The 1970s Are Back — In Print
How and Why this Decade Enthralls Readers Now
This past Tuesday evening, I poured myself a single whiskey neat and logged into record a bookclub episode of Narratives & Nightcaps with my friend, Brie Shouppe. Our focus: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore.
The envious influence of BookTok on recent book sales has made the declaration of “Book of the Summer” more elusive than before. Not only are readers interests split to the point that many question the feasibility of the mega-bestsellers we’ve seen in years pre-BookTok, but the online community has also disrupted new release momentum, reviving titles ten or fifteen years post-publication to new bestseller prominence.
And yet…Moore’s The God of the Woods made headlines as a multi-selection for national bookclubs. It was named the July pick for both Barnes and Noble Book Club and Indie Next List, and a bonus read for the CBS New York Book Club. The Washington Post endorsed it to readers as “your next summer mystery.” It was even made available through Book of the Month’s subscription selection.
These spotlights didn’t fall flat. When I went into my favorite local bookshop in late July, I witnessed a walking pile of books — the stockperson carrying a stack of The God of the Woods so high toward the front that they were unrecognizable from the waist-up.
Despite the title’s pervasiveness, I’ve been fascinated by another — seemingly inescapable — frequency illusion. Every list or table of books I sifted through seemed to have more and more fiction set in the 1970s. So much so that I felt they were growing to equal the number of WWII titles that usually pad the women’s fiction, thriller, and mystery/crime shelves.
I’ll admit: I was the first the chastise myself for buying into a frequency illusion, like when you buy a car thinking it’s unique and then run into 10 more of them on the drive back from the lot. The illusion is called a Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, and refers directly to the experience of seeing examples and appearances of information newly learned where they were otherwise previously overlooked.
So to debunk this newfound belief that we were moving into a new era of period fiction, I did what I do best: go to the data.
Only problem? The data actually provided positive correlation in support of the 1970s becoming a growing decade of interest for readers. And, if 2024 acquisitions data is to be believed, the prevalence of WWII-set fiction may be threatened by this decade’s rise in popularity.
A quick note on categorization: The God of the Woods is primarily categorized as a Mystery or Thriller — which is accurate — but subcategorization on Goodreads and other bookselling sites note that it can be classified as Historical Fiction. For the purposes of this brief study, we’re going to be taking the Historical Novel Society’s definition that true historical fiction takes place at least 50 years in the past.
Additionally, when reviewing the acquisitions and “book deal” data of the past twenty years, we’re looking across fiction genres with specificity to those entries with “197*” or “World War II” and “WWII” named in the deal announcement.
This year to date, 10 fiction deals have been announced with “1970s” in the description. Five years ago, the total twelve-months included just 9 fiction deals with the same detail. If we go back ten or twenty years to 2014 and 2004, we’re looking at 1 and 2 respectively.
Frequency of fiction deal announcements on Publishers Marketplace including the tag "1970s" in the book details. The vertical line marks 49 years from the onset of the decade.
We see an uptick in popularity of the “1970s” tag in 2019 specifically. Which, if we’re considering the Historical Novel Society’s definition of what makes a book setting historical, would place the uptick in popularity at 49 years post-1970. 2021 saw the highest frequency in 1970s based fiction with 12 unique announcements. Curiously, deal announcement for The God of the Woods was never recorded on Publisher’s Marketplace, so we can’t place that exact sale within the spectrum of deals over the last 20 years.
If we look to compare “1970s” to the prominence of book club fiction with “WWII” and “World War II” settings over the past 20 years, there’s enough to support the correlation of reader interest.
In 2004, WWII-era fiction included 8 deal announcements. By 2009, five years later, it was up to 17. The historical setting hit a peak in 2019 with 35 deals over the 12 months. Around this time, book lovers and publishing periodicals openly discussed the prominence of WWII-set fiction.
Frequency of fiction deal announcements on Publishers Marketplace including the tag "WWII" or "World War II" in the book details. The vertical line marks 49 years from the onset of the 1970s. The 50th anniversary of the named start and end of WWII are not included, occurring before the data provided in 1989 and 1995 respectively.
That year, Kate Quinn, author of WWII-set The Rose Code (2021), The Alice Network (2017), and The Huntress (2019), told The Washington Post that “[WWII]’s a period of perennial fascination.” Her reasoning at the time? “…the war had such a clearly defined villain.”
Others had a different perspective. Rhys Bowen, author of The Tuscan Child (2018), The Victory Garden (2019), and Above the Bay of Angels (2020) — all of which take place in WWII — starkly wrote for CrimeReads in 2022 “that a primary reason is that we are now far enough away from the war that it has become history and the generation who fought it is now largely dead.” To further his point on the recent popularity being tied to distance from the war, he cites his own experience pitching a WWII-set novel in 2000 “about British aristocrats who aided Hitler during WWII. I sent the idea to my agent who replied with a scathing letter that nobody was interested in WWII.”
The Historical Novel Society similarly observes the correlation between reader familiarity with a fiction novel’s timeline and their inclination — or disinclination — to think it’s of interest: “To a reader born in the 1960s, novels set during the Second World War may be considered ‘suitably historical,’ but readers who vividly remember the 1940s may not agree.”
Generational birth years as determined by Pew Research Center.
If we look at the years 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, and 2024 in direct relation to generational reading habits and relative ages, we’re also watching Gen X — who may have had interest in understanding their parents and grandparents’ experiences — take a backseat to Millennial and Gen Z book buying preferences. Millennials became the primary audience for new fiction sales by 2016, and the Gen Z relationship with BookTok — as noted above and in my previous posts — continues to rock the market today. We could assume that the latter two generations have more interest in the 1970s than their predecessors of Gen X simply because they have no living memory of the decade, but this warrants a further study. A Gen X author that I work with recently noted that they enjoy seeing shows and books that feature the societal norms from their childhoods — he used Netflix’s Stranger Things as an example — because it provided nostalgic confirmation that yes, life really was full of latch-key kids, pet rocks, and all the other idiosyncrasies that seem so distant from his life now.
The question remains: why the decline in WWII interest in 2024? Unclear. 2017 marked the undeniably beautiful release of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, sparking book club interest in similar works to capitalize on reader enjoyment. 2018 continued this trend. In 2019, lists latched onto the WWII popularity. BookBub published its “30 of the Best Historical Fiction Novels Coming in 2019” and public libraries released lists of the books they had in stock. At the same time, BookRiot documented the rise in WWII-era women’s fiction featuring silhouettes of women facing away from the reader. By 2022, readers, book bloggers, and publishing pundits had begun to latch onto the similarity among WWII fiction novels.
Comparison of deal announcements including "WWII" or "World War II" (deep blue line) against "1970s" (orange line) across the last 20 years. The vertical line marks 49 years from the onset of the 1970s. The 50th anniversary of the named start and end of WWII are not included, occurring before the data provided in 1989 and 1995 respectively.
And certainly, when overlaid with the growing “1970s” fiction sales, the historical setting still prevails. Perhaps we’ll see a dip for a while in WWII purchases while 1970s narratives grow. Perhaps they’ll battle it out for the top spot. Or maybe we’ll see the 1980s come in with fervor.
Whichever the case, this is a reminder to pay attention to what is “living history” and that — sometimes — following your latest frequency illusion can lead to more insights.
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