Please join History Through Fiction for What's New in Historical Fiction, a regular panel series featuring historical novelists with new and upcoming titles. Moderated by History Through Fiction editor, Colin Mustful, this special panel features:
Susan Meissner author of Only the Beautiful
Brinda Charry author of The East Indian
Nancy Horan author of The House of Lincoln
Rita Chang-Eppig author of Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea
Susan Meissner is a former managing editor of a weekly newspaper, and an award-winning columnist. She is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author numerous novels. Her new novel, Only the Beautiful, is a heartrending story about a young mother's fight to keep her daughter, and the winds of fortune that tear them apart.
Brinda Charry is a novelist-turned-academic-returned-novelist. A specialist in English Renaissance literature (Shakespeare and contemporaries), she has published a number of books and articles in that field. Her new novel, The East Indian, inspired by a historical figure, is an exhilarating debut novel about the first native of the Indian subcontinent to arrive in Colonial America.
Nancy Horan is the New York Times bestselling author of Loving Frank and Under the Wide and Starry Sky. A native Midwesterner, Horan was a teacher and journalist before turning to fiction. Her new novel, The House of Lincoln, set in 1850s Springfield, Illinois, chronicles the joys and struggles of a Portuguese immigrant family, a free Black family from Kentucky, and the Lincolns—Abraham, Mary and their three children.
Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA from NYU. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, The Santa Monica Review, The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories 2021, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, is a dazzling historical novel about a legendary Chinese pirate queen, her fight to save her fleet from the forces allied against them, and the dangerous price of power.