Six More Bossy Favorite Historical Fiction Reads from the Past Year
- The Bossy Bookworm
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Six More Bossy Favorites
Historical fiction is one of my favorite reading genres, and this is the second of three historical-fiction favorite lists I'll have for you as I revisit my reading for the Bossy best of the best from the past year. For my first roundup, check out this link.
You can explore the twelve titles on My Very Favorite Bossy 2025 Reads to find out about my overall favorite reads from last year, or you can click to read about past Bossy historical favorites.
If you've read any of these titles, I'd love to hear what you think!
What are some of your favorite historical reads, whether from the past year or beyond?
01 Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein
Allision Epstein shapes Charles Dickens's greedy criminal mastermind Jacob Fagin into a character with a rich backstory, showing him to be a man shaped by personal and societal circumstances in mid-1800s London and imagining his efforts to teach thievery to his wards as valuable survival instincts that allow for a desperate survival.
In Allison Epstein's version of mid-nineteenth-century Dickensian London, the traditional villain of Jacob Fagin acquires a rich backstory. Jacob has been scrabbling for existence since he was a young boy. When his father was murdered as a thief in the Jewish quarter, the family's situation became increasingly desperate. His beloved mother Leah kept her son fed and supplied with books, and she worked relentlessly at menial jobs to keep them afloat--until her own untimely demise from disease.
Now Jacob's options for survival are limited, and he begins to train as a pickpocket, soon eclipsing his teacher and the other thieves in the area, beginning to be known as Fagin--and gradually, driven by a measure of empathy, taking in and training young people who are also fighting for a chance in a tough world.
I haven't read Oliver Twist in many years, yet Fagin has remained ingrained in my head as a selfish, greedy, detestable character.
details of the place and time, exposes Victorian London's stark class contrasts, and presents the filthy rabbit warren of streets, alleys, and squares flanking the polluted Thames where the band of thieves scrape by, care for each other, sometimes betray one another, and live their complicated lives.
Allison Epstein is also the author of A Tip for the Hangman and Let the Dead Bury the Dead.
You might also be interested in these Bossy reads that are set in the 1800s.
For my full review of this book please see Fagin the Thief.
02 Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven
Bug Hollow tracks the Samuelson family from an idyllic mid-1970s Northern California summer through a tragedy that upends already-tenuous relationships. Various points of view and side characters sometimes make the story meander as Huneven explores fissures that stretch through decades, but I loved the unconventional bonds, chosen-family elements, and vivid details that place the reader in points in time.
When Sally Samuelson was eight, her idolized golden-boy older brother Ellis went missing after his high school graduation. The family located him in Bug Hollow, a Northern California community where he was living his best life in a last-gasp counterculture house with a free-spirit of a new girlfriend. After pushing him to return home before heading to college, he headed to campus and died in a freak accident.
Bug Hollow spans decades, tracking grief and then the life paths of Ellis's sisters (particularly young Sally), his parents, Julia, and adopted Eva. Lives intersect unexpectedly, disappointments and shortfalls become clear, secrets emerge, and joy is sometimes elusive. The strongest bonds between characters aren't those within the nuclear family, and this was one of my favorite aspects.
We zigzag to spend page time with intriguing side characters (Yvette, with whom Phil has a very brief affair; Mrs. Wright, the former principal of Sybil's school), which adds to the sometimes-disjointed feeling of the story, but I loved Huneven's gift for placing us in vividly set scenes of the times, and for the sprawling interconnected characters and their caring for each other.
Huneven is also the author of the novels Search, Off Course, Blame, Jamesland, and Round Rock.
You might also be interested in these novels about difficult family situations.
For my full review of this book please see Bug Hollow.
03 The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
The Briar Club employs nine points of view to tell the story of life in a female-only boarding house in 1950s, McCarthy-era Washington, D.C., bookended by the story of a mysterious murder in the building.
This historical fiction novel from Quinn is a departure from much of my favorite Quinn fiction--brave women during wartime, being brilliant, outsmarting the enemy, taking risks, and entering into danger.
In The Briar Club, Kate Quinn turns her considerable talent for bringing history to life by tackling the McCarthy era--in what feels like a very timely novel about free speech, the twisting of truth, and destructive governmental paranoia.
