These 25 Juicy Novels Were Based on True Stories

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It’s no coincidence that nearly half of the 2023 National Book Award fiction finalists were directly inspired by real events. From Paul Harding's fictionalized account of the expulsion of Black residents from Maine's Malaga island, one of the first racially integrated towns in the northeast in This Other Eden, to Hanna Pylväinen's lyrical love story, The End of Drum-Time, set among the 1851 campaign to convert indigenous Scandinavian reindeer herders, it's clear that the past (near or far) is a driving presence in much of today’s most compelling literature. I find this trend, and my own love of reading fiction inspired by true events, reassuring. First, because perspective is grounding—though it feels as though we live in especially challenging times, things could certainly be worse! And second, because truth is both stranger than fiction and where imagination takes flight. Real events are a wellspring for art. And art just as assuredly helps us make sense of the world we inhabit. When fiction is well-grounded in reality, it can give rise to understanding. Just as important, the emotion it stirs moves us to seek more information.

While fictionalizing real world events can attract debate (as with the controversy surrounding Viola Davis’s star turn as the leader of a real, all-female warrior tribe in 2022 film The Woman King), the real danger is in telling one story and expecting that to suffice. We need more stories, more perspective, more art examining real events through different vantage points and lenses. Fiction has the power to humanize the past, bringing to life stories of those whom historical archives may have misrepresented, or ignored entirely. In honor of this power (and in celebration of the 2023 National Book Award finalists), we're gathering some of our favorite novels from the past few years that take true stories to imaginative new heights.

The Acrobat, by Edward Delaney

If Hollywood ever had royalty, Cary Grant was it. With good looks, charisma, talent, and sophistication in unparalleled combination, the actor, who began his career as a circus performer, remains one of the United States’ most indelible screen idols. And yet that gilded persona masked a myriad of contradictions. Even after he became a great actor, the working-class Englishman christened Archibald Leach experienced a tremendous darkness he long struggled to conquer. This fictionalized and sympathetic biographical novel focuses on a turbulent 10-year period when Grant turned to experimental LSD therapies to address his troubles by journeying inward.

The Christie Affair, by Nina de Gramont

Like many of the characters she invented, Dame Agatha Christie was once the center of her own unhappy domestic intrigue. Just hours following her husband’s announcement that he was leaving her and marrying his mistress, developments to which she strenuously objected, Christie left her dog and her daughter at home and disappeared without explanation. That evening, her car was found abandoned in a ditch. Soon the whole nation was captivated and her errant husband under suspicion. Though she was found safe in a hotel 11 days later, little is known of what happened to Christie in the interim. It’s the one mystery she refused to solve to public satisfaction. De Gramont imagines what might have transpired, filling in the gaps of the scandal and adding a murder mystery enriched by psychological suspense.

Sister Mother Warrior, by Vanessa Riley

On the surface, a historical novel depicting the role of women in the Haitian revolution would seem to have little in common with Viola Davis’s blockbuster The Woman King. But these works share a common DNA. Both are fictionalizations of the lives of female legends of the Dahomey Kingdom. While the movie is a larger-than-life heroic depiction of women warriors who fought against French colonizers in the country now known as Benin, the novel is a meticulously researched and more intimate portrait of a pivotal time in history when a Dahomey-born soldier became one of two key female figures in the Haitian fight for freedom.

Winter Work, by Dan Fesperman

This masterful novel blends espionage, domestic drama, and murder. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the final coda to the Cold War and ushered in massive geopolitical and social change. But those events also impacted the lives of millions of people in more intimate ways. In addition to shifting the borders of nations, it dismantled the state spy apparatus known as the STASI, putting a treasure trove of sensitive secrets up for grabs, and precipitating a mad scramble by potential state buyers including the USA and the Soviet Union. This multilayered murder mystery captures what happened in the region formerly known as East Germany both on a political level—including how the cache of secrets ultimately found its way to the CIA—and a personal one, showing how these world events affected individuals, from the perspective of an unusual protagonist, a sympathetic East German spy with a complicated and messy home life.

Lady Joker, Volume 1 and 2, by Kaoru Takamura

Obliterating the line between literary and crime fiction, a Japanese legend makes a riveting English language debut. This epic novel based on Japan’s sensational Glico-Morinaga corporate kidnapping case sold more than a million copies and garnered overwhelming critical praise in its initial release. With its panoramic yet incisive view into Japanese society, it’s a perfect example of how the best of crime fiction provides insight into why crime happens. In this mainstay of Japanese literature, the question is not just who dunnit but why.

Anon Pls., by DeuxMoi with Jessica Goodman

In this juicy and propulsive debut novel, turning her personal account into a gossip blog turns an influencer’s life topsy-turvy. Based on the popular and infamous Instagram influencer known as DeuxMoi, this carnival ride of a novel explores the world of celebrity culture and social media from a refreshingly critical and informed view.

