BACK IN TI Lady In The Lake
Maddie Schwartz is a 1960s Baltimore housewife who feels stuck. She wants to live a more interesting, passionate life, so she leaves her husband and moves out of their home to become a newspaper reporter after helping the police find a murdered young girl. When Maddie hears about the body of a young black woman found in a fountain in a city park, she begins searching for answers and soon finds that she’s obsessed with the case and will stop at nothing to find the truth, even if the dead doesn’t want her secrets to be told. This is perfect if you’re in the mood for a book that keeps you guessing and on your toes while still having those period details that make historical fiction shine.
Laura Lippman
This novel follows the Forsters through several generations, blending historical fiction and a family saga into a super readable pick! The Forster family invented Panola Cola, which is the world’s first-ever soft drink company. This decades-spanning novel tracks the Forsters from their life before the invention of the drink to the company’s hey day to the decline of the brand and the loss of the family fortune. This novel wizzes through history and places, spanning a century and jumping from Mississippi to New York to Paris and back again. AMERICAN POP is an interesting take on history, prominent families, what it’s like to run an internationally-known business and the way success can destroy people.
American Pop Snowden Wright
Visible Empire
I love a novel based on true events, so this was right up my alley! A 1960s plane crash in France kills over a hundred of Atlanta’s wealthiest residents, who were all heading home from a cultural tour of Europe and have now left behind children, spouses, friends and entire lives. This all happens as Atlanta is on the cusp of immense social change as the Civil Rights Movement is gaining traction in the city. This novel follows those left behind and gives the perspectives of how the crash has changed the lives of a lot of seemingly different people. The focus on this isn’t so much the crash, which is just used as a plot device to set this story of love, wealth, race, and the South in motion.
Hannah Pittard
When Obama puts a book on his summer reading list, then you know it’s gotta be good. It’s 1986 and America is deep in the throes of the Cold War. Marie Mitchell, an intelligence officer with the FBI is brilliant and more than capable, but she’s a young Black officer in a male-dominated profession. She’s discouraged by the lack of upward mobility and is often passed over for high profile assignments, stuck in the office doing paperwork and admin tasks. When she’s given the chance to join a task force to take down Thomas Sankara, the charasmatic Communist president of Burkina Faso, she says yes, even though she admires what Sankara is doing for his country. After all, it’s the only way to break away from her office duties! Over the next year, Marie is tasked with observing Thomas and ends up seducing him and staging a coup to take him down, sacrificing what she believes in in the process.
28
American Spy Lauren Wilkinson
