My stepdaughter was interested in The Comedians by Graham Greene because she is interested in Haiti. The Comedians was written in 1966 and is about the dictatorship of François Duvalier. I told her I didn’t believe it would qualify as typical historical fiction, so I gave her some different options: I thought she might like Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls—about the Spanish Civil War—since half of her mother’s family is from Spain. I also gave her Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, about the Great Depression, and Train Dreams, Dennis Johnson’s novella about a man’s life in the American Northwest, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
