situations and ways of being.
The fact that we're talking about fiction also means that while historical authenticity is important, imagined elements of the story don't have to be based on fact. There is a wide variety of opinion on how much artistic license a writer should be permitted with fictional components, as reflected in the diverse selection below. For the actions and experiences of fictional characters, some will say the only limitation is the author's imagination but for non-fictional events and people, the story must stay true to the historical record. Others allow more leeway, allowing the author to put real people into imaginary situations, as long as the historical outcome remains unaltered.
The books listed below include examples of historical fiction by the strictest of definitions, as well as those that fudge the rules a bit - or a lot. Written over the last 200+ years, with settings that range from ancient Rome in Robert Graves' I, Claudius, to 19th century Egypt and an imaginary relationship between Gustav Flaubert and Florence Nightingale in Enid Shomer's The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, to Malaysia during and after the Japanese occupation of World War II in The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng.

50 Essential Historical Fiction Novels


Quo Vadis
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Quo Vadis
by Henryk Sienkiewicz

A love story between a Christian woman and a Roman man during the rule of Nero.
I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
I, Claudius
by Robert Graves

A fictionalized autobiography of the Roman emperor Claudius.
The Egyptian by Mika Waltari
The Egyptian
by Mika Waltari

1949 Finnish novel that was the bestselling foreign novel in the US until 1983.
The Pillars of the Earth
 by Ken Follett
The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett

Intrigue surrounds the construction of a cathedral in 12th century England.
Kristin Lavransdatter
 by Sigrid Undset
Kristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset

1928 Nobel Prize-winning trilogy depicting Norwegian life in the Middle Ages.

The Name of the Rose
 Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco

A highly-literary murder mystery set in a 14th century Italian monastery.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo

Gothic novel that inspired a flood of tourists to Paris's most famous cathedral.
Romola by George Eliot
Romola
by George Eliot

Eliot's study of life in Florence during the 15th century Italian Renaissance.
The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan
The Twentieth Wife
by Indu Sundaresan

Story of one of the most controversial empresses of India's 16th century Mughal Empire.
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
The Other Boleyn Girl
by Philippa Gregory

Entertaining if inaccurate portrayal of Ann Boleyn's sister, Mary.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel

Sequel to Wolf Hall, chronicling Cromwell's machinations to rid Henry VIII of Anne Boleyn.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas

Swashbuckling tale of d'Artagnan and the three Musketeers in 17th century France.
Silence by Shusaku Endo
Silence
by Shusaku Endo

The story of a Portugese Jesuit missionary's persecution in 17th century Japan.
Waverly by Sir Walter Scott
Waverley
by Sir Walter Scott

Originally published in 1814 and set 100 years prior, considered the first historical novel.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens

Parallel stories intersect in London and Paris during the French Revolution.

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
The Book of Negroes
by Lawrence Hill

An 18th century woman journeys from freedom in Africa, to slavery in the US, and back to freedom again.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell

Love story between a clerk for the Dutch East India Company and a disfigured Japanese midwife.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy's epic masterpiece depicting the French invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic era.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather

Two priests travel 1851 New Mexico in the wake of the Mexican-American War.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell

Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Leopard
by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

Sweeping saga of Sicilian society during Italian unification in the 19th century.
The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye
The Far Pavilions
by M. M. Kaye

This romantic epic set in 19th century India under British rule has been compared toGone With the Wind.
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Oscar and Lucinda
by Peter Carey

Winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, about the misadventures two gambling misfits in 19th century Australia.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood

Fictionalized account of a notorious 1843 murder case in pre-Confederation Toronto, Canada.
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Cloudsplitter
by Russell Banks

Story of radical 19th century abolitionist John Brown, told from the perspective of his only surviving son.

The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe
The Last Crossing
by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Complex saga of Victorian England and the North American frontier, told from multiple points of view.
March by Geraldine Brooks
March
by Geraldine Brooks

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, retellsLittle Women from the perspective of the absent Mr. March.
Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
Measuring the World
by Daniel Kehlmann

Two 19th-century German scientists with different approaches to measuring the world.
The March by E.L. Doctorow
The March
by E.L. Doctorow

Sherman's March to the Sea near the end of the American Civil War, told through a large and diverse cast of characters.
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
The Long Song
by Andrea Levy

A bawdy, farcical, yet unflinching portrait of a 19th century Jamaican slave girl on the brink of emancipation.

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan
The Painted Girls
by Cathy Marie Buchanan

The life of the model for Edgar Degas' Little Dancer Aged Fourteenis brought vividly to life.
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
The Sisters Brothers
by Patrick deWitt

Multiple award winner about two 19th century hired guns traveling from Oregon to California.
The Twelve Rooms of The Nile by Enid Shomer
The Twelve Rooms of The Nile
by Enid Shomer

Fictional friendship between Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, set in Egypt in 1850.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries
by Eleanor Catton

Booker Prize winner - part love story, part mystery, set against the backdrop of New Zealand's 19th century gold rush.
Caravans by James A. Michener
Caravans
by James A. Michener

Story of an American diplomat in Afghanistan following WWII, originally published in 1963.

Troubles by J.G. Farrell
Troubles
by J.G. Farrell

Ineligible when published in 1970,Troubles was awarded the 'Lost Man Booker Prize' in 2010.
August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
August 1914
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Epic chronicle of events leading up to the Russian Revolution.
Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden

Two young Cree men from Northern Ontario become snipers for the Canadian army in WWI.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie

Story of children born at or near the moment of India's independence from Britain.
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
The Thorn Birds
by Colleen McCullough

Melodramatic family saga of early 20th-century life in the Australian outback.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver

The family of a Baptist missionary adjusts to life in the Congolese jungle in the early 1960s.
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden

The fictional memoir of a geisha, from age nine to adulthood, in pre- and post WWII Japan.
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
The Night Watch
by Sarah Waters

An evocative story of London during WWII, told in reverse chronological order.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
by Wayne Johnston

Fictionalized portrait of Joey Smallwood, Newfoundland's colorful first premier.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova

An interweaving of the stories of Vlad the Impaler, Count Dracula, and a 1930s search for Vlad's tomb.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes

Story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's efforts to exonerate George Edalji, a solicitor falsely accused of a crime.
The Seventh Gate by Richard Zimler
The Seventh Gate
by Richard Zimler

Chilling murder mystery incorporating Jewish mysticism in pre-war Berlin under Nazi rule.
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
Shanghai Girls
by Lisa See

When WWII reaches Shanghai, two sisters leave a life of privilege to enter arranged marriages in the US.
Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Half-Blood Blues
by Esi Edugyan

Highly original story of an interracial jazz band in Berlin and Paris during the early days of World War II.
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
The Garden of Evening Mists
by Tan Twan Eng

Award-winning story of Malaysia during and after the Japanese occupation of WWII.