Mary Doria Russell's historical fiction is unrivalled. In Dreamers of the Day, Agnes Shanklin, a young school teacher from Ohio, finds herself at the Semiramis Hotel at the beginning of the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference. Soon she is rubbing elbows with Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell and watching as they redraw the map to create the modern Middle East. It is an immensely readable book that gives some perspective to the current political climate.