CHILDREN AND FIRE by Ursula Hegi
In her new novel, CHILDREN AND FIRE, Ursula Hegi tells the story of Thekla Jansen, a teacher in the fictional German village of Burgdorf, familiar to readers of the author’s previous novels. Taking for the most part the perspective of her heroine, Hegi explores, from the inside out so to say, the emotional confusion and moral dilemmas that Germans were confronted with after the Nazis’ rise to power. The author sets the historical stage effectively, and while alluding to pivotal events, she focuses her attention on one specific day in February 1934, a day that, while starting off like any other, ends with the Burgdorf residents shocked, emotionally scarred and deeply divided…
June 28, 2011
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Judi Clark · 
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Tags: 1930s, Real Event Fiction, Time Period Fiction, War Story · Posted in: Facing History, Germany, Reading Guide, World Lit
THE RESERVOIR by John Milliken Thompson
Tommie Cluverius is on trial for murder in the first degree. The charge is that he killed Lillie Madison and threw her into a reservoir where she drowned. The year is 1885 and Richmond, Virginia is the scene of the crime. Did Tommie kill Lillie or was it suicide? Did someone else kill Lillie and try to pin the crime on Tommie? The outcome of the trial will determine whether Tommie lives or goes to the gallows.
June 21, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 19th-Century, Murder Mystery, Other Press, Real Event Fiction, Time Period Fiction, Virginia · Posted in: Debut Novel, Facing History, Mystery/Suspense, US South
THE SECRET HISTORY OF COSTAGUANA by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
When Joseph Conrad was working on NOSTROMO in the early 1900s, and setting it in the fictional Latin American country of Costaguana, he found that his first-hand knowledge of the region, based on a couple of brief shore visits a quarter-century earlier, was insufficient. He therefore consulted friends who had spent greater time in northern South America and constructed a setting that is entirely believable, not only in its composite geography but also in its way of life and political turmoil. Now Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that Conrad might have had one further contact, José Altamirano, born in Colombia but recently arrived in London as an exile from Panama, following the province’s secession from Colombia in the revolution of 1903. Writing now in 1924, the year of Conrad’s death, Altamirano believes that the novelist has stolen his life story and that of his country to make a fiction of his own, utterly obliterating him in the process.
June 18, 2011
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Tags: 19th-Century, 20th-Century, Colombia, Panama Canal, Real Event Fiction, Story Retold, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Facing History, Latin American/Caribbean, South America, World Lit, y Award Winning Author
22 BRITANNIA ROAD by Amanda Hodgkinson
In Hodgkinson’s first novel a young Polish couple and their 7-year-old son Aurek, separated for six years during WWII, reunite in England at war’s end in 1946.
If only it were that simple.
June 3, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: Real Event Fiction, Time Period Fiction, War Story · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Debut Novel, Facing History, Reading Guide, United Kingdom
THE SOJOURN by Andrew Krivak
World War I was the deadliest conflict in Western history, but contemporary portrayals of war in literature and cinema primarily focus on examples of combat from the past fifty or sixty years. At a time when the Great War is receding into the annals of distant history, this elegiac and edifying novel has been released–a small, slim but powerful story of a young soldier, Josef Vinich, who hails from a disenfranchised and impoverished family in rural Austria-Hungary.
May 25, 2011
· Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: Bellevue, Mining, Real Event Fiction, Time Period Fiction, War Story, WWI · Posted in: Austria, Coming-of-Age, Debut Novel, Facing History, Reading Guide, US Frontier West, World Lit
DOC by MARY DORIA RUSSELL
DOC relates how it might have been during 1878-79 when Dr. John Henry Holliday lived in Dodge City, Kansas. “The Deadly Dentist” who later gained fame or infamy, depending on perspective, for “pistoleering” along with the surviving Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral, saved Wyatt Earp’s life in Dodge first. Earp is said to have credited Holliday with saving him, but apparently didn’t share details, so history isn’t sure of the facts. But this novel presents its own story of how it might have happened.
May 24, 2011
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 19th-Century, Fictional Biography, Real Event Fiction, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Facing History, US Frontier West, Wild West
