Stories built inside a past period rather than around it: cathedral builders, courtiers, soldiers, cowboys, revolutionaries and the people whose names were left out of the record. 580 books so far, across 96 series, plus 414 titles with no series listed. This is page 10 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe Talamasca, the order that documents paranormal activity, is hunting for the newly born Lasher. Mayfair women are dying of haemorrhages, an unusual genetic anomaly has turned up in Rowan and Michael, and Lasher, who was born from Rowan, belongs to another species altogether and is now in a physical body.
Rating coming soonBarnabus Pike is no gunfighter and not much of a street fighter, and Eddie Holt is a black boxer in a white man's world, and both of them have taken their share of hard knocks. They mean to survive a brutal winter in a remote Montana line shack and then settle down, until they meet an Irish immigrant and his sister, who have been burned off their land.
Rating coming soonDoby Kernohan and his father have travelled a long way looking for a new start, and the abandoned cabin they find seems like a good place to settle until they see the dead man in the front yard. The killing turns out to be an omen of darker events, for a cycle of violence that began long ago is about to reach its end.
Rating coming soonWilliam Tell Sackett is carrying thirty pounds of gold from the Arizona goldfields to the booming town of Los Angeles when Dorinda Robiseau asks him for safe passage. Sackett is no ladies' man but he can spot trouble easily, and he agrees reluctantly, which leaves him crossing the most brutal desert on the continent with a companion he does not trust.
Rating coming soonSixteen-year-old Amanda Verner fears that she is losing her mind, and she believes the baby will never stop crying. When her family decides to leave their small mountain cabin for the vast prairie, she hopes to leave behind her haunting memories of her mother giving birth to a terribly afflicted baby.
Rating coming soonFrank Morgan is a gunfighting legend, and he is about to come face to face with another kind of legend, one that stalks the woods of northern California. The loggers call it the Terror of the Redwoods: something that kills like an animal, growling, clawing and ripping. A local timber baron has put a bounty on the creature, and the woods are full of hunters who are bound to hurt somebody.
Rating coming soonSamuel is thirteen and spends his days in the forest, hunting food for his family on the frontier of a British colony. He is far from any town and from news of the war against the King that the American patriots have begun near Boston, and then the war arrives at his own door.
Rating coming soonVal Darrant was four years old on the snowy night his mother abandoned him, and instead of meeting a lonely death he met Will Reilly, a gentleman, a gambler and a worldly, self-taught scholar. For ten years each of them was all the family the other had. Those years take them from the boomtowns of the American West to the cities of Europe.
Rating coming soonKate Lundy owns the Tumbling B and Conn Dury is her foreman, and both of them told Tom the rules: men from the cattle drives are not allowed on the north side of town. The townspeople took the cowboys' money, but they thought them too coarse to be near their homes.
Rating coming soonJubal Sackett's urge to explore drove him westward, and when a Natchez priest asks him to undertake a nearly impossible quest he ventures into the endless grassy plains that the Indians call the Far Seeing Lands. He is looking for a Natchez exploration party and for its leader. That leader, Itchakomi, is the woman who will rule her people when their aging chief dies.
Rating coming soonInstead of the new life her family expected to forge out west, seventeen-year-old Angela is thrust into the role of caring for her three younger siblings after the death of their parents. With her older brother's help, and her trust in God, she is determined to raise the children as her mother would have wanted.
Rating coming soonIn the quiet Amish community of Hickory Hollow in Pennsylvania, cherished traditions and heartfelt beliefs have flourished while time has stood still. But a secret lies buried there that could shatter the tranquillity its inhabitants have grown to love. Hickory Hollow keeps the Old Order laws, and questions about the past are not welcome in it.
Rating coming soonOn her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of the infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham, whose household invites other artists to live and work at the family home in order to escape the conservatism of 1930s Australia. Lily becomes infatuated with the makeshift family. Lily is looking back from old age, so the reader knows from the start that the experiment did not last.
Rating coming soonIn the 1960s, in the Australian country town of Deane, Odette Brown cares for her granddaughter Sissy, who was conceived after Odette's daughter Lily was raped by a local white pastoralist. Lily has fled Deane for the city, and Odette has to keep Sissy out of the hands of the new local policeman. Deane is a small town, and the people in it have known Odette her whole life.
Rating coming soonJimmie Blacksmith is an Aboriginal man in nineteenth-century New South Wales, caught between his own family and culture and the world of white settler colonialism. The novel is written from his perspective, and it follows him on a mission of revenge. It is based on the life of the bushranger Jimmy Governor and was written from Jimmie's point of view.
Rating coming soonLucinda Vane is born into a wealthy Melbourne family, and she spurns the love of a distinguished family friend to marry the dashing aide-de-camp to the Governor, Hugo Brayford. Her life of ease ends when Hugo takes her to England just before the First World War. The novel spans the early 1900s to the Second World War and moves between Melbourne and England.
