Historical fiction books

Historical fantasyDark fantasy

Babel

R. F. Kuang · 2022

It is the 1830s, and the British Empire runs on silver bars enchanted by translation, which is why it needs people who speak languages the empire does not. Robin Swift is taken from Canton to England as a child after his family dies of cholera, raised by the man who needs his Chinese, and trained for Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. The tower is comfortable and the work absorbing, and the enchantments that make the empire rich are written in the difference between languages and paid for by the colonies they are taken from. Robin is caught between Babel and a society working against imperial expansion, while the country moves towards a war with China over silver and opium.

Ghost storySouthern gothicHistorical horror

Beloved

Toni Morrison · 1987

Sethe escaped slavery at a cost that included a husband and a child, and now lives on the edge of a small Ohio town in the years after the Civil War. Her household is her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, her daughter Denver, and a house with room for one more. The young woman who arrives and calls herself Beloved pulls the family's buried history back into the open.

Historical horrorMonster horrorModern horror

The Terror

Dan Simmons · 2007

Two Royal Navy ships sail north in 1845 looking for a passage across the top of the world, and two years later they are still there, frozen in with the coal running low and the food behind it. The novel follows the officers and crews of the Terror and the Erebus as cold, scurvy and each other wear them down, and as something out on the ice starts picking them off.

Historical mysterySerial killer thrillerDetective fiction

The Alienist

Caleb Carr · 1994

It is 1896, and a New York Times reporter is called out at night to look at a body with his old friend Laszlo Kreizler, a doctor who studies the minds of criminals and is known as an alienist. The dead boy was a child prostitute, and the way he was killed suggests a mind rather than a quarrel. Theodore Roosevelt, new in the job of police commissioner, asks the pair to work it.

Historical fictionWorld War I fictionWar fiction

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · 1929

Paul Baumer is a German soldier on the Western Front, and before the war he was a schoolboy in a quiet village whose teacher's patriotic speeches sent his whole class to volunteer. He arrives at the front with his schoolmates, and among the older men they meet is Stanislaus Katczinsky, a recalled reservist who becomes Paul's mentor. The novel follows them through the training camp, the trenches, the hospital wards and the leave that no longer fits.

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 2014

Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind, and she and her father leave Paris for her great-uncle's house inside the walls of Saint-Malo when the German army arrives. Werner Pfennig is an orphan in a German mining town whose talent for building and repairing radios takes him first to a military school and then into service tracking resistance transmissions. The novel alternates between the two of them through the war years, and moves back and forth in time towards the same summer.

Atonement

Ian McEwan · 2001

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misreads a scene between her older sister Cecilia and the housekeeper's son, Robbie, and tells a story about it that changes all three of their lives. The novel follows the consequences through the Second World War, through Briony's adulthood, and through her life as a writer and the way the book she is writing relates to what happened. McEwan divides it into three periods: England in 1935, wartime England and France, and the present day.

Between Shades of Gray

Ruta Sepetys · 2011

Lina Vilkas is fifteen and wants to be an artist, living in Kaunas in Lithuania with her parents and her younger brother. On the night of 14 June 1941 the Soviet secret police break into the family's home, and Lina, her mother and her brother are deported, with thousands of others, by train and then on foot towards labour camps in Siberia. The novel follows the three of them and the people they are transported with, and it is told in Lina's voice.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel · 2012

Thomas Cromwell is now the king's chief minister, and Henry VIII has tired of Anne Boleyn. The novel covers the months in which the second marriage is taken apart: the questions asked, the evidence gathered and the men Cromwell uses to gather it, while the court watches to see who rises next. It is the second of three novels following Cromwell, and it keeps to his view of the work in front of him and the household he comes home to.

