Our Strange Duet: Inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera (Delacorte Press, 2026) is a reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, spotlighting Christine Daaé as she rises to fame while torn between love, ambition, and the haunting secrets of the opera house from #1 New York Times bestselling author Erin A. Craig. This gorgeous hardcover edition of Our Strange Duet features stunning sprayed edges, custom character endpapers, a foil-stamped case, and a ribbon! She was never just the voice he shaped . . . A rising soprano with a gift she is only just learning to embrace, Christine Daaé has moved through the glittering world of the Opera Populaire longing to find her purpose. Instead, she finds herself caught between two men who refuse to let her slip quietly into the chorus. One is Raoul, her childhood friend turned devoted admirer, offering her a future filled with warmth, safety, and a love that feels like sunlight. The other is a mysterious masked figure who lurks beneath the Opera House: The Phantom. His brilliance, obsession, and dangerous devotion to nurturing Christine’s talents ignites a dark and complicated passion in her heart. As Christine’s star ascends, so does the tension between Raoul and the Phantom. She must decide who she is when the curtain falls—and what she’s willing to risk for the life she wants. Set against the sweeping, romantic world of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, Our Strange Duet allows Christine Daaé to take center stage to tell her own story: fierce, emotional, and unforgettable.

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In 2021, the NAACP Image Award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers made her fiction debut with The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, a magisterial epic of African American historical fiction—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—chronicling the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War, to our own tumultuous era.

Five years, and numerous awards and best-of lists later, Honorée joins the podcast on the anniversary of the novel’s publication to talk about what it meant then, what it means now, and that call from Oprah that shifted everything.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and a student of United States history. She is the author of seven books spanning three genres, including the NAACP Image Award-winning poetry collection, The Age of Phillis. She was on the podcast on June 20, 2025 to discuss her book, Misbehaving at the Crossroad: Essays and Writing. You can find Honorée on Substack, Facebook, and Instagram.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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I love Rhys Bowen’s historical mystery series, especially Her Royal Spyness books, which feature Lady Georgiana Rannoch. The Castle in the Glen (Lake Union Publishing, 2026) appears to be a standalone, although there’s room for it to develop into a series if the author so decides

The novel opens with an excerpt from The Wild Girl, a work-in-progress by an acclaimed mystery writer, Iris Blackburn (to quote from the Cast of Characters, “Think Agatha Christie”). Set on the Isle of Skye, off Scotland’s western coast, The Wild Girl purports to be the first case of Iris Blackburn’s pet detective, Inspector Melrose. But Iris, who’s approaching eighty and suffering from early-stage dementia, hires a young Australian named Emma Callander, whose first book recently appeared in London to great acclaim, to finish the novel.

To secure Emma’s agreement, Iris offers an all-expenses-paid trip to Skye, where Emma can absorb the atmosphere, appreciate the setting, and connect with the character of Inspector Melrose before sitting down to write. Only after Emma reaches the island does she begin to suspect that the fictional mystery may not be fiction after all.

Bowen juggles the three historical timelines—1904, the time of the original deaths; 1932, when Iris visited Skye; and Emma/Iris in 1965—with her usual aplomb. She also leaps nimbly between the novel and the novel-within-the-novel, which Emma reads so that she can get a sense of what the book needs and how she can contribute to finishing Iris’s story. The result is a delightful tale that never takes itself too seriously yet kept me turning pages to the end.

And if you’ve never visited Skye yourself, it really is exactly as described. That I have such vivid and fond memories of my short time there just added to my appreciation of the novel.

Rhys Bowen’s work has sold close to 10 million copies in over 30 languages. She has been nominated for every major mystery award and has won multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards. Her books include the Royal Spyness and Molly Murphy historical mysteries, as well as several international bestselling stand-alone novels. The Castle in the Glen is her latest book. Find out more at here. 

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in September 2026.

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When nobleman Thomas Boleyn, lord of Hever Castle, is called to London in 1509 to present himself to a newly anointed King Henry VIII, he sets in train events that ensure the Boleyn name will never be forgotten. His daughters Mary and Anne were young then, and though he was ambitious for his family to prosper, he could not imagine what would transpire in the two decades to come.