Rating coming soonAt the age of eleven, Abraham Lincoln learns from his father Thomas that vampires are real. A drunken Thomas explains that a vampire killed Abraham's grandfather in 1786, and that his mother Nancy did not die of milk sickness but was given a fool's dose of vampire blood after Thomas failed to repay a debt.
Rating coming soonSeventy-year-old John Sidney Howard is on a fishing holiday in France when the German army overruns the country. Asked by an English couple at his hotel to take their two children home to safety, he agrees, and every delay on the road adds another child to his charge until he is leading six of them through occupied France towards the sea, with the Nazis close behind.
Rating coming soonOmakayas is seven years old in 1847 and lives with her Ojibwe family in a birchbark house on an island in Lake Superior. The book follows the household through four seasons of hunting, fishing, gathering and storytelling, and into the winter when smallpox reaches the island and takes one of her brothers. She takes her share of the work and resents a good deal of it.
Rating coming soonCrisostomo Ibarra comes home to San Diego from Spain to mourn his father, and finds that the rich man was ill treated in his final years and in the trial that followed his death. He decides to carry on his father's plan of building a school, to marry his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, and to hold his ground against the parish priest and the colonial government.
Rating coming soonAlan Duncan comes home to his parents' sheep station in Australia after the war, a lawyer who lost both feet in an air crash, and finds that the housekeeper has killed herself. Searching the house for the papers she hid, he discovers that she was not who the household believed her to be, and her letters and diaries lead him back to the war and to his own family.
Rating coming soonJournalist John Easley goes north to Alaska to investigate the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands, a story the American government has censored, leaving his wife Helen behind. His plane is shot down over Attu and he survives only to face the wind, the cold and starvation while evading the Japanese, as Helen at home has to work out who she is without him.
Rating coming soonMiranda leaves a French convent for the New World and an arranged marriage to a prosperous Texas rancher. On the journey she meets Derek Bragg, the fiancé's friend, a Texas Ranger whose blunt manner and frank comments about her beauty infuriate the shy young woman, and the two of them cross the wilderness together.
Rating coming soonRoxanne Sherwood flees a typhus epidemic in Boston and runs into a band of Indians, who take her captive. A white stranger claims her as his wife to protect her, and the band rules that she must live with him as a married couple, which leaves her torn between duty and desire and between the society she came from and the frontier that now holds her.
Rating coming soonThe Earl of Devenham returns after ten years to marry Mary Anstey as he promised, and finds that neither of them feels what they once did, though both keep up appearances for the family. Mary's younger sister Emily sees through the pretence and decides to prevent the wedding with a sleeping draught and a scheme to take her place.
Rating coming soonKirsten has come from Sweden with her family to a prairie community in America, and the new school is an ordeal: she cannot follow the lessons and her teacher, Miss Winston, is strict and unsympathetic. Her one escape is a secret friendship with Singing Bird, an Indian girl, but when her friend suggests running away Kirsten has to decide where she belongs.
Rating coming soonCaroline Quiner is the girl who will one day be Laura Ingalls Wilder's mother, and she is watching the town of Brookfield in Wisconsin grow up around her as new buildings appear overnight and more families arrive. She marches in her first Independence Day parade, a circus comes to town, and then her family has the chance to move to another farm.
Rating coming soonStosh is surprised when Bobby Fuller, the boy who has always been his enemy, asks him for a favour: to take him back in time to meet Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion who lost his medals after a scandal and never recovered his fame. The two of them travel into the past on a quest to save Thorpe's reputation.
Rating coming soonCasiopea Tun is eighteen, lives as an unwanted poor relation in her wealthy grandfather's house in the Yucatán and dreams of escape. In a forbidden chest in his bedroom she finds the bones of the Mayan death god Hun-Kamé, and when a shard of bone pierces her thumb he returns to a semblance of life and binds himself to her.
Rating coming soonMemphis, 1939: twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger brothers and sisters live aboard their family's shantyboat on the Mississippi until their mother is taken to hospital one stormy night and strangers arrive. The children are taken to a Tennessee orphanage, and the novel also follows a present-day family changed by the same injustice.
Rating coming soonMichael K is a poor man with a cleft lip who has spent his childhood in institutions and works as a gardener in Cape Town. When civil war and martial law close over the country and his mother falls ill, he builds a cart to carry her back to the rural birthplace she remembers, Prince Albert.
Rating coming soonThe Liverpool Merchant is a slave ship working the triangular trade in the middle of the eighteenth century, and two cousins are bound up with it: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a wealthy Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who sails on the voyage. The novel's subject is greed, and slavery is the medium it uses to examine it.
Rating coming soonClaudia Hampton is a seventy-six-year-old historian, terminally ill in a London hospital bed, who decides to write a history of the world and finds herself writing her own instead. The novel moves backwards and forwards through her life, from a childhood competing with her brother for fossils to the war and the people she has loved.
