March is shaping up to be an exciting month for historical fiction lovers! Whether you’re drawn to epic sagas, gripping wartime dramas, or immersive tales set in bygone eras, there are plenty of new releases to add to your reading list.
From powerful stories of resilience to sweeping romances set against dramatic historical backdrops, these ten upcoming books promise to transport you through time. Get ready to discover captivating narratives, richly detailed settings, and unforgettable characters in this month’s most anticipated historical fiction releases.
10. Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Expected March 18th 2025
Four years on from winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah is publishing a new historical fiction novel: Theft.
Set in Tanzania at the turn of the 21st century, the story follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, three young people trying to find their place in the world. Karim, returning to his small hometown having graduated from university in Dar es Salaam. Fauzia, who sees Karim as a chance to escape her stifling upbringing. Badar is a poor boy taken in by the pair who is uncertain whether he has a future.
Follow how each of the three navigates new development arriving in their once untouched corner of the world, in the form of tourists and technology, forcing them to reckon with the opportunities and dangers they bring.
9. Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler
Expected March 18th 2025
The war has forced each member of the Altermans to flee Vienna. Each member of this Jewish family must reckon with their own solitary future as their members are split across countries. Sonja, who escaped persecution on the Kindertransport, searches for her lost husband in London.
Fania, her mother, has made it to Canada, but she is left thinking of her kin after seeing her doppelganger in the basement of a hotel. Moses, her son, is haunted by those he left behind and travels to Prague to make peace with his past. Arnold, his father, receives a letter from a woman claiming to be his long-lost daughter Sonja.
Rooms for Vanishing spins the reader across countries and time periods, exploring how each of the Altermans, though steadfast in their certainty that they are lone survivors, must grapple with the ghosts of their pasts.
8. The Antidote by Karen Russell
Expected March 13th 2025
The fictional Nebraskan town of Uz has been hit by a devastating dust storm, and 5 characters are pushed together by fate in this epic by Karen Russell. Her telling of Uz facing not only the Dust Bowl drought and the Great Depression, but also a reckoning with the town’s own historic avoidance of the worst parts of itself is interwoven with Russell’s signature veil of magical realism.
Follow the entrancing Prairie Witch, a Polish wheat farmer, his orphaned niece, a talkative scarecrow and a New Deal photographer who threatens to reveal long-kept secrets that the residents of Uz would rather keep quiet.
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Subscribe to our weekly newsletter7. The Jackal’s Mistress by Chris Bohjalian
Expected March 11th 2025
Libby Steadman has much responsibility. With her daily life occupied running the gristmill on their farm in Virginia with her teenage niece, a hired hand and his wife, she so strongly misses her husband fighting who knows where in the Civil War. She lives in constant uncertainty, with all of their flour taken for use by the Confederate Army, and the territory around them frequently changing hands.
The day that Libby finds a dying Union soldier in a neighboring house is the moment she must grapple with a difficult decision, and, regardless of which decision she makes, the ensuing change. Should she leave him, a fellow human being, there to die? Or should she take him in and give him care, risking severe punishment were she to be discovered? And if he survived, what then?
Desperate for news on her husband, who she fears dead in a Union camp, could this soldier be the key to news of him, or even seeing him again?
Libby must navigate the intersections of love, hatred and humanity in the swaths of war and instability in The Jackal’s Mistress, a tale focusing on a part of American history which is often overlooked.
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6. The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Expected March 18th 2025
It is 1895, and at 8:30 am in Normandy, Mado Pelletier boards the train to Paris with a concrete plan set in motion. The train is packed with people hailing from near and far, from Brittany to Russia, Ireland, Cambodia. Yet, as Mado’s journey continues, these anonymous faces come into focus, all with their own histories and plans upon their arrival in Paris, which throw Mado’s certainty into contention. But is it too late to change what has already been sent steaming down the tracks?
This novel, based on a real 1895 disaster which shocked the world of the time, and filled with antique photographs documenting the event, The Paris Express is a thrilling glimpse into the marvelous and romantic world of the end of the 19th century, and the lives of those on the other side of the coin.
5. A Map to Paradise by Susan Meissner
Expected March 18th 2025
Melanie has been blacklisted from Hollywood. In 1956, the height of the Red Scare, she is stuck in limbo and shafted from her usual society. She has little choice for friends in her Malibu home but finds solace in Elwood, her next-door neighbor. His agoraphobia only allows them to connect through their neighboring windows, but it’s a welcome change from her rarely conversational Polish housekeeper Eva.