Blending the history she knows so well with the creativity of her imagination, Tracy Borman brings the Boleyn family’s three-decade rise and precipitous fall to vivid life in The House of Boleyn (Hachette, 2026). Borman surrounds the main dramatic events of the Boleyn saga with a colorful tableau in which familial and inter-familial rivalries threaten and true love often loses out to keen ambition. Anne’s ever-loyal attendant Esther Frideswide and Thomas Boleyn’s perfidious steward Robert Cranwell are as memorable as Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, or anyone in the increasingly dangerous orbit of the royal court. Henry VIII pursues Anne relentlessly, showering her with gifts as the Boleyns are catapulted to political prominence. But when she can’t give him the son and heir he desperately seeks, the family faces a terrible and bloody fate. With lavish and compelling historical detail, Tracy Borman displays her keen gift for storytelling in this resonant novel of family, fate, and intrigue.

Tracy Borman is chief historian of Historic Royal Palaces, chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust, and chancellor and professor of Tudor History at Lincoln Bishop University.

Dr. Kristen Vitale Engel is an Associate Fellow at the Royal Historical Society. She is in the Department of History at Southern New Hampshire University, Global, the Editor-in-Chief of "The Court Observer" for The Society for Court Studies, the Submissions Editor for the Royal Studies Journal and the International Ambassador for HistoryLab+ in partnership with the Institute of Historical Research.

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In the midst of texting and cell phones, online websites and GPS, it can be difficult to remember an era when almost all communication took place by landline or snail mail, as it’s now called, and driving depended on the ability to read a printed map. But April Howells’s debut novel vividly recaptures that world.

The Unforgettable Mailman (Alcove Press, 2026) opens in Chicago in October 1966. The post office, overwhelmed with unsolicited mail in the days before the ZIP code, has shut down temporarily, and an elderly resident named Henry Walton decides that someone must deliver the mail. People depend on letters, after all, and without them, connections with their nearest and dearest will fade.

Henry himself suffers from a bad leg leftover from World War I and an increasingly dicey memory. But despite these obstacles, he succeeds in breaking into the post office and leaving with approximately 300 letters, destined for places as far apart as Canada and the Dakotas. Throughout the story we see Henry’s interactions with the recipients of the letters as well as the letters themselves, and through the exchanges Henry’s own past becomes ever clearer. After a while, his journey intersects with that of Roger, a high-school student in search of the father who left home, and the two of them pursue the delivery of the letters as we learn more about what makes each of them tick.

This haunting novel, which came out a couple of months ago, captivated me from the very beginning. Henry is beautifully portrayed and sympathetic, and so are all the people with whom he interacts along the road—including, of course, Roger.

April is a storyteller who finds heartwarming inspiration in little-known pieces of history. With a background in magazine publishing, she’s spent the last decade leading Global Internal Communications and Employee Engagement for premium apparel brand lululemon. The Unforgettable Mailman is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in September 2026.

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Romance novels—especially historical romance novels—thrive on heroes and heroines who don’t match in terms of social class. There must be conflict, after all, or the novel would end before it began. But not even George Bernard Shaw’s mismatched couple in Pygmalion (later My Fair Lady) can claim quite as much distance as Shana Galen’s Tamsin Archer and the Honourable Garret Kildare, the main characters in A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord (Berkley, 2026).

Tamsin’s once comfortable if never opulent life took a sharp downward turn when a Royal Navy press gang hauled her father off to unwanted service on a seagoing vessel, service from which he never returned. By 1813, when we meet her at age twenty-three, she’s doing her best to support her injured mother and two much younger siblings by selling flowers in the street. A young man named Garret speaks kindly to her and pays her a shilling when she’s expecting far less, and as a result she remembers him fondly, but it’s not until two years later that she meets him again. By then, a chimney sweep has taken her younger siblings and holds them hostage to payments she can never make and that he might not honor even if she did. She’s desperate to get them back.

In 1815, Garret’s life also makes a dramatic turn. His father, the Earl of Glenister, announces that the family has run out of money and must sell its ancestral lands in Ireland. Not exactly poverty, especially by Tamsin's standards, but still uncomfortable. Garret and his three brothers—Liam, Killian, and Daire—make a bet that one of them will secure the hand of an heiress, thus sparing their younger sister, Mariah, from having to marry an elderly and decrepit duke. But as Garret sets out to woo his heiress, he encounters Tamsin somewhere she’s not supposed to be …

Shana Galen, a former English teacher, has written more than fifty romances. A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord, first in her The Heiress Hunters series, is the latest. Find out more about her and her books here.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the summer or fall of 2026.

