Category: Historical Fiction

Adventure In The City Of Stories by Emma Otheguy

with wonderful illustrations by Poly Bernatene. This sequel to Cousins In The Time Of Magic finds our three young protagonists Siggy, Camilla and Jorge heading back in time for an even more personal reason than in the first book. Camilla is already having a terrible day after being humiliated at her Florida school by the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/07/20/adventure-in-the-city-of-stories-by-emma-otheguy/

They Were Divided by Miklos Banffy

They Were Divided by Miklos Banffy

Having taken the first two volumes of his Transylvanian Trilogy to immerse readers in the sometimes glittering, sometimes earthy world of Hungarian aristocracy prior to the First World War, Milos Banffy brings his stories to their immutable end in They Were Divided. The concluding book was published in Hungarian in 1940, and there could hardly …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/07/18/they-were-divided-by-miklos-banffy/

Recent Researched Comics for Grown-ups

silhouettes of two women look at eachother in an ornate border on the cover of charity and sylvia by tillie walden

Some lovely graphic works for adult readership have come out this Spring, each based on fact to various degrees. Tillie Walden’s Charity and Sylvia came out this week from Drawn & Quarterly; last month gave us Opioids and Organs by Arizona O’Neill; and in March, the collected volume of Death to Pachuco by Henry Barajas …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/06/17/recent-researched-comics-for-grown-ups/

Armaveni by Nadine Takvorian

subtitled: A Graphic Novel Of The Armenian Genocide. The older I get, the more I wonder why people who commit genocide are so hellbent on pretending it never happened. It adds a layer of weaseldom to an already terrible thing. Like, it’s bad enough you’re a mass murderer but when confronted with the evidence, you’ll …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/04/01/armaveni-by-nadine-takvorian/

The Spider Strikes by Michael P Spradlin

It continues to frighten and infuriate me that books like these aren’t merely a snapshot of a period in time but a very necessary and urgent warning of the road we must not presently travel. As with the prior books in The Web of The Spider series, set during Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/02/23/the-spider-strikes-by-michael-p-spradlin/

A Plague of Angels by P.F. Chisholm

A Plague of Angels by P.F. Chisholm

Shortly after the end of the events in A Surfeit of Guns, Sir Robert Carey receives a letter from his father, commanding him to come to London post-haste. More than filial piety is at stake, for Lord Hunsdon, as Henry Carey is called throughout the novel, is also Lord Chamberlain to the Queen herself. Sir …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/18/a-plague-of-angels-by-p-f-chisholm/

Ghost Town by James R Gregory (EXCERPT)

Hello, readers! Today we have a charming excerpt for you from a historical novel. While James R Gregory’s Ghost Town is billed as a psychological thriller, at its heart, it’s a story about leadership, love and connection, as ambition clashes with isolation to potentially devastating result. In the late 1800s, the small town of Sulphur …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/13/ghost-town-by-james-r-gregory-excerpt/

Asylum Murders by Michael G Colburn (EXCERPT)

Hello, readers! We have a treat for you today with an excerpt from the second installment of Michael G Colburn’s twisty historical Lady Black mystery series. Asylum Murders finds our heroine, London thief turned Australian high society widow Lady Edith “Edie” Black, in the midst of establishing her mostly secret career as a private investigator. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/16/asylum-murders-by-michael-g-colburn-excerpt/

Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless by Robert Musil

Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless by Robert Musil

Where Miklos Banffy spends nearly 1500 pages of his Transylvanian Trilogy chronicling the life of Hungarian nobility across their half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil compresses much of the experience of the Austrian half into less than a tenth of that in a tale of life in a …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/05/die-verwirrungen-des-zoglings-torless-by-robert-musil/

They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy

They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy

After introducing readers to the lost world of Hungarian nobility before the Great War in They Were Counted, Miklós Bánffy continues their stories toward the great catastrophe that is coming, that only a very few of them can see looming on the horizon. These two books, along with They Were Divided form Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/28/they-were-found-wanting-by-miklos-banffy/