Then one day, Melanie and Eva notice Elwood’s sister-in-law digging in Elwood’s rose garden. Understandable, until Melanie no longer sees Elwood from that day on. It is their quest to find answers about him that leads Melanie, Eva, and June’s secrets to come to light, forming an unlikely alliance to hold onto that which they each hold dear. But in times of struggle, it doesn’t take much for one to turn others into getting what they want.
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4. Soft Burial by Fang Fang (trans. Michael Berry)
Expected March 18th 2025
A woman is pulled from a river having nearly drowned. Upon awakening, she finds herself in a state of total amnesia. Building a life from nothing, she goes on to marry the doctor who saved her life, finds a job as the housekeeper of a prestigious and powerful household, and starts a family of her own.
But despite her choice to bury her past and live a peaceful life, she cannot run from her trauma forever. While she grapples internally with the pain of her early life, her son sets out to find the answers of where he comes from. However, he is soon faced with the difficult reality of what it means to open doors which were locked with good reason.
Soft Burial was originally written by Fang Fang and published in China in 2016. Despite the initial wave of acclaim, it was swept from Chinese bookshelves and banned from public sale. Translated into English for the first time by Michael Berry, this novel draws from the real trauma felt by those growing up in the Land Reform Era of 1950s Maoist China.
3. Madame Matisse by Sophie Haydock
Expected March 6th 2025
Follow the lives of three extraordinary women whose lives are inescapably intertwined by the remarkable artist Matisse, and the not-so-simple life surrounding him.
Amelie suffers under tradition and expectation. Henri Matisse represents to her a chance of escape, and she commits herself to supporting her husband unequivocally with her ambition, her time, and her money.
Lydia has fled Russia after the death of her mother. With wishes to escape her difficult past, she hopes to build a new life in the French Riviera where the glamorous, artistic, and famous make their homes. After finding employment with the Matisse family, she is swirled into the chaos of their family’s life.
Marguerite, Matisse’s eldest daughter, is forced to make difficult choices and find her way amongst the catastrophe and individual wants of the family around her.
Based on a true story, Madame Matisse is a captivating portrait of the emotional and artistic lifestyle that made the 1930s in France so iconically captivating and controversial.
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2. The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes
Expected March 4th 2025
When Millie Lang, a Works Progress Administration editor, finds herself in the precarious position of a potential political scandal, she hasn’t much choice when she is reassigned to work off in Montana on the state’s American Guide Series – a program designed to give work to America’s destitute writers.
Upon arrival, Millie finds the staff’s bizarre explanations for their lack of productivity suspicious, unconvinced by tales of powerful men wanting to hush hush their longstanding difficulties with union organizers.
Instead, Millie turns her eyes to the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe, who created the Boxcar Library to bring literature to overworked and isolated mining workers. But Millie’s questioning cannot find the answer to why Alice’s supposedly perfect candidate to man the Boxcar Library, Collette Durand, set off with Alice on their hopeful journey and never returned.
Inspired by the true story of Missoula’s Boxcar Library, Millie’s journey to find answers takes the reader into the lives of these unique women who faced the rough Western US with the courage to fight for the rights of those around them and to spread the joy and connection that books and literature bring.
1. Far From Home by Danielle Steel
Expected March 4th 2025
It is July 1944, and Arielle von Auspeck is relieved to have arrived back in Paris, leaving the stressful, oppressive cloud of Germany behind her. There she awaits her husband, Gregor, a retired colonel whose plan is to soon join her.
But then the sudden news reaches her that Gregor was involved in Operation Valkyrie, a failed assassination attempt of Hitler, and has been shot dead. She is left adrift and broken, but must immediately flee Paris with the help of a fellow collaborator to escape the suspicions now levied against her too.
Yet, as Arielle sits in hiding under a false name in a small Normandy town, she finds herself unable to sit helpless. Meeting Sebastien Renaud, whose wife and daughter were deported in 1941, they work together to resist the oppression of the German occupation and survive long enough to be reunited with those they love.
With so many compelling historical fiction books hitting shelves this March, there’s no shortage of captivating stories to explore. Whether you’re in the mood for a sweeping epic, a poignant wartime tale, or a glimpse into the lives of remarkable figures from the past, these new releases offer something for every history lover.
Which one will you be adding to your reading list? Let us know in the comments!