Historical fictionCivil War fictionHistorical romance

Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier · 1997

Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier who walks away from an army hospital as the American Civil War closes and sets out for Cold Mountain in North Carolina, where Ada, the woman he barely knew before he left, is trying to keep her father's farm from slipping away. Ada was raised to be ornamental and has no idea how to work land, until a young drifter called Ruby arrives and teaches her. The novel moves between his walk home and her farm, through a South being remade behind them.

Historical fictionVictorian fiction

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters · 2002

Sue Trinder has grown up in a London house run by a baby farmer and populated by petty thieves, and a well-dressed con man makes her an offer: if she takes a place as maid to Maud Lilly, a sheltered heiress in a country house, and helps him court her, the three of them will share Maud's inheritance. Sue agrees, then finds herself pitying and liking the woman she was sent to cheat. The novel is set in a Victorian England of asylums, doctors and property.

Historical fictionBiographical fiction

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier · 1999

In the 1660s Griet goes into service in Johannes Vermeer's house in Delft, after an accident costs her father his sight and the family its income. She is careful and quiet and watches how the painter works, and in time she is allowed to help him in the studio and then to sit for him. The rest of the household notices, and the debts, the order of the house and the difference in station between them all come into it.

Historical fictionCivil War fictionFamily saga

Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell · 1936

Scarlett O'Hara is the eldest daughter of a well-off plantation family in Clayton County, Georgia, and the novel opens on her life of parties and suitors before the American Civil War. It follows her through the war and the Reconstruction that follows, including the fall of Atlanta and the march through Georgia, as she works to keep hold of the family land and to rebuild the position she was born into.

Historical fictionWar fiction

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2006

Ugwu is a village boy who becomes houseboy to Odenigbo, a mathematics professor with revolutionary opinions in a Nigerian university town, and Olanna is the wealthy, educated woman the professor loves. The novel follows the three of them, and Olanna's twin sister, through the ethnic and political tensions of the 1960s and into the Nigerian Civil War, when households that had looked settled are pulled apart and the people in them have to keep moving.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell · 2020

In Stratford in the 1580s a young Latin tutor meets a woman called Agnes, known for her herbs, her falconry and her habit of knowing things before other people do. They marry, she moves in with his family while he goes to London to work in the theatre, and between them they raise three children largely apart. Eleven years later their son Hamnet falls ill, and the novel stays with the household and with Agnes through the days around his death and what follows it.

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 2016

Effia's marriage takes her into the household of the British governor at Cape Coast Castle, while Esi, her half-sister, is imprisoned in the dungeons of the same building, waiting to be shipped across the Atlantic. Neither sister knows the other exists. Each following chapter belongs to a later descendant of one of the two women, so the novel runs from the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century through the slave trade, plantations in the American South, the mines and jazz clubs of the twentieth century, and towards the present, one generation at a time.

Historical fictionAncient world fictionBiographical fiction

I, Claudius

Robert Graves · 1934

Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was born in 10 BC, and the stammer and limp that came with him led his own family to treat him as a fool. He lived through the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and the emperor Caligula, mostly by being underestimated, and in AD 41 the guard made him emperor. The novel is written as his own autobiography, covering the murders, marriages and poisonings of the imperial household from close enough to be in danger himself.

Historical fictionMedieval fictionHistorical adventure

Ivanhoe

Walter Scott · 1819

Wilfrid of Ivanhoe comes home from the Third Crusade in disguise, disinherited by his father for following King Richard instead of marrying as he was told, and finds England split between the Normans who hold it and the Saxons who do not. He rides in a tournament at Ashby, becomes caught up in the fate of a Jewish moneylender and his daughter, and ends up among the outlaws and loyalists trying to raise the king's ransom. The novel runs on disguise, trial by combat and the slow return of Richard.

Les Miserables

Victor Hugo · 1862

Jean Valjean is released from the galleys after nineteen years and finds that no one will take him in, until a bishop gives him a bed and, in doing so, alters the direction of his life. The novel follows him from 1815 to the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, along with the people whose paths cross his: a dying seamstress, her daughter Cosette, a police inspector who will not allow a former convict to become an honest man, and the students who build the barricades.

