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The Highlight

Ask a Book Critic: Novels to send you down a historical rabbit hole

Vox’s book critic gives you recommendations to scratch your next reading itch.

Vox_Books_July2024
Vox_Books_July2024
Paige Vickers / Vox
Constance Grady
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.

Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here.


Please recommend some historical fiction with fascinating history!

I loved Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle because it taught me SO MUCH about the monetization of Europe, the Royal Society, the British colonies in the US and how they developed, Peter the Great, tulips, coffee … the list just goes on! And now I’m reading Fareed Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions and it’s tying that stuff together with what I just learned from Shogun (and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet). Can you recommend another fiction that will send me running to Wikipedia to learn whether what I just read is really true? (Did you know that Isaac Newton developed knurling on the edges of coins when he ran the British Mint?) I love how things like Hamilton make us curious and want to learn more.

Since you are a historical fiction fan, I am going to assume that you have already heard everyone raving about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and you’ve already either read it or decided it doesn’t suit your purposes. (If that’s not the case, you’re truly not going to beat Wolf Hall for its sheer level of historical detail.)

Mantel aside, have you tried Nicola Griffith’s Hild books? They’re a planned trilogy with two volumes released so far about the seventh-century British Saint Hildegarde. It strikes me as being up your alley because the great pleasure of this series is its historical world-building.

Hild takes place in a Britain of many kingdoms, each power jockeying to gain control over the whole island, while the decaying remnants of the centuries-past Roman occupation loom like the detritus of a long-lost alien civilization. Our protagonist, the young Hild, is forced to become expert at housewifely tasks like the harvesting and preservation of plants and the dying of cloth, as well as politics, religion, and warfare — all of which means that Griffith must walk us with great care and detail through the tactile art of each.

While we’re on the subject of medieval women, Lauren Groff’s Matrix really is that girl. Groff reimagines the real-life 12th-century mystic poet Marie de France into a nun who, bit by bit, transforms her impoverished abbey into a feminist utopia. It’s a deeply sensual story with rich physical details. You might be especially interested in the way Groff conjures the intellectual and theological landscape of Marie’s world, and how hedonistic, outrageous Marie navigates it.

Finally, lest this answer be entirely about medieval English nuns, let me direct you to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. “History has failed us, but no matter,” begins Pachinko, which follows four generations of a Korean family from Japan-occupied Korea in the early 20th century to Japan in the 1980s. This book has a sort of Dickensian chewiness, a focus on the way history fractures a family that would be unbearable if it weren’t also playful. The relentless sweep of history is part of the focus of this novel; so is colonialism, and so is family. You’ll love it.


I love narratives that somehow balance the mundane and the cosmic or existential in scope. A lot of this seems to come from Norway, like Karl Ove Knausgaard and Jon Fosse or the films of Joachim Trier (or non-Norsk Tarkovsky and Malick), and others. I would love more recommendations that scratch this particular itch!

The first books that come to mind when thinking about this question are both campus novels, probably because college is a place where a lot of us encounter big cosmic questions and also have to navigate mundane issues like turning in papers on time and dealing with annoying roommates. Elif Batuman is good at this problem in her duology The Idiot and Either/Or, both of which feature Harvard undergrad Selin attempting to navigate tricky philosophical conundrums in her own life while also passing her classes and landing a summer job. I’m also very fond of Rosalind Brown’s Practice, which takes place over the course of one day as an Oxford student tries to write a paper on Shakespeare’s sonnets. It zooms all the way out to the problems of love and desire and how they should look, and all the way into the way dining hall food makes our protagonist have to shit. It’s a beauty.

The obvious other answer to this question is that the Russian novelists are the ones you need, mostly Tolstoy. I don’t want to be out here recommending War and Peace to you like you’ve never heard of it, but you know what, it’s actually probably the best book I know that sets the sublime and the mundane cheek by jowl.


I absolutely adored A Gentleman in Moscow — the sweet and very funny first person narrative was so engaging. I found the way it romanticised the mundane with such humour made me appreciate my life and being alive — do you have any recommendations for something akin?

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt is an absolutely beautiful little book, about a grandmother trying to raise her granddaughter with a minimum of resources and an enormous amount of love and care. Ruth is a school teacher who’s partly estranged from her daughter, Eleanor, since Eleanor became addicted to drugs and chronically homeless. When Eleanor has a baby, Lily, Ruth takes Lily to her single-bedroom flat to raise on her own.

As Lily grows up, she and Ruth develop a whole world for themselves, one built on their small and civilized rituals: tea and biscuits on the couch in front of the television, antique cartoons, sausage rolls decorated with birthday candles.

“Lily was not going to have a poultice childhood, a mending service, scrappy and provisional,” thinks Ruth, with vicious determination. “She was going to get the most anyone could give.” In the end, she gets quite a lot.

Ask a Book Critic is available exclusively for Vox Members. Want this in your inbox each month—and the chance to ask for your own personal book recommendation? Join Vox Membership today.

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