5 Historical Fiction Reads To Curl Up With This Fall

We love when books thrust us into a distant place or time. If you love literature that has the ability to transport you into a different era and bring the past to life with colorful characters and epic storylines, you have to pick up a copy of these five books!

1. An Address in Amsterdam: A Novel by Mary Dingee Fillmore

Rachel Klein optimistically tries to ignore the Nazis as they invade Amsterdam in May of 1940. Her city has been a safe space for Jewish people, but when her beloved Gentile boyfriend must leave instead of being arrested by the Nazis, she realizes her life is being turned upside down. After eighteen months of delivering papers to the underground without the Nazis' knowledge and danger increasing everyday, Rachel encourages her parents to go into hiding with her. The basement where they take refuge is the last place she would expect to find new love, but she does. This novel demonstrates that bravery and love can help to conquer even the most hopeless situations.

2. The Girl from Venice by Martin Cruz Smith

In the city of La Serenissima, the people of Italy fear invasion of the Nazis in 1945. One night a fisherman named Cenzo finds a young woman’s body floating in the water and discovers she is still alive. Guilia is an Italian Jew who escaped the Nazi organization Wehrmacht SS, and is determined to find her family. This meeting thrusts both of them into an unexpected journey during wartime with unforeseen dangers around every corner.

3. Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

Following the death of her mother, eleven-year-old August and her family move to Brooklyn in the 1970s. Dealing with the denial of her mother’s death, she finds refuge and acceptance in a clique of girls named Angela, Gigi and Sylvia. With ever-present sexual abuse, drugs pouring into the neighborhood and the threat of pregnancy or Child Protective Services, this haunting life tale illustrates the intersecting beauty and horrors of Brooklyn while experiencing girlhood.

4. Root, Petal, Thorn by Ella Joy Olsen

Ivy Baygren is living a dream come true as her and her husband Adam purchase a captivatingly beautiful bungalow called the Emmeline Rose in Salt Lake City, Utah. Ivy envisions their family living happily ever after, until Adam unexpected dies. Trying to remain strong for her two kids, Ivy takes on all the home improvement projects her and Adam planned to do. Along the way she uncovers clues about previous occupants of her home. The stories behind the women who inhabited the home before her help Ivy to uncover her own story and learn that it’s possible to blossom in times of sorrow.

5. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Cora is a young slave living on a plantation in Georgia approaching womanhood, where even greater pain awaits her. She is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, but when Caesar arrives from Virginia, he tells Cora about the Underground Railroad. They decide to take a relentlessly dangerous risk and escape. Things get even worse when Cora kills a young white boy trying to capture her. As the two seek freedom up North, the malicious slave catcher, Ridgeway, is hunting them. This adventurous tale paints a portrait of a cruel history and a young woman’s determination to escape the suffocating bondage that was chattel slavery.