Filling In the Gaps With Historical Fiction

How does historical fiction help us fill in the gaps of history? Whether bringing unknown histories to life or telling the stories that don’t often get told, historical fiction can give us a better understanding of history. But when it comes to actual gaps in the historical record or unknown aspects of history, how does historical fiction fit in?

Three authors with 2025 historical fiction releases explore how they use historical fiction to fill in the gaps of history or use those gaps to let their interpretations of events take shape. They each have different approaches and takes on researching and writing historical fiction. They each explore different time periods and genres. But what they all have in common is their passion for bringing the unknown, the uncertain, and the forgotten back to life.

The Author of A Bomb Placed Close To The Heart Sees Historical Fiction As A Way to Fill Archival Gaps

Nishant Batsha’s training as a historian makes him uniquely equipped to use historical fiction as a means of filling in “archival lacunae,” as he puts it. These gaps in the historical record, and the ways Batsha fills them in, are part of what makes A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart so impactful. His novel, which is partially based on the real-life historical figures–and love story–of M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, is particularly aimed at doing this. Filling in Evelyn’s story after her house was destroyed in a fire and her ex-husband Roy wrote her out of his memoir helps restore her place in the historical record.

Batsha feels that “one of the more interesting parts of writing fiction connected to the past is expanding the possibilities […] found in a single strand of memory.” Drawing on facts from the historical record but expanding upon how they affect the bigger picture is a large part of how Batsha does this.

Finding Freedom Through Approaching Historical Fiction as a Writer, Not an Scholar

Phil Melanson grew up believing there was a stark divide between queer fiction and historical fiction. This was particularly distressing when, as a young writer, Melanson found himself drawn to historical settings in his work. To assuage these feelings of doubt, Melanson decided to be a champion of historical accuracy. He would write historical fiction like Hilary Mantel, sticking as close as possible to facts from the historical record. But when his research on the troubled early career of Leonardo da Vinci muddied the waters, Melanson had to confront his own doubts and preconceived notions about what historical fiction could and should be.

Instead of seeking permission from scholars to support his theory that da Vinci harbored an attraction for men (based on historical accusations of da Vinci engaging in sex with male sex workers), he needed to do the work of a writer: “to consider, to imagine” instead of “miring [himself] in a fatuous academic debate around labels and anachronisms, when, as a novelist, they weren’t [his] primary concern.” His new novel, Florenzer, is the outcome of that realization. Neither, Melanson feels, does his new novel suffer any historical inaccuracies for it. Some historians might see the fifteenth-century ledger listing da Vinci as a sodomite and counter with how many false accusations were made at the time. But similarly there’s no way of knowing for sure that those accusations, and Melanson’s interpretation of them, are wrong.

This Author’s Trips To Fiji For Research Were No Vacation

Going to Fiji for research might sound like a vacation, but for author Nilima Rao, it was all about uncovering hidden and forgotten history. Rao comes from an Indian Fijian family descended from indentured servants (girmityas) brought over from India under British occupation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of that history is lost now, never written down. But in her first book, A Disappearance in Fiji, which explores Fijian history through a “crime fiction romp,” Rao was able to bring some of the experiences of her great-grandparents’ generations back to life. Harkening back to Nishant Batsha’s thoughts on filling in gaps in the record with historical fiction, Rao said she felt moved “to give voice, even if it was a posthumous, fictional and almost certainly flawed voice, to people who hadn’t had a well-recorded voice in their lifetimes.”

The second book in the Akal Singh series, A Shipwreck in Fiji, pushed Rao to research another aspect of her birth country that she knew little about: the iTaukei, who are the Indigenous people of Fiji. In order to fully understand the people she was writing about, Rao felt that she needed to immerse herself in iTaukei culture. This meant taking a five-hour flight, then a five-hour bus ride, then a two-hour bus ride, then a three-hour ferry trip, then a forty-five minute bus drive to the village of Lovoni on the island of Ovalau. The trip may have been arduous, but Rao’s time in the iTaukei village was not. Having now lived in one herself, Rao felt better prepared to write scenes set in someplace like it–and to write even more historical fiction books about Fiji.

If you’re interested in learning more about interesting historical fiction news and interviews with the authors who write it, you might enjoy this look into an infamously banned 1920s LGBTQ book and the Nazi-era filmmaker who inspired an author’s eerily prescient work of historical fiction. Or, if you’re just looking for some more great book recommendations, check out the best historical fiction books of 2025 so far.