Historical fictionWesternFrontier fiction

Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry · 1985

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are former Texas Rangers living in a small border town with little to occupy them, until Call decides to drive a herd of cattle north to Montana. The novel follows the drive and the people attached to it: the cowboys who sign on, a woman they rescue along the way, a young man with something to prove, and others who have no intention of leaving Texas. It is set in the late nineteenth century and built out of the ordinary work of the frontier rather than its legends.

Historical fictionNaval adventureHistorical adventure

Master and Commander

Patrick O'Brian · 1969

Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy lieutenant newly promoted to master and commander, meets the physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin at a concert in Port Mahon and takes him aboard as surgeon of the sloop Sophie. The two of them sail the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing prizes under a first lieutenant, James Dillon, whose Irish politics complicate the ship. Their orders run from escort work to a fight against a far larger opponent.

Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden · 1997

Chiyo is nine years old in 1929 when her father sells her and her sister into the entertainment districts of Kyoto: Chiyo to a geisha house in Gion and her sister to a brothel. She is trained in music, dance and the etiquette of the teahouses, takes the name Sayuri, and learns how a geisha's career is financed, negotiated and envied. Her account runs from the fishing village she came from, through the war years and the decades on either side of them.

Historical fiction

Historical fictionHistorical romance

Outlander

Diana Gabaldon · 1991

Claire Randall, who served as a nurse in the war, is travelling in the Scottish Highlands in 1945 when a standing stone takes her to 1743, into a country of raiding clans and a Jacobite rising not yet begun. A clan that does not know what to make of an Englishwoman in strange clothes takes her in, and the safest arrangement available is marriage to Jamie Fraser, a young Highlander with a price on his head.

Historical fictionFamily sagaImmigrant fiction

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 2017

Sunja is the daughter of a fisherman in Korea in the early 1900s, and she falls for a wealthy stranger who turns out to be married. She refuses his offer to buy her out of the consequences and instead accepts a proposal from a sickly minister on his way to Japan, which takes her away from her home and sets the family on a different course. The novel follows four generations through the markets, churches, universities and pachinko parlours of Japan, in a country that treats Koreans as outsiders.

Historical fictionAncient world fiction

Pompeii

Robert Harris · 2003

Marcus Attilius Primus comes from Rome to take up the post of aquarius on the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that waters the towns around the Bay of Naples, and finds its springs failing and the man he replaced missing. Working along the line from Pompeii towards Misenum, he is drawn into the affairs of the towns it serves, including a wealthy former slave, the engineers who answer to Rome and the officials with their own arrangements. Nobody yet knows what the mountain above the bay is about to do.

Historical fictionHistorical adventureColonial fiction

Sea of Poppies

Amitav Ghosh · 2008

The Ibis is an old schooner with a mixed crew and a hold full of opium, sailing the Indian Ocean in the years just before the Opium Wars. The passengers include a ruined raja, a village widow, an American of mixed parentage and an opium trader with a missionary streak, alongside sailors, stowaways and convicts. The novel moves from the poppy fields of the Ganges to the high seas and the back streets of China, and as their old ties fall away the people aboard begin to think of themselves as ship-brothers.

Historical fictionHistorical adventure

Shogun

James Clavell · 1975

John Blackthorne, an English navigator, is wrecked on the coast of Japan and wakes in a country closed to most of the world. He has to learn the language and the rules of a society in which the line between life and death is thin, and he becomes a piece in the struggle between two warlords, the Portuguese and Spanish missionary presence, and the Japanese lords who want his knowledge of ships and guns. The novel is set in feudal Japan at the start of the seventeenth century.

Silence

Shusaku Endo · 1966

A young Portuguese Jesuit is smuggled into seventeenth-century Japan, where the government is determined to stamp out Christianity and foreign influence, and finds the Christian communities driven underground. He is a fugitive in a country he does not know, dependent on villagers who risk their lives to shelter him, and he begins to doubt his mission as he waits for an answer that does not come. The novel is told partly through his letters and partly through the record of the persecution around him.

