Here are a few of the standouts from this year for me:
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
Like Mother, Like Mother by Susan Rieger
The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister (also a great audio book!)
Non Fiction
An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin (In the audiobook edition, there are marvelous instances of presidential speeches, which are provided in the original speaker’s format. For example, if Goodwin mentions a JFK speech excerpt, then the audiobook is narrated by a clip of JFK’s voice of the speech. Of course, this is another example where the author narration of the book is enjoyable, too.)
It’s been a while since I read There are Rivers in the Sky, but it seems like the parts about the Epic of Gilgamesh were more centered on a rare physical copy of the work, rather than the text itself. If you end up reading it you’ll have to let me know if it enhanced your reading experience of the novel.
Rivers was one of those books that had me constantly doing Google searches to see which parts of it were true (a whole bunch, it turns out). That’s my favorite kind of historical fiction, where fictional characters are set in a largely factual context.