7 Historical Fiction Books to Get Lost in This Summer 2026

Although she aimed to inspire peers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller’s story has largely been lost to time. 

In Sparks Fly Up, author Carol Strickland seeks to re-imagine the life of Fuller, from writing the first American book on women’s rights, to the shipwreck that took her, and her manuscript on the Italian struggle for freedom, with it. 

Following her death, Fuller’s friends reunite in Concord, Massachusetts, and debate on how best to memorialize her in this fascinating historical novel.

A mix of historical and literary fiction, this National Book Award finalist is a “multigenerational epic of the Sadr family’s life in Iran and their eventual exile” (The Globe and Mail). Kimiâ Sadr, along with her mother and sisters, has fled Iran to join her father in France. 

Many years have passed, and she contemplates having kids of her own. In a Parisian fertility clinic, her Sadr ancestors return to her, and she must decide what she wants for herself in a modern world, beyond the regime. 

While Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey prepares to take over theaters this July, now is a great time to revisit the myth through Zachary Mason’s inventive retelling. 

The Lost Books of the Odyssey offers a sweeping reimagining of the classic story of Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. 

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, “Mason has found a supple, lyrical voice in these pages that captures the spirit of the original Odyssey and at the same time feels freshly contemporary” (New York Times). 

In June’s pick for Reese’s Book Club, two women from opposite worlds team up to take down one of 1930s New York’s most notorious mob bosses, Lucky Luciano. Eunice Carter, the city’s first Black female prosecutor, knows that if she manages to take down Lucky Luciano, head of Manhattan’s five largest organized crime families, it will be the biggest case of her career. 

Although prosecutors have made attempts targeting his businesses’ illicit affairs, Carter has decided to take a different approach. No one has thought about the Mob’s role in prostitution. Polly Adler has built her high-class brothel from the ground up, with her clients some of the most famous names of the day. 

But she’s no longer going to put up with how Lucky treats her girls—and that’s when she meets Eunice, in what is a “dazzling, page-turning work of historical fiction that crackles with life and suspense” (Marie Bostwick, New York Times-bestselling author).

Selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, this multi-generational tale, according to Oprah Winfrey, is “one of the best books I’ve read in my entire life. It’s epic. It’s transportive [...] It was unputdownable!” 

Spanning from 1900 to 1977, in Kerala, South India, three generations of family have been similarly struck by an affliction: one person in each dies from drowning. And in Kerala, where water is everywhere, such a fate is hard to avoid.

A young girl from Kerala’s Christian community, who recently lost her father, is sent to wed a forty-year-old man. In this new beginning, love, joy, and tragedy unfold, setting off a change of events that is “grand, spectacular, sweeping and utterly absorbing” (New York Times Book Review). 

Set in 15th-century China, Lady Tan’s Circle follows Tan Yunxian, a woman who, despite the Confucian principle that “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” is being raised to be useful. 

Her grandmother, one of only a few female doctors in China, teaches he the ways of Chinese medicine, and learns how to diagnose women’s illnesses. She works alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling, and the two quickly form an unbreakable friendship. 

But when Yunxian is arranged to be married by her mother, everything changes between them, and she can no longer be with Meiling or the other girls in the household. As a wife, she must bind her feet and have sons—but she silently plots her escape... 

Named a Best Book by the New York Times, Washington Post, President Barack Obama, among others, The Vanishing Half recalls “James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye” (Wall Street Journal).

Growing up, it was difficult to tell the Vignes twin sisters apart. But at sixteen, they made the choice to run away from their southern black community, and the course of their lives diverged drastically. 

One sister has returned to the same place she once tried to escape, raising her black daughter, while the other passes as white with her white husband, who knows little of her past, 

When the lives of their daughter intersect, what follows is a “multi-generational family saga that tackles prickly issues of racial identity and bigotry and conveys the corrosive effects of secrets and dissembling” (NPR).