Historical Fiction: Three Novels

John Burnham Schwartz is the bestselling author of five novels, including Northwest Corner, The Commoner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. He has done extensive screen and television writing for the major Hollywood studios, including as screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, for which he was nominated for a 2018 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Writing. In 1967, as the Cold War silently raged on, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin, abruptly abandoned her life in Moscow. She arrived in New York to throngs of reporters. By her side was Peter Horvath, a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America. The young lawyer who escorted Svetlana to the United States was actually John Burnham Schwartz’s father. In his historical novel The Red Daughter (Random House) Schwartz draws upon private papers and years of extensive research to imaginatively re-create the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman’s search for a new life and a place to belong. She is a contradictory celebrity: charismatic and headstrong, lonely and haunted, excited and alienated by her adopted country’s radically different society. After convincing herself that all she yearns for is a simple American life, she attempts to settle into a suburban existence in Princeton, New Jersey. But when the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright calls, Svetlana impulsively joins her cult-like community, a choice that soon ends in disillusionment. That’s when Svetlana reaches out to Peter, the one person who understands the hold of her past. Their relationship changes and deepens, moving from America to England to the Soviet Union and back again, unfolding under the eyes of her CIA minders, and Svetlana’s and Peter’s private lives are no longer their own. The New York Times Book Review praised The Red Daughter for doing “exactly what good historical fiction should do: It sends you down the rabbit hole to read and learn more.”

Julie Orringer is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a novel, and the short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, both New York Times Notable Books.  She is the winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize. In her historical novel The Flight Portfolio (Knopf), Julie Orringer weaves invention and facts as she follows the efforts of one Varian Fry who, in 1940, traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to help escape within a few weeks. Instead, Fry stayed more than a year, working to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and arrange journeys across Spain and Portugal, where the refugees would embark for safer ports. His many clients included Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall, and the race against time to save them is a tale of forbidden love, high-stakes adventure, and unimaginable courage. The Boston Globe called The Flight Portfolio “Magnificent ... Gorgeous... Important... a deeply researched, almost unbearably tense, bruised-knuckle hybrid. Part real history and part love story, it’s also a deeply moral work, asking tough question about what matters most to us personally — and to the world."

Thomas Mallon is the author of ten novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, and Watergate. Fellow Travelers has been made into a contemporary opera that is regularly performed throughout the United States. Mallon is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, and in 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Set during the tumultuous middle of the George W. Bush years—amid the twin catastrophes of the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina— Landfall (Pantheon) brings Thomas Mallon's cavalcade of contemporary American politics, which began with Watergate and continue with Finale, to a vivid and emotional climax. The president at the novel's center possesses a personality whose high-speed alternations between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify the panoply of characters around him. The story is deepened and driven by a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison O'Connor, whose destinies have been affixed to Bush's since they were teenagers in the 1970s. The true believer and the skeptic who end up exchanging ideological places in a romantic and political drama that unfolds in locations from New Orleans to Baghdad and during the parties, press conferences, and state funerals of Washington, D.C.