Go behind the fiction
Explore the history, books, people and strange details that shape Mirà Kanehl’s fictional worlds — from revolutionary France and 1820s Hawaiʻi to New Orleans, pirates and the literature of the past.
Historical research · Book essays · Reading guides
History Behind the Stories
The real people, places, beliefs and events behind Mirà’s fiction.
Explore revolutionary France, early nineteenth-century medicine, Hawaiʻi during a period of profound change, New Orleans, Jean Laffite and the world surrounding One Virtue And A Thousand Crimes.
Historical Fiction Reading
Books, periods and stories worth disappearing into.
Reading lists, recommendations and deeper explorations of historical fiction — for readers looking for their next world.
FEATURED
820s Hawaiʻi: The World Behind A Half Flower
What was Hawaiʻi like in the 1820s? Explore religion, politics, literacy and the Naupaka legend behind Mirà Kanehl’s A Half Flower.
Behind A Half Flower
A Half Flower moves through France and Hawaiʻi at a moment when medicine, religion, politics and ideas of the world were being challenged from several directions.
These articles explore the history beneath the story.
- Revolutionary France
- early nineteenth-century medicine
- the end of the kapu system
- Catholic and Protestant missions in Hawaiʻi
- Hawaiian healing traditions
- foreigners in 1820s Hawaiʻi
Prefer the story? Read A Half Flower
Behind One Virtue And A Thousand Crimes
New Orleans in the 1810s was a place of cultural collision, unstable loyalties, contraband, war and competing ideas of law and respectability.
Explore the world surrounding Cosma Drilo, Jean Laffite and the people who moved between the city, river and Gulf.
- Jean and Pierre Laffite
- Barataria
- Grand Isle / Grand Terre
- Gallatin Street
- New Orleans 1812–1815
- smuggling routes
- women and law
- Marie Laveau / early New Orleans spiritual traditions
- Battle of New Orleans
- privateering versus piracy
Prefer the story? Begin with The Adventuress
From the Old Bookshelf
Sometimes the best way to encounter another century is to read what people were actually reading in it.
I revisit older novels and stories not only for their plots, but for the things their authors reveal without intending to: language, class, gender, morality, prejudice, food, clothing, technology and the ordinary assumptions of their world.
A Study in Scarlet — 1887
Where Sherlock Holmes began — and what the novel reveals beyond the mystery.
The Honour of the Flag — 1895
Honor, class, gender and a nineteenth-century story that becomes more disturbing the closer you look.
The Five Orange Pips — 1891
A Sherlock Holmes story with a darker historical shadow.
The Frozen Pirate — 1887
A frozen rogue, a sea voyage and one wonderfully strange piece of nineteenth-century nautical fiction.
Want to step inside the worlds instead?
The free Starter Library contains first chapters, historical maps, character guides and research material from behind Mirà’s fiction.
New here? Start with A Half Flower.
About Mirà
Mirà Kanehl writes immersive historical fiction built from research, sensory detail and people whose worlds made sense to them — even when they seem strange to us.
Her stories move through early nineteenth-century France, Hawaiʻi, New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.
