Looking for a good summer read?   Transport yourself with these  historical fiction works  by  Canadian and international authors.

When Marie, the spoiled daughter of a sugar baron living in 19th-century Montreal, meets the brilliant Sadie, the two are immediately inseparable. Marie has bubbly charm and sees the pleasure of the world, whereas Sadie’s obsession with darkness is all-consuming. Class and circumstance lead them down different paths, while each woman plays an unexpected role in the events that upend their city.

When We Lost Our Heads is a story that explores gender, power, sex, desire, class and status.

Heather O’Neill is really a writer and author from Montreal. O’Neill’s debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals , was a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award and won Canada Reads 2007. The Montreal-based writer was the first back-to-back finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize: her book The Girl Who Was Saturday Night was a finalist in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels was a finalist in 2015. Her latest books are the novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel and the nonfiction book Wisdom in Nonsense .  

Bloomsbury Girls tells the story of Vivien Lowry, Grace Perkins and Evie Stone — three women with a complex web of relationships, goals plus dreams — as they interact with famous literary figures. The particular novel is set in the 1950s world of publishing and the women work in an old-fashioned bookstore, run by men, called Bloomsbury Books. As they juggle their lives, the women work toward a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.  

Natalie Jenner is the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society , which was the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award runner-up for historical fiction. Jenner is really a former lawyer and independent bookshop owner. She was born in England and now lives in Oakville, Ont.  

Everyone Knows Your Mom Is a Witch takes place in a small German town in 1618, where an elderly widow will be accused of witchcraft. In the German duchy of Württemberg, fear is palpable — the plague is spreading, and the Thirty Years’ War has begun. So when a woman named Ursula Reinbold accuses widow Katharina of offering her a witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch was shortlisted for the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize .  

Galchen is a Canadian American writer. She is also the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances . She lives in New York City.

Em follows the story of a young boy called Louis, the child of an American soldier, who takes care of an abandoned baby. Louis calls the baby em Hồng, em meaning “little sister” or “beloved. ” Although Louis lives on the streets associated with Saigon and holds the baby in a cardboard box, em Hồng’s life opens the realm of possibilities. The novel is inspired by historical events, including Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of orphans from Saigon within April 1975.  

Em was on the particular 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist .  

Born in Saigon, Kim Thúy left Vietnam in a boat at the age of 10  and settled with the girl family in Quebec. Her other novels include Vi , Man and Ru . Ru won the Governor General’s Literary Honor for French-language fiction and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2002. It also won Canada Reads 2015, when it was championed by Toronto International Film Festival CEO Cameron Bailey. Her books have been translated into 29 languages and are available in 40 countries and territories.  

Wan tells the story of Jacqueline, a privileged artist in 1970s South Africa. After an anti-apartheid activist comes to hide in her garden house, Jacqueline’s carefully constructed life begins to unravel.

Dawn Promislow is a writer through Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of the collection Jewels and Other Stories , which was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2011. Her writing has appeared in places like the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Berfrois, Munyori Fictional Journal, StoryTime and Hazlitt. Promislow lives in Toronto.

Set in the particular 1970s in Mexico City, Velvet Was the Night follows a secretary named Maite who lives to read the latest issue of Secret Romance. She escapes into stories of passion and danger, ignoring the student protests and political unrest that consume the city.

When her next-door neighbour, Leonora, a beautiful art student, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite searches for her and uncovers the girl secret life as a student radical and dissident. Eccentric criminal Elvis, at the request of his boss, is also looking for Leonora. As Maite and Elvis come closer to finding out the truth behind Leonora’s disappearance, they can no longer escape the danger that threatens to consume their lives.  

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Canadian writer born and raised in Mexico. She’s the author of novels Mexican Gothic , Gods of Jade and Shadow , Signal to Noise , Certain Dark Things and The Beautiful Ones . She has previously won the Goodreads Readers Choice Award, the Copper Cylinder Award and Aurora Award.

In this time-traveling novel, the homicide detective named Mallory finds herself transported 150 years in the past after she is attacked and left unconscious in an alley. Mallory wakes up in the body of housemaid Catriona Thomson, who was also attacked in the same spot within 1869. Mallory must put aside her shock and find a way to catch her murderer, which hopefully leads her back to her modern life before it’s too late.  

Kelley Armstrong is a bestselling author of YA and middle grade books, horror novels and thrillers. The girl standalone novels include Aftermath and Missing , but she is best known for her Darkest Powers plus Darkness Rising series and her Cainsville and Otherworld series.

The Great Passion   is a historical novel about Johann Sebastian Bach’s writing of St . Matthew’s Passion . In 1727, Stefan Silbermann is a grief-stricken 13-year-old, struggling with the death of his mother and his removal to a school in distant Leipzig. Narrated by the  fictional teen, The Great Passion   is a story of Bach over the course of a year as an ambitious, passionate musician and father, navigating grief and professional rivalries — through faith, love and the transcendence of music.  

James Robert Runcie is a British author, documentary filmmaker, television producer and playwright.  

