Please join us for What’s New in Historical Fiction, a regular panel series featuring historical novelists with new and upcoming titles.
What’s New in Historical Fiction brings together four authors whose latest novels explore ambition, identity, power, and self-determination across strikingly different historical settings—from Harlem in the 1920s and Fordlandia in the Brazilian rainforest to early Hollywood and the court of Queen Elizabeth II. Moderated by Colin Mustful, this panel offers a wide-ranging conversation about how historical fiction illuminates the tension between public expectation and private desire, and how novelists recover the emotional lives of people navigating eras of spectacle, upheaval, and change.
Featured Authors and Novels:
Tiffany L. Warren, A Harlem Wedding
Brynn Barineau, Jungle of Ashes
Priya Parmar, The Original
Jennifer Ryan, The Queen’s Coronation
Tiffany L. Warren — A Harlem Wedding
Set in the glittering world of the Harlem Renaissance, A Harlem Wedding tells the story of Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose celebrated marriage to poet Countee Cullen becomes the backdrop for a deeper struggle between personal desire and public expectation. Rich with atmosphere, glamour, and emotional complexity, the novel explores Black excellence, family pressure, love, and the cost of building an authentic life in the spotlight.
Brynn Barineau — Jungle of Ashes
In 1928, Henry Ford’s dream of industrial control takes root in the Brazilian rainforest, where Fordlandia rises as a symbol of ambition, exploitation, and cultural collision. Through the story of Joanna Rogge and Rafael Caetano, Jungle of Ashes explores the human cost of progress, the fragility of imposed order, and the intimate choices people make amid political and ecological unrest.
Priya Parmar — The Original
Priya Parmar’s The Original reimagines the early life of Katharine Hepburn as a story of ambition, reinvention, and refusal. Set against the glamour and constraint of 1930s Hollywood, the novel follows Hepburn as she confronts the demands of fame, the limits of convention, and the personal risk of living truthfully in a world built on performance.
Jennifer Ryan — The Queen’s Coronation
Set in London in 1953, The Queen’s Coronation follows three women working behind the scenes of a nation-defining royal event as they navigate class, gender, love, and the search for independence. Against the pageantry of Buckingham Palace, Jennifer Ryan’s novel reveals the private struggles and quiet resilience that shape lives far beyond the crown itself.