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So close to the semiquincentennial, it’s great to see a novel focused on the life of Abigail Adams, a woman appreciated even in her own time—especially by her husband of more than half a century, John Adams, the second president of the United States—but not, at the time, for her determination that her new country should also extend liberty to its female citizens.

Of course, Abigail Adams has received considerable attention since for her views on the need for adult women to control their own futures, but in the process much of the complexity of her life, her character, her surroundings, and her family has dropped out of the discussion. In A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams (William Morrow, 2026), Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie dive into the story of Abigail’s and John’s long and loving marriage, their political service and economic problems, their time at home and abroad, and their six children—four of whom survived to adulthood but not all of whom thrived once they got there.

It’s all wonderfully rich and complex, both emotionally and in terms of the history revealed here—enhanced by the feminine perspective. The American Revolution as it happened was not the neat story told in school but messy, sprawling, contentious, risky, and eventful, and the formation of the resulting republic reflected all those competing trends. Unless you’re a historian specializing in this place and time, I can guarantee you will find out things you never knew, and in entertaining ways.

Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie have published numerous novels, together and separately. Find out more about their joint projects here.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear later in 2026.

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Byline for the Dead: A Novel of Labor, Conspiracy, a Bloody Uprising and Two Ambitious Journalists (Sager Group, 2025) is a historical mystery-thriller that interweaves stories from different eras as two journalists, five decades apart, work to unravel the truths about one of the most violent labor strikes in American history. In 1984, Gray Wheeler is a disillusioned young reporter working for The Toledo Sword. Assigned to cover the 50th anniversary of the Auto-Lite strike-known as the "Battle of Toledo," a bloody, five-day labor uprising involving 10,000 union workers and 1,300 Ohio National Guard troops-Gray stumbles across a mystery left unpublished a half-century earlier by another young reporter that connects the 1934 massacre to present-day political machinations. Putting together the pieces, past and present, the two reporters work in tandem across the decades, unravelling the corruption that led to the deadly strike. As the story proceeds, we learn of desperate workers, soulless political agitators, ruthless National Guard troops, suppressed government reports, buried testimonies, and suspicious deaths. As Gray and newspaper librarian Kirby Peters dig deeper into the story, they discover the chilling truths behind the spark that ignited the bloodshed. And they find their lives at risk. The deeper they dig, the greater the danger. Threats culminate in a deadly confrontation in the ruins of the old Auto-Lite factory. Byline for the Dead explores themes of journalistic integrity, institutional memory, and the power of the past to shape the present. As Gray confronts Toledo's forgotten history and the ghost of his own unfulfilled ambitions, he must decide whether exposing the truth is worth the cost-especially when the truth fights back.

Ray Welling, PhD, grew up in Toledo, Ohio and earned a journalism degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. Later, he migrated to Australia, where he has worked as a journalist, editor, publisher, content director, writer, marketing manager, lecturer and podcaster. He lives in Sydney with his wife. Byline for the Dead is his first novel and was a finalist for the 2025 American Writing Awards for Best New Debut Fiction.

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Starting in the late 1970s, three women navigate post Cultural Revolution China: Lulu, who’s forced to become a prostitute in Shanghai to save her mother and sister from starving, Lei who is sold in marriage for cigarettes and a few eggs, and Yan, Lei’s smart, beautiful daughter, whose kindness to the farmer master’s neurodivergent son allows her to get an education. Both Lei and Lulu must put aside their dreams and suffer indignity after indignity, Lei from her husband, and Lulu from her pimp, while Yan ultimately sacrifices her career to help her family. With a cast of unforgettable characters struggling through China’s transition to modernity, and grappling with the impact of mental illness, prostitution, and Aids, And the Ancestors Sing is a stunning gripping historical novel.

