Historical Fiction

Enter Me

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new historical suspense novels that she says you will want to stay up all night to finish.

Kate Atkinson's novel both mourns the passing of the World War II generation and allows readers to vicariously enter into the experience of the war. It's a companion to her 2013 book, Life After Life.

When book critic Maureen Corrigan was a kid, her family would pile into the car for trips to sites of historical interest. For Corrigan, summer has always been the season for traveling back to a bygone age — either by hitting the road or hitting the books.

Roth, who has been writing novels for more than a half-century, explains how he comes up with his ideas — and why he continues to write every day. In his latest work, Nemesis, he imagines a fictional polio outbreak set in his hometown of Newark, N.J., during the 1940s.

If the Dead Rise Not, the latest book in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther detective series, shifts the saga from prewar Nazi Germany to 1954 Havana. Critic John Powers says the Chandleresque novel kept him glued to his deck chair for days.

Maureen Corrigan has booked an armchair getaway this summer with four books that will send her traveling through time. From turn-of-the-last-century New York tenements, to the 1939 World's Fair, to literary romance on the shores of Lake Geneva, these books will take you to places even the most luxurious vacations can't go.

Maureen Corrigan reviews Brothers, Yu Hua's epic, 600-plus-page comedy that details life in a Chinese village from the early days of the Cultural Revolution to the giddy capitalist present.

As war continues and the economy sags, Maureen Corrigan recommends three historical works that provide insight into coping with trying times.

Fresh Air's book critic reviews the latest novel from the author of Nine Parts of Desire.

Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner co-wrote the screenplay for the new Stephen Spielberg film Munich. Kushner won a Pulitzer for his 1993-1994 play Angels in America, which was performed in two parts and set in New York in the mid-1980s in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan lists her favorite books of 2005, including novels by Mary Gaitskill and Kazuo Ishiguro, and memoirs by Joan Didion and J.R. Moehringer.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant.

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews “The Time of Our Singing” by Richard Powers.

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel by Susan Sontag called In America (Farrar Straus & Giroux).

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel, "Another World," by British author Pat Barker.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Dreamland" (HarperCollins) the new novel by Kevin Baker about New York City in the early 1900s.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "Charlotte Gray" the new novel by Sebastian Faulks the author of "Birdsong." (Random House)

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews British writer Pat Barker's The Ghost Road. (Dutton). It won Britain's Booker Prize. The book is the third part of a trilogy of novels about World War I. (Her others are Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.)

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Panama by Eric Zencey and The Alienist by Caleb Carr.