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The colossal success last year of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, a novel that imagined the life of Dracula set against the background of numerous world events, has publishers hoping that book-buying consumers are hungry for more historical fiction.
The broad definition of historical fiction throws many books into this thriving category. Mystery, thriller, conspiracy and religion hybrids pepper the genre.
Recent hit novels, including Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, weave historical settings around fictional characters. Frazier's Thirteen Moons (Random House, $26.95, on sale Oct. 3) is eagerly awaited. The 19th-century-set novel is the tale of an orphan who lives alongside the Cherokee.
Publisher Henry Holt is placing its bets on The Interpretation of Murder ($26) by Jed Rubenfeld, a thriller centered on Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to New York.
"The Interpretation of Murder can definitely trace its family tree roots to the success of The Historian," says Brad Parsons of Amazon.com. "It is certainly on our list as a hot book to take a look at this fall."
Elaine Petrocelli of Book Passages in Corte Madera, Calif., says she will recommend Mary: A Novel by Janis Cooke Newman (MacAdam/Cage, $26) to readers. This novel about Mary Todd Lincoln "is a perfect example of why historical fiction works when it's in the right hands," she says. "You come away feeling you really know Mary, and it's very true to the time."
Valerie Koehler of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston is a fan of the post-Civil War novel On Agate Hill (Algonquin, $24.95) by Lee Smith, out Sept. 19, and Dark Angels by Karleen Koen (Crown, $25.95), set in the Restoration era court of England's King Charles II.
"People like to read historical fiction for the same reasons they like to watch the History Channel,"
Koehler says. "If it's done right, it takes you to another place, but you have to make sure that world is a real world and you keep it consistent."
But it isn't easy.
"It's really a challenge to write historical fiction because just writing a decent novel is difficult enough," says Thomas Mullen, whose debut novel, The Last Town on Earth (Random House, $23.95), is about a fictional town in Washington state that quarantines itself during the 1918 flu epidemic.
"You have to be accurate to the historical time period and about the ways people spoke and the ways in which men and women interacted," Mullen says. "It's a whole other level of things you need to get right for the novel to work."
Contributing: Jocelyn McClurg
*Read an excerpt at books.usatoday.com.
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