Fiction Inspired by Real Life
Read a fictional book based on real life events! All-Year Reading Challenge • 2024
January 23, 2024
In this list, you’ll find stories inspired by historical moments, offering a unique blend of imagination and historical accuracy. From war-torn landscapes to political intrigues and untold secrets, these books invite you to explore the intersection of fiction and history.
Use this booklist to fulfill a reading challenge prompt in our All-Year Reading Challenge!
Djinn Patrol On The Purple Line
Deepa Anappara
In an award-winning debut based on true events, a 9-year-old reality-television enthusiast in India uses crime-show approaches to investigate the disappearance of a classmate, before additional abductions shatter life in his sprawling city home.
The Children’s Blizzard
Melanie Benjamin
Draws on oral histories of the Great Plains blizzard of 1888 to depict the experiences of two teachers, a servant, and a reporter who risk everything to protect the children of immigrant homesteaders.
The Postcard
Anne Berest
Fifteen years after the arrival of an anonymous postcard with the names of her maternal great-grandparents and their children, all killed at Auschwitz, Anne Berest is moved to discover who sent it and why and embarks on a journey to learn the fate of the Rabinovitch family.
The Romantic
The Real Life Of Cashel Greville Ross
William Boyd
A 19th-century everyman, Cashel Greville Ross seeks his fortune around the world, traveling as a solider, farmer, felon, writer and father, experiencing all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love, and realizing his greatest accomplishment is discovering who he truly is.
The Secret Chord
Geraldine Brooks
A tale based on the story of King David is set against a backdrop of Second Iron Age Israel and traces his journey from an obscure shepherd to a hero and king before his fall as a murderous despot.
Horse
Geraldine Brooks
A scientist from Australia and a Nigerian-American art historian become connected by their shared interest in a 19th century race horse, one studying its remains, the other uncovering the history of the Black horsemen who were critical to its success.
City Of Incurable Women
Maud Casey
In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored.
In The Full Light Of The Sun
Clare Clark
The award-winning author of The Great Stink traces the fortunes of three disparate Berliners who against a backdrop of rising Nazi power are caught up in an art scandal involving newly discovered van Goghs.
Trial By Fire
P.T. Deutermann
Based on a true story, this dramatic World War II novel of attack, survival and triumph on board an aircraft carrier in the Pacific follows the crew of the USS Franklin as they, against all odds, save their ship, and themselves, after being bombed.
Winter Work
Dan Fesperman
When a fellow Stasi officer is murdered, Emil Grimm must finish his mission alone, and when it intersects with CIA agent Claire Saylor, he finds himself on common ground with this woman as they both fight for their lives against a powerful enemy hiding in the shadows.
Love And Other Consolation Prizes
Jamie Ford
A half-Chinese orphan whose mother sacrificed everything to give him a better chance is raffled off as a prize at Seattle’s 1909 World’s Fair, only to land in the ownership of the madam of a notorious brothel where he finds friendship and opportunities, in a story based on true events.
Booth
Karen Joy Fowler
Describes the multiple scandals, family triumphs and disasters that took their toll on the 10 children of celebrated Shakespearean actor Junius Booth as the North and the South reached a boiling point and the Civil War broke out.
A Well-Behaved Woman
A Novel Of The Vanderbilts
Therese Fowler
Marrying into the newly rich but socially scorned Vanderbilt clan, a formerly impoverished Alva navigates society snubs and dark undercurrents in the lives of her in-laws and friends while testing the limits of her ambitious rule-breaking.
Peach Blossom Spring
Melissa Fu
Settling in America years after his turbulent childhood in China, Renshu, now Henry Dao, refuses to talk to his daughter about her heritage, determined to keep her safe in this new land despite being weighed down by his history.
Button Man
Andrew Gross
A disadvantaged but once happy Jewish immigrant family is brought together by the women’s garment trade and torn apart by the birth of organized crime in 1930s New York City.
The Siberia Job
Josh Haven
Texas businessman John Mills and his Czech companion, Petr Kovac, travel to the furthest reaches of post-Soviet Russia to acquire vouchers for the country’s national oil company, Gazneft, moving town to town with suitcases full of cash, until the Russian mafia and Gazneft catch wind of their successes.
A Brief History Of Seven Killings
Marlon James
A tale inspired by the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley spans decades and continents to explore the experiences of journalists, drug dealers, killers, and ghosts against a backdrop of social and political turmoil.
