Jessica Shattuck / Julie Lekstrom Himes

Two authors of historical fiction will be reading and discussing their recent books. Jessica Shattuck’s Women in the Castle is about the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler, or more accurately it’s about the widows of the insurgents who plotted (and failed) to assassinate Hitler. (Shattuck published an op-ed in the New York Times this weekend about her family’s own activities during World War II.) Julie Lekstrom Himes’ Mikhail and Margarita is a novel about Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian writer whose allegory The Master and Margarita has been called the greatest novel of the twentieth century. (It’s certainly up there.) Set in the 1930s Soviet Union, Himes’s novel looks at Bulgakov’s romance with a real-life woman named Margarita, and how she inspired the novel.