Authors' Notes: Elizabeth O'Connor on writing the present through the past, and six of her favourite historical fiction novels

Percival Everett’s Watershed follows Robert Hawks, a Black hydrologist whose quiet fishing trip north of Denver pulls him into a violent struggle over Native American treaty rights and government secrecy. As he uncovers evidence of biological waste leaking into reservation waterways, Robert is drawn into a network of activists whose histories echo Black and Indigenous resistance movements. Like Everett’s other work, the novel is sharp-tongued, urgent, and politically electric. It’s not exactly a beach read (!), but it is perfect for readers who love fiction that interrogates the ways that land, civil rights and power are constantly intertwined.

You could spend an entire summer immersed in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, but I’ll restrain myself to recommending the first instalment, The Light Years, a deeply-felt, intricate portrait of a family on the brink of change. Set in Sussex in the late 1930s, the novel beautifully sketches a quintessentially British summer (trips to the seaside, picnics, children racing through orchards, complaints about the heat) alongside three brothers navigating desire, duty, and the looming shadow of war.

Sometimes, historical fiction can illuminate a point in history that you knew nothing about. Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants unfolds in China in 1979, when Beijing was rocked by the anti-communist Democratic Wall Movement, and the public execution of a young woman sends tremors through a small town. Moving through alleys, kitchens, and cramped apartments, Li reveals how political violence infiltrates the smallest corners of daily life. Most of all, however, it’s a novel of hope and tenderness, and a universal portrait of human resilience.

Birrell’s background as an art historian infuses Venus, Vanishing with a tactile sense of place. The textures of 1930s Berlin (fabric, thread, light, skin, paint) are rendered with such precision that they feel animate, giving the novel a distinctive, material intensity. Hannah, a painter, is hired to produce a series of nude portraits that draw her into a dangerous convergence of desire, ambition, and political menace. Birrell’s writing is astonishing, at once measured, intimate and volatile, as she uncovers queer life in Berlin amidst the rise of fascism and complex histories of German and Jewish art.

Trust is a puzzle box of a novel. Diaz traces the legend of a Wall Street financier through four interlocking texts (and four unreliable narrators), asking who gets to tell our histories, and who (and what) gets written out. It holds to account the ways that we mythologise wealth and power under capitalism, while being  slippery in its own metafictional telling. I don’t mean to make it sound like a headache - it has the masterful balancing act of all great novels by wearing its intelligence and formal daring lightly; mostly, it’s whip-smart, compulsively readable, and deeply moving.

Like Trust, Megan Hunter’s Days of Light is structured around the spaces in a story, tracing six Easter Sundays across sixty years of Ivy’s life. Hunter is one of my favourite stylists; her prose is lyrical, restrained, introspective, expansive and she is particularly good at making small details and gaps in a story sing. A mysterious flash of light in 1938 becomes the novel’s quiet gravitational pull, shaping decades of longing, grief, war, faith, and self‑discovery. Inspired by Charleston House in Sussex, it’s also a mediation on self-expression, queerness and the changing roles of women in the twentieth century.

1938. For Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself. When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been searching for. But, as she guides them across the island’s cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.