I didn't love the recipes and their cutesy endings with story-specific conditions that are ideal for their consumption. Nor did I love the house's voice, or the house as a whimsical, yearning character (with somewhat unclear desires).
The many points of view added depth to the characters, but at a cost: I felt somewhat jarred by shifting to another perspective just when I was settling into the last one.
But I love a found-family story. And Quinn's inspiration for the Grace March storyline is a personal favorite; The Americans is one of my all-time favorite shows.
Kate Quinn is the author of the fantastic titles The Diamond Eye, The Huntress, The Rose Code, and The Alice Network, as well as The Phoenix Crown, which she wrote with Janie Chang.
For my full review please check out The Briar Club.
04 The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Smith was inspired by the real-life Victorian England case of a cockney impostor attempting to wrest an inheritance from the nobility, but I was most captivated by the unmarried, aging, complex character of Eliza and how she found unorthodox avenues by which to find fulfillment.
In her first historical fiction novel, Smith offers a Victorian England tableau featuring a wonderfully complex female character in Eliza Touchet, the unmarried, aging housekeeper, cousin, and confidante to the terrible but prolific, well-to-do novelist William Harrison Ainsworth.
Smith builds a subplot from the real-life, much-publicized case of the Tichborne Claimant, in which Arthur Orton, a cockney butcher, returned from an extended stay in Australia and attempted to lay claim to the Tichborne family fortune, insisting that he was a long-lost noble son much changed by his time away--and with the actual Tichborne heir's former slave as his key witness.
But I was far more interested in the character of Eliza and the shape of her life. Her voice and point of view are sometimes testy, often incisive, and at other times diminished--a product of the limitations of single women in that time. I found Eliza irresistible.
Zadie Smith is also the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as essays and short stories.
For my full review, please check out The Fraud.
05 Isola by Allegra Goodman
Isola, based upon the story of a real-life sixteenth-century woman, shifts between details of a life of moneyed ease and an abandonment on an unforgiving, uninhabited island after our main protagonist falls in love with the wrong person.
Marguerite is heir to a fortune, but after she is orphaned, she grows into a young lady while her guardian Roberval squanders her inheritance.
As Marguerite enters into her early teens, she begins to fear that her cousin views her as a creepy match for himself. At the very least it becomes clear that he will pay no dowry in order to make another match for her. Instead, in a somewhat shocking turn of events, he forces her to sail with him to New France. But on the way, Marguerite falls for her guardian's servant.
The carelessness that partially leads to the crisis in space felt unrealistic to me, and the high drama and gasping reveal regarding the pivotal spWhen their relationship is discovered, Roberval cruelly punishes them by abandoning them on an uninhabited island to perish. Marguerite, once a privileged, protected child of wealth and opportunity, must learn to survive in the wild.
I was fascinated by each aspect of this tale, and Goodman transported me into the details and (often infuriating) dynamics of life at the time.
Isola is inspired by the story of the real-life sixteenth-century heroine, Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval.
For my full review of this book please see Isola.
06 Trust by Hernan Diaz
This story-within-a-story-within-a-story reveals a clever woman working within the 1920s confines of her sex to outsmart Wall Street while retaining a conscience while showcasing foolish, greedy men determined to manipulate the truth in order to paint themselves in a better light. I was intrigued by the structure and by the peeks behind the curtains of a wealthy family and one woman's financial acumen.
In 1920s New York, Benjamin Rask is a ruthless, outrageously successful Wall Street tycoon, and his beloved wife Helen is the daughter of quirky intellectual aristocrats. They have exceeded any imaginable measure of success and wealth, and their elite financial position and power has in turn catapulted them to the peaks of social status.
But dark secrets lie behind their intriguing success. Diaz's novel explores multiple versions of the couple's story through various points of view, which together present fascinating questions about the true story of two disparate personalities, their marriage, and their intertwined success.
The structure of the novel is intriguing; through shifting perspectives and increasingly occluded reality, the reader must choose a narrative to believe. Characters come off as less realistic than their fictionalized versions (who are main protagonists of the story inside a story), and the ability of those with money and power to manipulate the truth into pure fiction is chilling--and chillingly familiar these days.
Hernan Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Trust. He is also the author of In the Distance.
For my full review, please check out Trust.
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