Historical Fiction Books to Read Next

There’s plenty of historical drama in Robert Harris’s latest novel, but the events that led Britain into the carnage of World War I serve mainly as a backdrop for the intimate maneuverings in PRECIPICE (Harper, 464 pp., $30). At its center is the actual clandestine liaison between the country’s 61-year-old prime minister, Herbert Asquith, and a 26-year-old aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, who became his sounding board and confidante as he faced mounting hostilities both within his government and throughout Europe.

Harris notes at the outset that all the letters from Asquith quoted in his text are authentic documents. Around them Harris has deftly sketched his own portrayals of Asquith, Stanley and their social circle, adding invented correspondence from Stanley to Asquith as well as an invented Special Branch detective who finds himself deep in an “off the books” investigation after copies of classified Foreign Office telegrams — meant to be distributed only to a few select ministers — start turning up in decidedly insecure locations. Going undercover at the Stanleys’ Welsh estate, then covertly reading Venetia’s mail, he becomes an increasingly uncomfortable voyeur, disturbed by the Asquith letters’ “bizarre mixture of secret military intelligence and passionate declarations of love.” Will he be tempted to intervene? Or will Venetia, sensing the danger of her position, take action on her own?

Independence is the double-edged sword of Peggy Guggenheim’s existence: seemingly granted by her inherited fortune but denied by the expectations surrounding the Guggenheim name and her own insecurities. At least that’s the impression you get from PEGGY (Random House, 384 pp., $29), a sympathetic first-person narrative left unfinished at her death in 2022 by Rebecca Godfrey and completed by her friend Leslie Jamison.