Rating coming soonOskar Schindler is a member of the Nazi Party and a businessman in occupied Poland who, over the course of the war, ends up saving the lives of twelve hundred Jews. The novel was written by Thomas Keneally after a Holocaust survivor showed him his files on Schindler, and it mixes documented people and events with fictional dialogue.
Rating coming soonIn Munich in 1923 a young Australian woman, Ruth Becker, meets the journalist Hans Wesemann while visiting her cousin Dora, and the three of them take part in left-wing activism. Ten years later, with Hitler as chancellor, Ruth and Hans, Dora and the playwright Ernst Toller, flee to London and try to make the world understand the danger.
Rating coming soonThe Ghost Road is the last book of a trilogy about shell-shocked British officers at the end of the First World War. Its main figures are the real psychoanalyst William Rivers and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, who has been treated for shell shock and is preparing to go back to France.
Rating coming soonThe novel describes the siege of a fictional Indian town, Krishnapur, during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and it is told from the point of view of the British residents. As the siege tightens, the Europeans find themselves short of food and dignity, and the arrangement in which they govern an Asian population is turned upside down.
Rating coming soonThe novel is framed as a fictional oral history of the attempted assassination of a reggae singer in Jamaica in 1976 and everything that followed from it. It runs through the crack wars in New York in the 1980s and a changed Jamaica in the 1990s, and it is told by many voices rather than by a single narrator.
Rating coming soonA woman travels to India to find out about Olivia, the first wife of her grandfather, and she reads Olivia's letters as she goes. Through them, and through her own experience of the country, she learns what happened to Olivia in the 1920s, when a bored English colonial wife was drawn into the orbit of a minor Indian prince.
Rating coming soonCoonardoo is an Aboriginal woman who has been prepared since childhood to be the housekeeper of Wytaliba station in north-west Australia, in an age when white settlers were taking control of more and more of the bare plains. She falls in love with the station's owner, Hugh Watt, a white man, and the novel describes the difficult relationship between them.
Rating coming soonJonah is a hunchback larrikin who lives in a Sydney slum and leads the local street gang, which is known as the Push. He is feared and respected in the neighbourhood, and his life changes when he becomes the father of a son, after which he sets out to break away from the world he has grown up in.
Rating coming soonIn 1687 sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler leaves Barbados after her grandfather dies and goes to live with her aunt's family in the Puritan community of Wethersfield, Connecticut. She finds the colony cold and narrow, and the only place she feels free is the meadow where she talks to an old Quaker woman the neighbours call a witch.
Rating coming soonAt Oxford in the twenty-first century, history students do their fieldwork by travelling into the past as observers, and Kivrin Engle has prepared for years to visit the fourteenth century. Her tutors finally agree to send her, and then the drop does not go as planned and the team at home has problems of its own to deal with.
Rating coming soonThree women of the same family live centuries apart. In 1619 Altha is on trial for witchcraft after a local man dies. In 1942 Violet would rather study insects and climb trees than become a young lady. In 2019 Kate leaves London for a cottage in Cumbria that a great-aunt has left her, and finds that the house has secrets of its own.
Rating coming soonElizabeth Thatcher is a young woman from the east who accepts a teaching post in a small western Canadian town, hoping for something more interesting than a quiet life at home. What she finds is a place with a great deal to learn and a population with its own opinions about a teacher, and among the people she meets is a member of the North-West Mounted Police.
Rating coming soonJaffy Brown is running through the back streets of east London when he comes face to face with a tiger that has escaped from a menagerie. Charles Jamrach takes him out of its jaws and gives him a job. Some years later Jaffy, now sixteen, is sent to the other side of the world on a whaling ship to catch something for the collection.
Rating coming soonJohn Ridd is the son of a respectable farming family on Exmoor, and his father was murdered by the Doones, a clan of outlaws who were once noble and now rule a valley of their own. John grows up intending to be a farmer rather than a revenger, and then he meets Lorna Doone by accident and falls in love with her, which puts him on the wrong side of the clan that killed his father.
Rating coming soonIn 1940, with France defeated and an invasion of Britain expected, a British agent brings back intelligence showing that Hitler intends to support the invasion with occult means. The people who can answer that are the country's witches, and the officer who has to organise them is a practising occultist as well as an MI6 man.
A historical novel is set substantially in a period before the one it was written in, and that setting has to matter: the world the characters move through, the rules they obey and the choices open to them all come from the time. An old book is not automatically historical fiction, so a novel written about its own present sits elsewhere. Myth, ancient-world stories and alternate histories are welcome when the period is the frame the story is told in.
The shelf runs from the nineteenth-century historical novel through the twentieth-century family sagas to books published this decade: medieval, Tudor, Victorian, colonial, civil war, frontier, wartime and post-war stories, plus the historical mysteries and historical romances where the period carries as much weight as the plot or the love story. Those two kinds also sit on the mystery and romance shelves when they genuinely belong there.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books