The best books for illuminating historical truths through fiction

The murder of Leon Trotsky remains one of those historical events that didn’t change much yet reveals a lot about its time and the people. Since Trotsky was by then marginalized as a has-been in international communism, his death was simply an act of Joseph Stalin tying up loose ends. If you already know something about this period, what with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, the assassin Ramón Mercader, the Spanish Civil War, and the brewing of the Second World War, the author, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, will still deliver an eye-opening and disturbing read.

The top of my reading pile always has a book in Spanish, and it was this way that I became familiar with Padura, famous for his crime noir novels set in Habana. I admire his scholarship in digging through what had to be vast mines of documents, but also his huevos for shaping a well-documented narrative into a tale of heartless villains scheming to make the world a better place through terror and murder. Like any good historical fiction, the most incredible parts are what was most true.

If you’ve never heard of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion—the Irish soldiers who deserted the US Army to fight for Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1847—with this novel, Reyna Grande will fill in the blanks in grand style. She pulls you in using the trope of a romance between Ximena, a curandera, and John Riley, an Irish-American artilleryman, both pawns in a gigantic land grab now regarded as one of the US’s forgotten wars.

We listen to the big personalities—Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna and US General Zachary Taylor—give their version of events even as the book provides an unflinching eye at the plight of the common people caught in the chaos and bloodshed.

What I loved most about this book was the voice. Woodrell did a fantastic job presenting the period Biblical lyricism through the narrator, Jake Roedel, a reluctant Confederate soldier.

The scene is the largely overlooked Kansas-Missouri front of the US Civil War, where bloody vendettas were just as much of the fighting as were skirmishes between the blue and the gray. We ride with the young men, boys really, as they raid and pillage, hide and survive, and there’s nothing romantic about the loss and pointless savagery. 

I really enjoyed this novel for several reasons. For one, Jess Walter is a fantastic storyteller. As a history geek, this book gives a fascinating retro look into an era I otherwise would’ve ignored: Hollywood during the making of the movie Cleopatra. One of the strengths of fiction is fleshing out a historical personality by putting him or her on stage, giving them voice, emotion, and substance that would be difficult to do in nonfiction.

We meet Richard Burton in all his self-centered, boozy, womanizing splendor, and you can’t help but feel disappointed that you never got to spill drinks with him. But the guy who steals the show is Hollywood producer Michael Deane, a narcissistic schemer who tramples over everyone to get his way, on the surface self-absorbed, yet inwardly fully aware of the effect he’s having. 

I’ve tried several times to understand the Mexican Revolution, with its cast of martyrs and rouges scrambling in a violent tornado of noble intentions and bloody treachery. Nava artfully demonstrates his chops as a writer by paring this seemingly incomprehensible sweep of Mexican history into an accessible and compelling narrative.

His characters are complicated and nuanced—Nava gives us no easy answers—and we watch them flail for salvation and fleeting promises even as society collapses around them.