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If you like reading challenges, I’m sure you already know about Book Riot’s yearly Read Harder challenge. Like every year before, 2025’s Read Harder Challenge is full of unique and engaging tasks to push you outside your reading comfort zone. Each task is designed to engage your reading—and your TBR—in a different way. Since Past Tense is all about historical fiction, there was one task in particular I knew we should talk about: #17 “Read a book about little known history.”
I often find myself shocked and pleasantly surprised by the little tidbits of historical fact I pick up just from reading historical fiction for fun. Not all historical fiction is based heavily on fact, but when it is, it can be a great way to learn a thing or two about history that was previously unknown to you. One thing that this kind of historical fiction is great at is bringing little-known history to life. I don’t think it’s a secret that the history we learn in school is limited and culturally biased. And, what’s “little known” to one person might be common knowledge to another. But by picking up books about the history we don’t know, we can all engage in a fuller and more interesting view of what history looked like.
These five books all feature elements of history that were either entirely new to me or strike me as things outside of common public knowledge. From forgotten historical disasters to pioneers of culture and technology, these historical fiction books about little-known history bring the more obscure sides of history to light.
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A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh
The name Alexander Graham Bell likely brings to mind images of the telephone, but you may not know he also has a long and complicated history with the Deaf community. Marsh takes inspiration from the journals of Bell’s real-life deaf students to tell the story of how he helped and then ultimately betrayed the Deaf community. Now, asked to vouch for him when his telephone patent is contested, Ellen Lark must decide whether to risk her reputation and her future to tell the truth about Bell’s actions.
Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray
You’ve probably heard about the Harlem Renaissance, but if you’re like me, you’d never heard of the woman who helped start it. The Harlem of the 1920s was a place of creativity, change, and cultural pride, and as the new literary editor of The Crisis, Jessie Redmon Fauset was right at the center of it all. Tasked by W.E.B. Du Bois with finding the up-and-coming writers who would change the face of American literature, Fauset features the likes of Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen. The Crisis thrives under Larsen’s leadership, but her relationship with W.E.B. Du Bois and her desire to someday become editor of the magazine could derail it all.
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
More lives were lost in the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff than the Titanic and Lusitania combined, but many people have never even heard of it. I hadn’t before reading this heartbreaking historical fiction novel by Ruta Sepetys. The ship, overcrowded with more than 10,000 wartime personnel and refugees on a craft only meant for 1,800, was hit by a Russian torpedo in the Baltic Sea. To tell its tragic story, Sepetys imagines the people who might’ve found their way to the Wilhelm Gustloff: a young Lithuanian nurse, a Prussian soldier ferreting away Nazi treasures, and a heavily pregnant Polish girl, all fleeing for their lives.
The Last Train to Key West by Chanel Cleeton
Maybe it’s no surprise that one of the most devastating hurricanes of the 20th century isn’t well known nowadays, considering the number of life-altering storms we’ve witnessed in the last two decades alone. But when the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 hit, it became the first of only four known Category 5 hurricanes to hit the continental U.S. At least 408 lives were taken; even more devastating: most of them were World War I veterans working in the Florida Keys. Cleeton brings the terrible storm to life in a beautiful story about fleeing the past and facing the future.
Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Release date: April 8, 2025
In the years following the Civil War, a kingdom was established in the Appalachian Mountains. This kingdom, created by a community of the formerly enslaved people based on their memories of African kingdoms, was called Happy Land. It was a place people could finally find freedom in the land that they owned. Unfortunately, both then and today, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be taken from them. When Nikki visits her estranged grandmother in North Carolina, she learns of her great-great-great-grandmother Queen Luella and the history of a place and a family she never knew. Is it too late to protect this land and the birthright she never knew she had?
