Cozy Up With December’s New Historical Fiction Releases

Release date: December 1, 2024

A young Korean girl realizes she will have to pass as Japanese in order to get by in 1930s Japan. Miyoung dreams of a brighter future than her small farming village in Japanese-occupied Korea has to offer. So when she’s offered the chance to live with her older sister and receive an education in Japan, she’s elated. But anti-Korean sentiment runs rampant in Kyoto. To achieve the future she’s always dreamed of, Miyoung changes her name to Miyoko and pursues a career as a nurse. Soon, though, war looms on the horizon, and she’ll have to decide what version of herself she wants to fight for.

Release date: December 3, 2024

Nettie, a young Haitian student in 1960s Oakland, puts her public health skills and revolutionary spirit to good use at the free health clinics created by the Black Panthers. Soon, she’s swept up in the movement and her love for the party’s defense captain, Melvin. Pregnant, Nettie follows him to Chicago. But there, she finds herself overwhelmed with the city’s harsh segregation, police brutality, and Melvin’s growing unfaithfulness. A violent tussle with the police that ends Nettie’s pregnancy is the last straw. Can she find who she was before all this while still fighting for a better tomorrow?

Release date: December 3, 2024

Bella isn’t a woman of noble birth, but when her ill cousin asks her to trade places for the season so their nearsighted great-aunt will believe Issie has had the coming out demanded of her, Bella agrees. It seems an innocent enough ruse, allowing Issie to read in bed and Bella to experience all the pomp and circumstance denied to her by birth. Then Bella meets Lord Brooke. He’s irresistible, and when the earl begins courting her, believing her to be the wealthy Lady Issie, Bella can’t help but wish she was the right lady for this lord.

Release date: December 3, 2024

In 1960s Alabama, Katia Daniels soothes her longing for a child of her own by pouring her heart and soul into her work at the Pike County Group Home for Negro Boys. Katia’s duties both at work and at home, with a brother missing in action and her father lost to cancer, stretch her to the point of breaking. But when an old face from her childhood returns to town, their rekindled friendship forces Katia to question how a woman is supposed to balance her duty to others with her duty to herself.

Release date: December 4, 2024

In this retelling of Oliver Twist, Nancy takes the lead. Nancy is intimately familiar with the harsh streets of Victorian London, roaming them first as one of Fagin’s young pickpockets and now on the mercurial arm of Bill Sikes. When she begins a relationship with a gentleman named Mr. Rufus, new hopes open up to her for the first time. But it’s in taking a young boy named Oliver under her wing that Nancy begins to realize the kind of life she really wants to lead.

Release date: December 24, 2024

A Chicago journalist tired of being passed over for the sports writing position she’s long vied for travels to Nashville to interview her great-grandfather about his time in the Negro Baseball Leagues. But when he has a stroke within days of her arrival, Harper’s plans change. As she helps with his recovery, she discovers a trove of old letters between her great-grandparents in the attic. What she finds is too intimate to print, but with her grandfather’s blessing, it inspires a novel about their lives.

Release date: December 24, 2024

James Willoughby has given up his cushy life in Oxford to study surgery in Edinburgh, where the city’s cutting-edge medical programs offer the study of everything—except human cadavers. The private schools in Surgeon’s Square are too costly for him to afford, so he makes a deal with a daring young dissectionist named Nye. But it’s a deal James was altogether unprepared for, because Nye doesn’t just procure bodies—he snatches them. And now James is his unwitting accomplice.