The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Belle Da Costa Greene, born Belle Greener, lived much of her remarkable life on the shadowy margins of America's highest echelons, so it’s fitting that her remembrance is also extraordinary. Though she languished in obscurity for decades, there are now two books—Belle Greene, by Alexandra Lapierre, and The Personal Librarian, published just one year apart—devoted to memorializing her legacy. Both are explorations of two of America’s favorite obsessions: race and reinvention. Though Greene attempted to erase herself from the narrative by burning her personal papers, these two extraordinary novels are dedicated to telling her story. Both books tell the real-life story of “passing” that I’ve thought about for a long time after reading. I wonder whether the authors truly captured the essence of person they based the story on, but there’s no doubt they created a compelling narrative that stands on its own. From biographical sources and related histories, this story seems more pristine and reverential, less reckless, less restive and slightly less compelling in her humanity than the person they set out to study.

Take My Hand, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Some of America’s ugliest and most contested episodes involve the intersection of healthcare and the legal system. When sex and race are intertwined, the conflict grows all the more heated. Perkins-Valdez based her novel on a true case of involuntary sterilization that revives issues that still swirl around the idea of reproductive freedom today. New birth control methods have brought greater freedom, but they’ve also made marginalized women, many of whom are Black or brown, vulnerable to targeting by people who want to change America’s racial makeup: “When birth control was becoming more widely available to women, it was sort of a double-edged sword…on the one hand, it promised reproductive control and freedom, but on the other hand, it was possibly going to be used as a form of repression and eugenics.”

Code Name Hélène, by Ariel Lawhon

Nancy Wake was a glittering socialite with a glamorous career as a writer for Hearst. She was also a spy who killed a man with her bare hands and one of the most decorated women of World War II. Helene was just one of her aliases. Lucienne Carlier was another, the name Nancy used to smuggle people and documents across the French border. Singled out for distinction by both Kirkus Review and Publishers Weekly, this thriller tells the exciting and moving story of the reporter and Australian expat turned spy for the British.

By Her Own Design, by Piper Huguley

This is an all-American story in the best sense of the term. When Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy, it was the society event of the season. Even the highly scrutinized and celebrated dress secured a place in history. The talented woman who designed the piece of fashion history was Ann Lowe, a Black woman raised in Jim Crow Alabama, who learned to sew from her own mother and her formerly enslaved grandmother, both legendary seamstresses in their own right. Now this fascinating artist is enjoying renewed and long overdue attention, thanks to this moving novel by storyteller and chronicler of African American history Piper Huguley.

The Perfect Nanny, by Leila Slimani

Slimani was so enthralled with the true tale of Yoselyn Ortega, the New York City nanny who allegedly murdered two children under her care in 2012, that she turned it into this award-winning best seller. The Moroccan French author moved the story to her own home of Paris and focused her lens on the relationship between the grieving mother and the "perfect nanny" she regrettably trusted with her young son and daughter.

Never Anyone But You, by Rupert Thomson

Lucie and Suzanne are step-sisters in love, a complicated and uncouth scenario in the early-to-mid 1900s. The pair moves to progressive Paris to reinvent themselves, where they become surrealist artists and change their names. Now going by Claude Cahun, Lucie is recognized for her gender-bending photography and Suzanne's alter-ego Marcel Moore narrates their life spent cohabitating and collaborating. This fictionalized retelling of the real couple's relationship is populated with other famous figures of the lost generation and plays out their resistance against antisemitism, as well as their eventual imprisonment by the Nazis.

Red Joan, by Jennie Rooney

For most of her life, Melita Norwood got away with treason. The British civil servant provided Russian intelligence with private information before retiring and going into hiding. But in 1999, at age 87, Norwood (alias: Red Joan) was found. In her fictionalized novel, author Jennie Rooney begins with Red Joan's late-in-life questioning by the MI5 and flashes back to when she made the life-defining decision to work with the Russians. A 2019 film adaptation based the novel has Judi Dench and Sophie Cookson playing the titular Red Joan through different eras of her life.

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

That Miriam Toews's Women Talking, now an award-winning film by the same name, is based in truth makes it that much more difficult to read—but if you’re able to stomach the multiple abuses a group of Mennonite girls and women are forced to endure in the mid-2000s, you'll agree she was preordained to tell this story. The author, who left the church at 18, said she felt compelled to write the novel after hearing about those in a Bolivia Manitoba colony who had been repeatedly anesthetized and sexually assaulted, only to be told by the perpetrators they were hysterical. The women seek retribution in the novel like they did in real life, but the reckoning that occurs has them questioning their previously unshakable faith.

Beautiful Exiles, by Meg Waite Clayton

War correspondent Martha Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway in 1936, and, despite Hemingway's marriage to journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, their flirtatious friendship quickly became romantic. Their own eventual marriage was tumultuous, which, of course, makes for a great read—especially with Clayton's talent for taking years of research and spinning it into something hot. Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen starred in HBO's 2012 take on their relationship, Hemingway & Gellhorn, but Beautiful Exiles further explores who Gellhorn was in her own right.

