Burr by Gore Vidal
May I recommend Reluctant Voyageurs by Elizabeth Vonarburg? The English translation is not fantastic, but it’s still a wonderful book. It’s not that history diverged once in the story, from one small event – history keeps changing in this book.
Quebec is a seperate country from the rest of Canada, and both are far more right wing. The split between Catholic and Protestant was over the number of Messiahs – the Catholics insist that Mary had twins, including a girl named Lilith (thus justifying their ordination of openly Lesbian priests, which does not sit well with the Protestants). There are radical anarchist groups of mystics in the far north, the Earth is cooling instead of warming, and certain apparently magical phenomena have been scientifically verified.
This books is a real treat for a Montrealer to read, because she casually tosses off references to landmarks that don’t exist, in places where other landmarks are missing (like the canal on the south side of Ste-Catherine Street, or the little creperie where the UQAM campus should be).
Is that the new term? I hate it, I’ll stick with AH.
A lot of people swear by Keith Roberts’ Pavane, a CFH set in a world in which the English Reformation didn’t occur, but I found it to be possibly the most languid and slow book ever.
Well, maybe not ever, but God! It sure moved at a glacier-like pace!
Another CFH based on the same theme is Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration, set in a 20th century Britain in a world where Luther made his peace with Leo X.
Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. Most of it actually takes place in the future. I actually wish more of the story had been in the alternate history of Columbus’s voyage, but it’s still a good book.
Not exactly novels, but the GURPS role playing sourcebooks have some wonderful novel-worthy alternate realities, including
Caliph- a world in which the perfection of the printing press in 8th century Baghdad allowed the Islamic world to conquer all (Christianity is a very underground movement of intellectuals) and achieve interplanetary travel by what is by modern reckoning the 17th century (the 11th by Muslim calendar).
Tesla- in real life the brilliant but barking-mad engineer Nikola Tesla had several unusual phobias, among them pearls. There is a legend of undetermined veracity that her pearl necklace is why he broke his courtship of J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne and consequently lost funding. In this reality they wed and Tesla, not Edison, dominated in the “power wars”, leading to an Art Deco world of the 1920s/30s in some ways far more advanced than our own era and in others nowhere near.
Shikaku Mon- Ferdinand and Isabella’s son, the Infanto Juan, survived and his descendants rule over an empire that includes Brazil, most of Europe, most of Asia and points throughout the rest of the world.
Check out Uchronia: The Alternate History List – http://www.uchronia.net/. It’s an effort to list, and provide a brief review of, every AH novel, short story, and essay that has ever been published.
BTW, Uchronia gives out an annual “Sidewise Award” for the best AH.