Mansions of the Moon   is set in ancient India and traces the life of Siddhartha Gautama, otherwise known as the Buddha, and his marriage to the intelligent and spirited Yasodhara. From their early life together to their crumbling partnership as Siddhartha’s spiritual calling takes over, Mansions of the Moon paints a portrait of a marriage plus illuminates a woman who has remained in the shadows of history.

Shyam Selvadurai is an award-winning Sri Lankan Canadian novelist. His books include Funny Boy , which won the 1995 Books in Canada First Novel Award, now known as the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It was furthermore adapted into a film by Indian Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, which is available on CBC Gem . His other books include The particular Hungry Ghosts and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea.

Everything Turns Away is a novel set in the particular aftermath of 9/11. On Sept. 11, 2001, the lives of two couples are about to be unraveled when their neighbour is usually murdered, their babysitter goes missing and the World Trade Centre collapses. This domestic thriller is a haunting exploration of marriages and what tears them apart, of what happens to people during shocking events, and of how everything can change in an instant.

Michelle Berry is the author of 3 collections of short stories and six novels. Her books include I Still Don’t Even Know You, The Prisoner and the Chaplain , This Book Will Not Save Your Life , How to Get There from Here and What We All Want . Berry lives in Peterborough, Ont. where she operates an independent bookstore, Hunter Street Books.

All of us, Jane is a novel inspired by the real-life   The Jane Collective, a good underground  healthcare initiative that will started in 1960’s Chicago.   We, Anne is about a young woman named Marthe, who ends up befriending an older woman while living in Montreal. She learns about how the woman used to help young women in rural Newfoundland get abortions, and the two return to the particular island to continue this cause. But over time, things become more difficult  —  and more complicated  —  than Marthe ever imagined.

Aimee Wall is a writer plus translator from Newfoundland who now lives in Montreal. The girl translations include Vickie Gendreau’s novels Testament and Drama Queens. We all, Jane , the girl first novel,   has been on  the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist , the  shortlist for the 2022 ReLit Awards and was a 2022 finalist for the  Amazon North america First Novel Award .

Vile Spirits is really a follow-up to mystery new The White Angel , which was inspired from the 1924 murder of Scottish Nanny Janet Smith. Vancouver is once again plagued by two suspicious deaths. Alcohol is definitely legal again after prohibition failed, but anti-booze sentiments remain strong. To attempt appeasement, Attorney General Gordon Cunning establishes the Liquor Control Board to oversee supply. But when both Cunning as well as the wife of a bureaucrat are found dead, people wonder if it can pure coincidence that they were both drinking the same brand of “tonic. ”

John MacLachlan is a writer, playwright, composer and theatre director who lives in Vancouver. He has created many productions, most notably Billy Bishop Goes to War . He’s the author of several fiction and nonfiction publications, including The White Angel . MacLachlan is an officer of the Order of Europe.

What Storm, What Thunder   is a novel that  delves into the lives associated with characters affected by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. As markets and businesses begin to close down after a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7. 0 magnitude hits the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Survivors and victims of the tragedy share their own stories of heartbreak, trauma and resilience.  

  Myriam L. A. Chancy is the author of four novels and four books of literary criticism. Her novel  The Loneliness of Angels   won the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award in 2011 plus was shortlisted for the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize within Caribbean Literature for hype.   Chancy was raised in Haiti and Canada and now resides in the U. S.

Daughters of the Deer   begins within 1657 with  Marie, the gifted healer of the Deer Clan. She does not wish to marry the white French soldier, but at the urging of her chief, Marie accepts his proposal to save her people from disease, starvation and violence. Eighteen years later, Marie has a daughter named Jeanne, who is torn between cultures. When Jeanne falls in love with a young woman named Josephine, the girl knows  their relationship  will be forbidden by her dad, while her mother’s people see her two-spirit nature as a sign of special wisdom.  

Danielle Daniel is an author and artist  of settler and Indigenous ancestry living in the traditional territory of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek (Sudbury, Ont. ). Her other books include  The Dependent , which was shortlisted for the 2017 Northern Lit Award, and the picture books  Once in a Blue Moon   and  Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox , which won the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award and was obviously a finalist for the Blue Spruce Award and First Nation Communities Read Awards. She also illustrated the 2018 Marilyn Baillie Award-shortlisted picture book  You Hold Me Up , written by Monique Gray Smith.

The Orphan Girl   is a historic fiction book about friendship and courage that follows Kate, an energetic and enthusiastic young woman in England during the Second World War. Already dealing with loss of her father, she is caught in an air raid and is injured when her house is bombed. While recuperating, a doctor named Claire  invites Kate to live with her. But when Claire’s husband returns home from the war, the women’s lives are forever changed.

Kurt Palka is a bestselling novelist based in Toronto. Three of his books are works of historical fiction —  Clara ,   a Hammett Prize finalist set in 1930s  Vienna,   The Piano Maker ,   the national bestselling book placed in 1930s  Canada, and  The Hour of the Fox ,   which follows a lawyer called Margaret Bradley through the death of her son within the 1970s. Palka  was raised in Austria and spent most of his career as a journalist.