Fever
Mary Beth Keane
A story inspired by the life of the woman known as “Typhoid Mary” traces the efforts of a headstrong Irish immigrant whose tenacity and talent for cooking gains her entry into upper-class kitchens until the discovery of her status as a disease carrier forces her into an isolation that she eventually defies with horrific results.
The Dickens Boy
Thomas Keneally
The son of England’s most famous author, Edward Dickens, is sent to Australia to make something of himself–or at least fail out of the public eye–where he works hard to prove to his parents and himself that he can succeed in this vast and unfamiliar wilderness.
The Good People
Hannah Kent
Three women in nineteenth-century Ireland bond over a shared effort to rescue a child from a superstitious community that believes that his trauma-related inability to speak indicates that he is a changeling responsible for a series of misfortunes.
The Radio Operator
Ulla Lenze
When he unwittingly becomes part of a Nazi espionage network working in Manhattan, shortwave operator Josef Klein is deported to Germany where he, after witnessing the seductive power of the Nazis and the war’s terrible consequences, goes on the run to escape his past.
Under The Java Moon
Heather B Moore
Forced to relocate to a POW camp when Holland declares war on Japan in 1941, Mary Vischer, with her husband somewhere on the Java Sea with the Dutch Navy, bravely fights to keep her family alive amidst brutal conditions of the overcrowded camp.
The Tattooist Of Auschwitz
Heather Morris
An international best-seller based on the true story of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor traces the experiences of a Jewish Slovakian who uses his position as a concentration-camp tattooist to secure food for his fellow prisoners.
Hamnet
A Novel Of The Plague
Maggie O’Farrell
The award-winning author of I Am, I Am, I Am presents the evocative story of a young Shakespeare’s marriage to a talented herbalist before the ravaging death of their 11-year-old son shapes the production of his greatest play.
The Flight Portfolio
Julie Orringer
The award-winning author of The Invisible Bridge presents a long-anticipated latest novel based on the story of Varian Fry’s extraordinary effort to save the lives and work of Jewish artists fleeing the Holocaust.
The Revenant
A Novel Of Revenge
Michael Punke
A story of survival on the American frontier chronicles the exploits of fur trapper Hugh Glass, who is attacked by a grizzly bear and left for dead by his fellow trappers, but survives and treks through the wilderness to seek justice.
When It’s Over
Barbara Ridley
Based on a true story, When It’s Over is a moving, resonant, and timely read about the lives of war refugees, dramatic political changes, and the importance of family, love, and hope.
Cher Ami And Major Whittlesey
Kathleen Rooney
A tale based on true events follows the experiences of an army officer who answers the call to service during World War II before his life is astonishingly reshaped by his battlefield encounters with a messenger pigeon.
See What I Have Done
Sarah Schmidt
A reimagining of the Borden murders profiles an abusive home where the events surrounding the killing of the parents are presented from the viewpoints of Lizzie Borden, her elder sister, their housemaid, and an enigmatic stranger.
The Old Lion Of Theodore Roosevelt
Jeff Shaara
The New York Times bestselling author traces the remarkable life of one of the most consequential figures in the U.S. and the world at large, from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, revealing a man who shaped the foundations of the modern country and world.
The Stars Are Fire
Anita Shreve
A novel based on the true story of the largest fire in Maine’s history follows the experiences of a pregnant woman who struggles to protect her two young children and watches her home burn while her husband joins the volunteer firefighters.
I Remember You
A Ghost Story
Yrsa Sigurdardottir
A tale based on a true story finds three friends targeted by a malevolent presence while trying to renovate an old house in the Icelandic Westfjords, while a local doctor uncovers an elderly suicide victim’s obsessions.
The Last Green Valley
Mark Sullivan
In late March 1944, as Stalin’s forces push into Ukraine, young Emil and Adeline Martel decide they must run in retreat from their land with murderous Nazi officers they despise to escape the Soviets and go in search of freedom.
Women Talking
Miriam Toews
Based on real events, Women Talking is the story of eight women in a remote Mennonite colony who face an agonizing decision in the aftermath of a series of unspeakable sexual crimes.
The King’s Pleasure Of Henry Viii
Alison Weir
Painting a stunning portrait of the idealistic monarch who expanded Parliament, founded the Royal Navy, modernized medical training and patronized the arts, this historical novel explores the private side of King Henry VIII, a passionate man in search of true love who was a legend in his own lifetime.
The Orphan Keeper
Camron Wright
Kidnapped and adopted by an American couple, Chellamuthu learns enough English to tell his adoptive parents he has family back in India, but their efforts to find them are fruitless, until over a decade later when he meets a girl with ties to his past.