What’s the definition of historical fiction—how long ago does a novel have to take place to be considered historical? Kayla Rae Whitaker’s Returns and Exchanges (Random House, May 19) feels right on the bubble, opening in December 1979 and following the Baker-Taylor’s retail chain in Lexington, Kentucky, through the winter of 1990—with a brief epilogue set in 2015. Fran Taylor is the chief executive of the family-run discount store, sharing the title with her husband, Fred, with whom she also shares four kids—but she finds herself attracted to Wendy Patterson, an assistant manager. The novel follows Fran and the other Taylors over the course of a decade. “Whitaker has written a sprawling, extravagantly intelligent novel about people quietly breaking free from constraints—marital, gender, class.…Superb,” says our starred review.
Dimitry Elias Léger’s Death of the Soccer God (MCD/FSG, May 12) jumps further back in time, telling the story of a fictional Haitian soccer hero who played for the 1950 U.S. World Cup soccer team and then faced a firing squad in Port-au-Prince. Complicated? That’s not even mentioning the time he spent rooming with Miles Davis in New York. Our starred review says “the novel moves with lyrical, imaginative force, especially in its vivid evocations of soccer play, while also showcasing the author’s penchant for orchestrating funny and poignant romantic interludes.…A historical novel that merrily dances and jukes its way across the pitch of time.”
David Baerwald, a musician, has used his grandfather’s life story as the inspiration for his first novel, The Fire Agent (Spiegel & Grau, June 2), which opens in 1900 and sweeps across the first half of the 20th century. Ernst Baerwald is raised in a wealthy German Jewish family before the rise of Nazism, and his powerful father steers him into a life of “friendly” industrial espionage as a chemist at IG Farben—which leads to the more traditional kind of espionage during the world wars. “With its moral power, cinematic qualities, and deeply felt storytelling—one highlight is Ernst’s participation in a momentous performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at [a] POW camp—this is…quite an achievement.”
After the success of Hamnet (2020) and The Marriage Portrait (2022), set in Elizabethan England and Renaissance Florence, respectively, O’Farrell opens her latest novel, Land (Knopf, June 2), in 1865 Ireland, where Tomás and his 10-year-old son, Liam, have been working as surveyors for the hated British, who are drawing maps of their colonized island. When the father and son discover an ancient sacred site, it upends the life of their family. Our starred review calls this an “evocative and impassioned” novel, “steeped in Irish history and folklore, alive with a sense of wonder.”
“If Jane Austen and Nora Ephron collaborated they might produce something close to” Ayelet Waldman’s A Perfect Hand (Knopf, May 19), according to our starred review. Alice Lockley, a Victorian lady’s maid, conspires with the valet of her mistress’ less favored suitor to bring them together so the servants can be together, too—but then Alice goes to a meeting for the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women, unfortunately called SPEW for short. “Witty, frothy, and ultimately wise,” our review concludes.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
