Historical Fiction

I cooked a turkey dinner for my in-laws today (the roads were too bad for us to bring them over on Christmas, or the day after) and I'm about ready to nod off, but I promised daily book lists! So, daily book lists it shall be. As always, if you've read any of these, let us know:

Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2004 National Book Award & Pulitzer Prize winner) Set before the Civil War in Virginia, centers on a former slave who now owns slaves. A book with many points of view, The Known World paints an enormous canvas thick with personalities and situations that show how slavery destroys but can also be transcended. (Wikipedia)

James McBride has written a highly acclaimed memoir called The Color of Water as well as fiction.
Song Yet Sung Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre–Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future—from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop—in her dreams. (Publishers Weekly)

Miracle at Santa Anna McBride offers a powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy around the village of St. Anna of Stazzema in December 1944. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind; it is also a carefully crafted tale of a mute Italian orphan boy who teaches the American soldiers, Italian villagers and partisans that miracles are the result of faith and trust.

Here are some recommendations from Book Lover's Diary:

Indu Sundaresan (Indian, now lives in America)
I have personally enjoyed The Twentieth Wife and its sequel The Feast of Roses but she also has another book The Splendor of Silence and a collection of short stories out In the Convent of Little Flowers
Genre: Historical Fiction, maybe Romance as well

Tariq Ali (Pakistani, now lives in Britain)
He has written a quartet of books beginning with Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (which is my favorite). The others are The Stone Woman, The Book of Saladin, and The Sultan of Palermo. He has also written a few nonfiction books.

Author: Julie Otsuka (Japanese-American)
When the Emperor Was Divine Julie Otsuka's commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination — both physical and emotional — of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view — the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family's return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity — she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion. (from the publisher)