Genre Guide – Alternative History

Eva Eva

There are turning points in history that set the stage for everything that happens afterwards.  From brilliant inventions to epic tragedies; history is made, the story is told, and the future falls into place.  

But…what if? 

Alternative history begins with real history; something that is true or, at least, believed to be the true way of things (such as a legend). Then, through a twist of fate, what was true is now untrue. From realistic possibilities to fantastical imaginings, below you will find a selection of books embracing the fathomless question: what if? 

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In the Catalog

The Binding

The Binding

A Novel

Gianaclis Caldwell

In this America, Manifest Destiny wasn’t a thing and the US never colonized beyond the Appalachian Mountains. In the east, there are The Atlantic States of America, a corporate-run caste system; and to the west, the United West, a people fighting to remain free and equal. Two women, fighters and survivors from opposite sides, meet and discover that they are bound by fate in this America that could have been.

From the Catalog
From Hoopla
The Black God's Drums

The Black God’s Drums

P. Djèlí Clark

The Civil War is being fought not only on the ground and at sea, but in the air on sky ships, and a weapon called the Black God’s Drums is being aimed at New Orleans. On top of everything, Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, decides to get involved for her own selfish reasons.

From the Catalog
From Libby
From Hoopla
The Calculating Stars

The Calculating Stars

Mary Robinette Kowal

A meteorite such as the one that killed the dinosaurs slams into Earth in 1952, destroying the US eastern seaboard and rendering the planet unable to sustain life much longer. In the race for humans to develop space travel to escape the dying Earth, a female mathematician and pilot dares to ask why the first astronaut must be man. Why not a woman, and why not her?

From the Catalog
From Libby
The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick

The Axis powers won WWII and the United States has fell to Germany and Japan. Now, in 1962, slavery is legal in the US once more and the remaining Jewish survivors of the Holocaust are forced into deep hiding. What if there was a way to fix what has gone so terribly wrong?

From the Catalog
From Libby
From Hoopla
Outlander

Outlander

Diana Gabaldon

An ex-combat nurse on vacation with her husband in Scotland in 1945 stumbles into 1743 Scotland at the height of Jacobite Rebellion. To survive, she is forced to marry a Scottish warrior, with his own issues to work through, and faced with loving two very different men in two completely different worlds.

From the Catalog
From Libby
From Hoopla
The Shamshine Blind

The Shamshine Blind

A Novel

Paz Pardo

During the Falklands War, the Argentinian government developed a chemical weapon, a “psychopigment,” capable of eliciting any human emotion upon contact. That “weapon” becomes the Black-Market recreational drug of choice in 2009 America.

From the Catalog
From Libby
To Paradise

To Paradise

Hanya Yanagihara

Across three different timelines (1893, 1993, and 2093), exist vastly different Americas, from the Free States of the US where people may live and love how they please to a land destroyed by plagues and run by a totalitarian government. But even in a world where everything is different, humanity remains very much the same.

From the Catalog
From Libby
You Dreamed of Empires

You Dreamed of Empires

Alvaro Enrigue

Hernán Cortés’s expedition into the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1519 wasn’t as obviously a one-sided victory as history believes. The Spaniards enter Tenochtitlan and cannot determine if they are guests or prisoners of the great Aztec nation.

From the Catalog
From Libby