Radha Lin Chaddah was born in London to an East Indian father and a Malaysian Chinese mother, and grew up in Kenya, the UK and the US, graduating from New Trier High School in Winnetka, IL. She majored in Biology at the University of Chicago, earned medical and law degrees at the University of Illinois, and a Master of Public Health at Harvard University. She completed Internal Medicine residency training, and later practiced, at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston. Radha and her family moved, over the course of twenty years, from Boston to NYC to Taipei to Shanghai to Beijing to Princeton, and finally to Philadelphia. Radha worked as a primary care physician in Boston, NYC and Beijing; worked with the China CDC to co-write the book, HIV/ AIDS: Beyond the Numbers; and provided mental healthcare to patients in several states as a telemedicine doctor upon settling in Philadelphia. When not reading and writing, Radha enjoys learning new Mandarin characters, tackling novice knitting projects, painting with watercolors and acrylics, catching a live, stand-up comedy show with her husband, Avery, trying out new recipes with their young adult daughters, Yani and Ayo, and, of course, jotting down story notes for her next writing project. You can visit Radha online at radhalinchaddah.com.

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There must be a shift in the Zeitgeist of the publishing world, because after a long drought in Gothic novels, this is the second one I’ve encountered in little more than a month. The Fourth Wife (Kensington, 2026) takes place near Salt Lake City, Utah, during the years when the Mormon community there still practiced polygamy but was coming under increasing pressure from the US government to abandon the practice, pressure that included a law making multiple, simultaneous marriages a criminal offense.

It’s 1882. Twenty-year-old Hazel Russon, a talented pianist, has grown up in a polygamous family, but she has a secret agreement with her childhood friend Elijah Crowther that they will become each other’s only spouse once they are permitted to marry. When Elijah’s father, a powerful figure in Salt Lake City society, summons Hazel and informs her that Elijah has rejected her in favor of a return to the fundamental principles of Mormon life—the most fundamental of which is polygamy, known only as the Principle—she is shattered by her love’s betrayal. As a result, she allows Elder Crowther to talk her into becoming the fourth wife of Brother Jacob Manwaring, a wealthy older man who promises Hazel a home of her own, including a piano.

Hazel has long struggled with what most of us in the twenty-first century would categorize as an anxiety disorder, in part caused by the difficulty she has in meeting the extreme demands of her religion for female submissiveness. And although initially attracted to Jacob, she soon discovers that not everything Elder Crowder told her about her husband-to-be was the truth…. 

It’s all delightfully creepy and fast-paced, and the interactions among Jacob’s wives are even more interesting than those between them and Jacob. 

Linda Hamilton studies and writes about nineteenth-century Mormon life as both a historian and a novelist—including, most recently, The Fourth Wife.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the summer of 2026.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Janice Hadlow about her fascinating novel, Rules of the Heart (Henry Holt & Company, 2026).

A beautifully evocative historical novel about the perils of all-consuming love, inspired by a real-life eighteenth-century love affair, from the bestselling author of The Other Bennet Sister
“When I love at all, it is with my whole soul—my heart must be torn to pieces before it can forget or resign the objects of its affections.”
England, 1794. Now in her thirties, Lady Harriet Bessborough, already the veteran of several liaisons, finds herself pursued by a much younger man. This isn’t unusual in her circle, where married women often take younger lovers. No one minds much, provided they follow the rules of the game: Don’t embarrass your husband, maintain complete discretion at all times, and never ever make the mistake of falling in love.
So when Harriet meets Lord Granville—brilliantly handsome, insistently ardent, and twelve years younger than her—she’s confident she can manage their affair. Until she finds herself falling uncontrollably under his spell.
As she’s plunged into an all-consuming passion, Harriet’s worldliness and sophistication desert her. With each besotted step, she finds herself edging ever closer to exposure and ruin. She knows she should leave Granville but can’t bring herself to do it—she loves him far too deeply now to escape the scandal that threatens to engulf her.

Janice Hadlow worked as a television producer and commissioner for most of her career. She graduated with a first-class degree in history from King’s College London and has always been fascinated by the eighteenth century. She is the author of A Royal Experiment, a family biography of George III, Queen Charlotte, and their children. The Other Bennet Sister, her fiction debut, was named a best book of 2020 by Library Journal, NPR, and The Christian Science Monitor. It is currently in production as a drama for BBC television.

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