New Books In Historical Fiction

Keeping details straight while writing a chronologically organized series is difficult enough. Focusing four full-length novels on the events of a single group experience in a single year, with back stories and future developments for a small group of heroines, each of whom has a chance to tell her own story of the central event and its consequences, requires even greater skill. Yet Karen Swan pulls off this mammoth enterprise in her Wild Isle series, which concludes with The Midnight Secret (Macmillan, 2025). The Last Summer, the first book in the series, opens in June 1930 with three friends sitting on a rock plucking fulmars, a kind of seabird. Effie, Mhairi (the Gaelic form of Mary, pronounced VAH-ree), and Flora already know that they will have to evacuate their island home in the Outermost Scottish Hebrides within a few months. Flora greets the change with enthusiasm, Effie with cautious pragmatism, and Mhairi with despair. From this first book and the two that follow, The Stolen Hours and The Lost Lo