Historical Fiction Imbued With a Rich Sense of Place

New York Times

28-01-2025

What We Tried to Bury Grows Here
'In war, the full breadth of emotions persist, hiding among the horror — even joy.' For Mariana, whose fiery political writing is an inspiration to her fellow Basques, that joy comes from a brief encounter with a young soldier named Isidro, who has left his remote village to fight on the government side in the Spanish Civil War. In a conventional novel, they'd be the tragic lovers battling fascist oppression. But in Zabalbeascoa's daring first novel their stories serve a different purpose, attracting a host of other stories on both sides — as well as the sidelines — of the conflict.
In WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE (Two Dollar Radio, 277 pp., $27), almost two dozen narrators vie to convey the danger and uncertainty of life in a country where 'tomorrow you never knew who would throw you against the wall for the actions of today.' We hear from priests and soldiers, mothers and children, prisoners and refugees. Amid the inevitable violence and horror, there are the equally inevitable heroes and villains, but for everyone the world has acquired 'an evil stink.' Mariana knows her compatriots have no choice but to fight on, yet she also knows that 'the war will make us unrecognizable to our former selves.'
To Save the Man
Radical transformation is central to the plot of TO SAVE THE MAN (Melville House, 322 pp., $29.99), which takes its title from a favorite saying of Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: 'To save the man, we must kill the Indian.' Although the novel takes place in just a few months during the autumn and early winter of 1890, it covers a wide range of physical and emotional terrain.
As a new class of students is ushered into Pratt's military-style campus in central Pennsylvania, the western reservations are being swept by a movement called the 'ghost dance,' which promises triumph over the white man's weapons and a return to the old ways of the frontier. Moving between the increasingly rebellious plains and this school dedicated to erasing its pupils' tribal loyalties, Sayles builds narrative tension as news of a possible uprising spreads through dormitories filled with vulnerable young men and women. It offers a different sort of challenge to the institution's only Indian instructor, a talented musician who's been presented to Carlisle's benefactors as a 'paragon of her endangered race.' Caught between two worlds, Miss Redbud often feels more like a traitor.
The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter
Sixty-one-year-old Judith Shakespeare insists that she favors neither side in the 17th-century battle between Britain's Puritan Roundheads and the Cavalier forces of Charles I. Nevertheless, the playwright's midwife daughter must flee her native Stratford when the fractious political atmosphere yields a charge of witchcraft against her. It's not necessary to read 'My Father Had a Daughter,' Tiffany's novel about the youthful Judith, to enjoy THE OWL WAS A BAKER'S DAUGHTER (Harper, 256 pp., $30), whose title is borrowed from a line Shakespeare gave to Ophelia that goes on to explain: 'We know what we are, but know not what we may be.'
What Judith may be, when she reaches the questionable safety of London, is a co-conspirator with an old flame, a wolfish actor who's been reduced to clandestine performances in pubs now that the Parliamentarians have closed the city's theaters. The (wildly dangerous) performance of a lifetime awaits him in the besieged Royalist stronghold of Oxford, and he insists that only Judith can help him get there. Unfortunately, she's saddled with two cumbersome companions: a Bible-spouting Protestant zealot and an unpredictable little girl who may be as mad as Ophelia.
Babylonia
The literature that inspired BABYLONIA (Sourcebooks Landmark, 432 pp., $27.99) stretches as far back as the Greek historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, who wrote of a powerful woman they called Semiramis, ruler of a vast Middle Eastern empire in the ninth century B.C. Myths have surrounded her ever since, and she's been portrayed as a ruthless schemer, reveling in the violence and cruelty that were the hallmarks of the Assyrian monarchs who came before and after her.
Casati doesn't shy away from the stark brutality that permeated the culture Semiramis was born into. At the same time, she invents a subtly persuasive portrait of an impoverished orphan whose cleverness and striking looks propel her from a wretched provincial settlement to the inner sanctum of the royal citadel via marriage to a taciturn warrior, the emperor's closest companion since childhood. The court and its intrigues are chillingly drawn, dominated by the emperor's mother ('every thought of hers, a dagger in the dark') and a eunuch spymaster ('the only weapons I trade in are secrets'). What enables Semiramis to prevail is her memory of what it was like to have nothing, to be nothing. On the rise, she is constantly alert to the bonds forming 'an endless rope, tied from person to person, that can be snapped in a moment.'