Historical fiction

Historical fictionPost-war fictionImmigrant fiction

Small Island

Andrea Levy · 2004

In London in 1948, Hortense arrives from Jamaica to join a husband she has barely met, expecting the country she was raised to think of as home. Gilbert has served in the Royal Air Force and is living in a single room in a house owned by Queenie and Bernard, a white English couple whose war has left its own damage. The novel is told in four voices and moves between Jamaica and England, and between the war years and what came after them.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Lisa See · 2005

Lily is the daughter of a farmer in nineteenth-century China, and at six years old she is told by the local matchmaker that her feet, if bound properly, will be flawless. Since a woman's prospects are judged by the size and shape of her feet, that is very good news for her family and years of pain for her. She learns the secret women's script called nu shu, and she is matched with an 'old-same', Snow Flower, from a more refined household; the two of them carry that bond through their marriages and their households.

Historical fiction

Suite Francaise

Irene Nemirovsky · 2004

Suite Francaise follows French families of very different kinds through the exodus of June 1940, when the roads out of Paris filled with people fleeing the German advance. The first part covers that flight and the small cowardices and fragile moments of solidarity that came with it; the second moves to the village of Bussy, where a German garrison is billeted and old resentments between neighbours find new encouragement. Nemirovsky wrote it while the events were unfolding, and it was published decades later.

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak · 2005

Liesel Meminger is nine when she arrives in a small German town to live with foster parents, having buried her brother on the way and lost her mother. She learns to read with her foster father, steals books where she can find them, and lives through the Nazi years among her neighbours, the Jewish man hidden in the basement and the war that eventually reaches the town. The novel is narrated by Death, who takes an interest in the girl and her use of words.

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 1982

Celie is a poor Black girl in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century, and the novel is made of the letters she writes, first to God and later to her sister Nettie, who has gone to Africa as a missionary. Through them the reader follows Celie's marriage, the women who come into her life, including the singer Shug Avery, her sister's letters from another continent, and the slow accumulation of a life that Celie begins to shape for herself.

Historical fictionHistorical adventure

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas · 1846

Edmond Dantes is a young sailor with a promotion and a wedding ahead of him when he is denounced by men who want what he has and imprisoned without trial in an island fortress. The novel follows what becomes of him, of those who accused him and of the people who once depended on him, across France, Italy and the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1839. It opens on the day Napoleon leaves Elba, and the politics of the Bourbon Restoration run underneath everything.

Historical fictionVictorian fiction

The Crimson Petal and the White

Michel Faber · 2002

Sugar works in a Victorian London brothel and has a plan for getting out of it, and William Rackham is the heir to a perfume business who decides that he wants her. He installs her in his house, where she is drawn into the running of the business, the unhappiness of his wife and the household's arrangements. The novel moves between its characters and follows Sugar's own writing as well as the family's fortunes, taking in the smells, streets and commerce of the 1870s.

Historical fictionVictorian fictionHistorical mystery

The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry · 2016

Cora Seaborne is a recent widow with an interest in natural history, and she moves with her son to a village in Essex where an old rumour has revived: that a serpent has come back to the marshes. The local vicar, William Ransome, is certain the stories are superstition and that there is something worse behind them, and the two of them argue over what nature and faith can account for while the parish looks on. The novel is set in late nineteenth-century England.

Historical fictionPost-war fiction

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows · 2008

In January 1946 Juliet Ashton is a London writer looking for her next subject when a stranger from the island of Guernsey writes to her about a book that once had her name written in it. He belongs to the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a reading group that began as an alibi when its members were caught breaking curfew during the German occupation. The novel is told in letters, telegrams and diary entries as Juliet gets to know the islanders and what the occupation did to them.

