Historical Fiction

'The Wicked City' by Beatriz Williams is a classic example of historical fiction. Her narrative so on point with the time period that she makes us believe that we are smack in the middle of the Jazz Age, sipping bathtub gin in a clandestine Juice Joint.

While not asking for a neatly tied-with-a-bow, mea-culpa ridden ending from the characters or the author, in 'Leopard at the Door' Jennifer McVeigh could have given her readers a sense of character redemption and evolution, which sadly never happens.

In 'Assassin's Creed: Heresy' by Christie Golden we are taken into the past in the most interesting of ways. Using technology to connect both the past and present, Golden gives us a riveting story behind the legend of Joan of Arc.

Grounding speculative fiction in history, fact, setting, dialogue gives writing an air of authenticity that pulls in the reader.

For many reasons 2016 has us wishing for either a do-over, or the anticipation to see it already gone. One thing we can't deny though is that this year has been a glorious one for fiction. But also for book covers.

Enter to win an autographed copy of Barbara Barnett's new novel "The Apothecary's Curse" published in October by Pyr.

Author Helen Sedgwick about her book 'The Comet Seekers': “I knew that I wanted to write about people making different choices, and the multiple points of view allowed me to show why each of the characters make the decisions they do. It felt like the natural way to write a book about choice, and the ways in which we are both individual and connected.”

'The Other Side of Hope' by R. F. Dunham is a world mirroring our own, third-world Christians and first-world Muslims work to understand one another

"There are a number of ideas I was exploring in this novel: ideas of truth and fiction in war—how war is mythologized before, during and after the fact; how story-telling acts a way to cope with trauma; how the trauma of the Vietnam War was a trauma of the American family."

This novel about the biblical King David gives strong personalities to the women of the story, who in the texts are mostly merely wives, pawns, and victims. And the richness of the flowing prose matches Brooks's heightened imaginative powers.