White Houses, Amy Bloom

When Lorena "Hick" Hicock was sent to the White House to report on First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she wasn't expecting to fall in love. The secret relationship took place for years, with details only having emerged in posthumously published love letters between the two women. Amy Bloom's novel fictionalizes their lengthy romance from Hick's point of view, sharing juicy details about the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, including his own extramarital affairs.

The Flight Portfolio, by Julie Orringer

American journalist Varian Fry was so incensed by the Holocaust that he left the States to join the Emergency Rescue Committee, a volunteer-run network that helped persecuted artists, writers, and thinkers out of Nazi-occupied France. In The Flight Portfolio, Julie Orringer imagines Fry's experiences convincing the likes of Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp that relocating to the States the only option, while simultaneously struggling with the return of a (fictional) old flame. Fry is conflicted when this past love reemerges.

See What I Have Done, by Sarah Schmidt

Lizzie Borden's life story is based on lore as much as it is documented history, and has been told several different ways both on the page and screen. Schmidt's take is from four individual vantage points, one of which is Borden herself. The writing is gorgeously grotesque in its description of a claustrophobic household that leads a stifled young woman to murder her father and his wife.

Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward, author of Oprah's 103rd Book Club Pick, Let Us Descend, based her second novel on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, something she, unfortunately, experienced firsthand. The rich detail Ward provides in this 2011 National Book Award–winning story is largely due to these devastating circumstances, but gives the story an authenticity to accompany its candor. Narrator Esch is 15 and pregnant, living with her brothers and father in a fictional dilapidated part of Mississippi called Bois Sauvage. As Katrina descends, the family barricades themselves inside, and while they're dealing with more than just the impending storm, the stakes are much higher because of it.

The Girls, by Emma Cline

Emma Cline's debut has a lot in common with the story of Charles Manson and the young women who quickly became his devotees. Set in the summer of the late '60s, not long before the violent killing of actress Sharon Tate, the fictional Evie becomes enchanted with Suzanne, an enigmatic personality she discovers in a Los Angeles park. Evie's infatuation soon has her following Suzanne into a cult led by the Manson-esque Russell, who has his members doing his murderous bidding. It's up to Evie if she'll be able to go through with all that is asked of her, and readers will be ravenous in finding out for themselves.

Room, Emma Donoghue

The novel that inspired Brie Larson's Oscar's winning performance in the movie of the same name was influenced by horrific circumstances. In 1984, a 17-year-old girl named Elisabeth Fritzl was locked in a secret basement by her father, who kept her imprisoned for 24 years, raping her and forcing her to conceive seven children without leaving the room. Hearing about Fritzl's entrapment and eventual release led Donoghue to think through what it would be like for a young mother and her child to be kept in captivity and then released back into the modern world. The final product is profoundly unnerving but ultimately hopeful.

Loving Frank, Nancy Horan

Like Martha Gellhorn or Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamah Borthwick is yet another woman who has largely been defined by her relationship to a well-known man. Luckily, Loving Frank gives Mamah control of her own story, which is as much about her struggles as a woman craving independence in the early 1900s as it is about her romance with Frank Lloyd Wright. As in real life, Mamah's story comes to a tragic end. Still, her time alive is worth more than a grisly anecdote, and Horan provides the context.

My Sister, My Love, Joyce Carol Oates

The mystery of what happened to JonBenet Ramsey has endured, largely because of its sensationalistic aspects, but also because it's been a cold case for several decades now. In 2008, the prolific Joyce Carol Oates utilized details of the unthinkable crime as plot points for her 37th novel. My Sister, My Love turns JonBenet into Bliss, a young figure skater who is discovered dead in her family's basement. The story is told through the eyes of Skyler, Bliss's older brother, on the 10th anniversary of her death. Oates offers deep insight into a suburban family in crisis, in public, including commentary on America's contemporary tabloid culture.

Inamorata, by Joesph Gangemi

Mina Crandon was a 1920s-era seance-giving spiritualist who intrigued believers (including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and naysayers (such as Harry Houdini) alike. In Joseph Gangemi's Inamorata, a college student named Mitch hoping to win a prize from Scientific American investigates a Crandon-esque psychic medium named Mina Crawley. Mitch is looking to disprove Mina's abilities but soon finds his skepticism fading as he starts falling for his subject. His personal interest in Mina leads him to further question if things are truly as she presents them—or if she's just incredibly good at fooling even those who think they know her best.

Inferno, by Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles refers to this book as a "poet's novel," but the prose is infused with facets straight from the writer’s real life. Named and partially modeled after Dante's own masterwork, Myles’s Inferno is an East Coast ode to a 1970s young adulthood spent coming into queerness and creativity. There are moments of humility and wondrous humor, which are balanced with the author’s innate sensuality and satiric way of moving through the world.

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