Historical fictionColonial fiction

The Long Song

Andrea Levy · 2010

July is born on Amity, a sugar plantation in Jamaica, and grows up enslaved there in the last years before emancipation. The novel is presented as her memoir, looking back in old age, and follows her through the Baptist War of 1831 and the abolition of slavery in 1833, along with her mother Kitty, the people who work the cane, and Caroline Mortimer, the white heiress who inherits the estate.

Historical fictionMedieval fictionHistorical mystery

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco · 1980

In 1327 the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his novice, Adso of Melk, travel to a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy for a disputation between the Pope's representatives and the Franciscans, in a year when emperor and pope are at war. The abbot asks William to look into the death of one of the monks, and then another monk dies. The abbey's library, which nobody but the librarian may enter, sits at the middle of the questions he has to ask.

The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah · 2015

Vianne and Isabelle are sisters in France when the German army occupies the country, and they answer it in opposite ways: Vianne stays in the village and tries to keep her daughter fed and her household intact, while Isabelle joins the resistance and works on escape routes for downed Allied airmen. The book moves between the occupied years and a frame set in 1995, as an elderly woman looks back at what she and her sister did.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

The Other Boleyn Girl

Philippa Gregory · 2001

Mary Boleyn is married young and becomes the mistress of Henry VIII, and it is her sister Anne who decides what to do with that. The novel follows the two of them through the years in which the king is trying to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the court is working out which family will keep his favour. Mary tells her own part in it: the children she raises, the sister she loves and cannot trust, and a court in which being noticed by the king is both a career and a danger.

Historical fictionMedieval fictionFamily saga

The Pillars of the Earth

Ken Follett · 1989

Kingsbridge is a small English town with a priory, a market and no cathedral, and in the twelfth century a group of people set out to build one. The novel follows the masons, monks, nobles and villagers whose lives the building changes, from the sinking of the White Ship to the murder of Thomas Becket, through a civil war that leaves the country without a settled ruler. A prior, a builder and a woman who works in wool each carry part of the story across several decades.

Historical fictionPost-war fiction

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989

Stevens has been a butler at Darlington Hall for most of his working life, and in the summer of 1956 his new American employer suggests that he take a motoring holiday. He drives into the West Country, going back over what he remembers of the years between the wars in the house: the guests, the politics of his employer's dinners, his own standards of service and the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who left. The novel is Stevens's own account of those years and of what he chose to do with them.

Historical fictionHistorical adventure

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Baroness Orczy · 1905

During the Reign of Terror a band of English gentlemen keeps smuggling French aristocrats out of the country before they reach the guillotine, and nobody knows who leads them, only that a small red flower is left behind each time. In London, Marguerite Blakeney is a celebrated French actress married to Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy man whose visible talents appear to be clothes and a good-natured drawl. French agents are hunting the person behind the flower, and Marguerite knows more about him than she would like.

Historical fictionCivil War fiction

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · 2016

Cora is enslaved on a cotton plantation in Georgia, and when a new arrival tells her about the Underground Railroad she decides to take the risk and go. In this version of it the railroad is real: engineers and conductors operate tracks and tunnels under the soil of the South. Cora and her companion travel north from state to state with a slave catcher behind them, and each place they stop has its own arrangements for Black people and its own particular danger.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston · 1937

Janie Crawford grows up in Florida in the early twentieth century and tells her own story to a friend after she returns to the town she left. The novel follows her through three marriages: a farmer chosen for her, a mayor who wants a wife he can display, and a man who takes her to the Everglades to work the bean fields.

Historical fictionColonial fiction

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe · 1958

Okonkwo is a wrestler and farmer in Umuofia, a village in southeastern Nigeria, who has built his standing by refusing to resemble his father. The first part of the novel describes his household, the customs and gatherings of the Igbo and the fear of weakness that drives him. The later parts bring the arrival of British missionaries and administrators, who introduce a church and a court and a version of order that the clan's own structures cannot hold against.