It’s an apt time to reflect on the strange experience of living during momentous historical events. Here are some recommended novels that take place around big moments in history.

The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Headstrong Kirabo grows up in a small Ugandan village in the 1970s; her childhood years running parallel to Idi Amin’s violent reign. Kirabo has been perfectly content with village life - surrounded by her grandmother, aunts and cousins - but as she enters her teenage years, she begins to keenly feel the absence of the mother she has never known. This stunning coming-of-age story tracks Kirabo’s first move, first love and first betrayals, as her country is transformed by the bloody dictatorship of Amin.

The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte

In the first year of the doomed German invasion of Russia in WWII, a German military doctor, Paul Bauer, establishes a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana - the former grand estate of author Leo Tolstoy. There he encounters Katerina Trusbetzkaya, a fiery Russian writer who has been left in charge. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer’s arrogant commanding officer, Metz, becomes unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. This is an engrossing exploration of the limits that people reach in war time, as well as a bittersweet love story and an exploration of literature as a potent force for good.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

In an Ireland ravaged by World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in Dublin, where expectant mothers who have come down with an unfamiliar Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders: Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world.

Fracture by Andres Neuman

Mr Watanabe, one of the few survivors of both atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, is in Tokyo when the earthquake that precedes the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster strikes. In the aftermath, Mr Watanabe travels to Fukushima, to try and understand Japan’s history of collective trauma. This sweeping and unusual novel is told from the perspectives of four women from around the world (Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid) who knew and loved Mr Watanabe over the course of many years. Fracture encompasses some of the most urgent political, social and environmental questions of contemporary life, about collective trauma, memory and love.

That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott

In playful, musical prose, this multi-award-winning book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers. The novel’s hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Spanning Bobby’s remarkable life, That Deadman Dance is a fascinating, powerful portrait of Australia’s earliest days.

The Mountains Sing Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Hà Nội, 1972. Hương and her grandmother, Trần Diệu Lan, cling to one another in their improvised shelter as American bombs fall around them. Her father and mother have already left to fight in a war that is tearing not just her country but her family apart. For Trần Diệu Lan, forced to flee the family farm with her six children decades earlier as the Communist government rose to power in the North, this experience is distressingly familiar. Set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War, The Mountains Sing is the stunning English language debut of Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai and draws from her interviews with real people about their experiences of this time.

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

The pale-skinned, black-eyed baby is a bad omen. That’s one thing the people on the former plantation are sure of. The other is that Miss Rue - midwife, healer, crafter of curses - will know what to do. But for once Rue doesn’t know. Times have changed since her mother Miss May Belle held the power to influence the life and death of her fellow slaves. Freedom has come. The master’s Big House lies in ruins. But this new world brings new dangers, and Rue’s old magic may be no match for them. This engrossing debut novel explores the lives of emancipated slaves struggling to survive in the years just after the Civil War.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

A Pakistani man invites an American stranger to join him for tea at a cafe in Lahore, as dusk settles over the city. Changez has enjoyed meteoric personal and professional success in America - a job at an elite firm, a budding relationship with well-connected Erica, entree into Manhattan society. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in his fulfilment of the immigrant’s dream. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Celebrated Russian author Boris Pasternak is writing a book, Doctor Zhivago, which could spark dissent in the Soviet Union. The Soviets, afraid of its subversive power, ban it. But in the rest of the world it’s fast becoming a sensation. The CIA plans to use the book to tip the Cold War in its favour. Their agents are not the usual spies, however. Two typists - the charming, experienced Sally and the talented novice Irina - are charged with the mission of a lifetime: to smuggle Doctor Zhivago back into Russia by any means necessary. It will not be easy. There are people willing to die for this book - and agents willing to kill for it. But they cannot fail - as this book has the power to change history.

The Great Homecoming by Anna Kim

Divided from his family by the violent tumult of the Korean civil war, Yunho arrives in Seoul searching for his oldest friend. He finds him in the arms of Eve Moon, a dancer with many names who may be a refugee fleeing the communist North, or an American spy. Beguiled, Yunho falls desperately in love. But nothing in South Korea’s capital is what it seems. The city is crowded with double agents and soldiers, and wracked by protests and poverty, while across the border, Pyongyang grows more prosperous by the day. When a series of betrayals and a brutal crime drive the three friends into exile, Yunho finds himself caught in the riptide of history. Might a homecoming to North Korea be salvation?