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 11 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonIn 1872 a refitted United States Navy tug sails for the North Pole in search of a route nobody has found. Off the coast of Greenland the ship is caught in the ice for months, and the expedition splits in two, with half the crew aboard the vessel and the rest stranded on an ice floe that begins to drift.
Rating coming soonA light aircraft bound for the Galapagos Islands ditches into the sea, and the zoologist on board, Daniel Kennedy, has to decide whether to save himself or the woman he is with. In a second story set in 1917, his great-grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele and will be tested in the same way.
Rating coming soonIn 1869 three people are killed in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, and a young man called Roderick Macrae is arrested for the murders. The memoir he writes in prison makes it clear that he did it, and the courts then have to decide why: what kind of man kills his neighbours, and whether the law should hold him responsible.
Rating coming soonIn 1618, plague and the beginning of the Thirty Years' War have left the Holy Roman Empire frightened and suspicious. In the small town of Leonberg, an illiterate widow called Katharina Kepler, known for her herbal remedies, is accused of witchcraft by a neighbour, and the accusation grows until the whole community has an opinion about her. Her son Johannes, the imperial mathematician, has to leave his work and defend her.
Rating coming soonJack Aubrey is ashore on half pay with no ship when Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders: he is to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant and take two strategic islands in the Indian Ocean from the French. Two of the captains under him, a pleasure-seeking dilettante and a disciplinarian whose severity nearly drives his crew to mutiny, make the commission harder than the enemy does.
Rating coming soonCaptain Jack Aubrey is given a new mission: to take his ship to the Pacific and protect the British whaling fleet there from an American frigate, which will mean his first voyage around Cape Horn. Dr Stephen Maturin has not yet identified the senior French agent who escaped him, and he does not know that the letter he sends his wife is going by the hand of exactly that man.
Rating coming soonIn January 1794, on the eve of the wars with France, a seventeen-year-old called Horatio Hornblower joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman. He is seasick, awkward and socially hopeless, and the other midshipmen decide he is a dullard. Then he is sent to board a French merchant ship and take charge of it, and something in him turns out to work properly at sea.
Rating coming soonA Yorkshire whaling ship called the Volunteer is bound for the Arctic in the 1850s, in a trade that is being killed off by cheaper fuels. On board are a harpooner named Henry Drax, who is as dangerous as he is capable, and Patrick Sumner, a disgraced former army surgeon taken on as the ship's doctor for want of anything better.
Rating coming soonIn the Judean desert, about two thousand years ago, five travellers are strung out along the road that a caravan took earlier that morning: three men, a woman, and someone too far behind for anyone to guess at, walking barefoot with no staff, no water and no food. They are all going into the wilderness for their own reasons, and the heat is the least of what they will find there.
Rating coming soonJakarta, 1965. An Australian journalist, a Chinese-Australian photographer and a British diplomat are thrown together in the Indonesian capital in the summer and autumn of a year that ends in a coup attempt. Each of them is in the country for his own reasons, and each of them is being used for somebody else's.
Rating coming soonEliza Cantrell has agreed to marry a man she has never met and to help him run a general store, and she sets off a week earlier than planned. Robbers take her dowry on the way, and when she finally arrives the man she is supposed to marry is not in town, leaving her with no money, no wedding and nowhere to go.
Rating coming soonRider is a half-breed Shoshoni wanted for murder among his own people, and his only interest is in staying alive. When he sees Emma Trent refused passage on a wagon train bound for Oregon, he offers to guide the train on one condition: that she is allowed to come with it.
Rating coming soonJack Aubrey has been struck off the Navy List, and the frigate Surprise, bought at auction by his friend Stephen Maturin, sails out of an English port as a privateer with a letter of marque. Her crew is a mixed company of old hands, privateers and smugglers, and her captain is looking for a cruise profitable enough to restore him.
Rating coming soonThe Surprise comes home from the far side of the world with prisoners aboard and a captain who has never met his grown son. Ashore in England, Jack Aubrey is drawn into a different kind of battle, fought on dry land and in the market, where his name and his fortune are no longer safe from the people who wish him harm.
Rating coming soonThe chase of the Franklin has taken the Surprise across the Pacific to the coast of Peru, where an undercover mission that has waited for years is finally within reach. Stephen Maturin has to cross the Andes to rejoin his ship, while Jack Aubrey, out on the ocean, finds the weather and the sea itself turning against him.
Rating coming soonA mail packet running for England is chased across the Atlantic for the papers in Stephen Maturin's hands, and for the woman travelling with him. Safely ashore, Jack Aubrey is given a small ship and a mission on the Danish coast, and the two friends find that the war has another kind of danger waiting for them.
Rating coming soonJack Aubrey, now a commodore with a squadron under him, is sent to the coast of West Africa to act against the trade in slaves, and afterwards to a station where Napoleon's navy is to be found. On land, meanwhile, Stephen Maturin meets a daughter he has never seen and finds that an old enemy intends to reach him through her.
Rating coming soonNews that England may be encouraging the Spanish colonies to break away changes the Surprise's orders, and Jack Aubrey's commission is restored to him along with a ship to carry an envoy to the Malay states. Stephen Maturin goes along for the treaty, the natural history, and the chance to work on a problem of his own.
Rating coming soonWaiting in Malta while the Surprise is repaired, Stephen Maturin finds that the island is also home to a network of French agents, and that one of them is using a woman's troubles to buy her services. A new admiral takes command of the station and sends Jack Aubrey out on a series of errands, some of which are not what they seem.
Rating coming soonBound home from the far side of the world to take up a new command, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have their passage interrupted by a fire aboard ship, and they find themselves caught up in a war that began while they were away. Much of what follows takes place in Boston, and the book turns two real battles of 1812 into fiction.
Rating coming soonOn a small island in the Scilly Isles in 1915, a boy who has slipped away from school to go fishing hears a sound coming from an island nobody lives on. What he finds there is a girl who cannot or will not say who she is, and the question of where she came from slowly divides the people of his community.
Rating coming soonIn 1665 a privateer named Charles Hunter is hired by the governor of Jamaica to take a Spanish galleon and the treasure she carries, at a time when the English colony at Port Royal is holding on against the power of Spain. What he plans is a raid on a Spanish fortress, and he has to assemble the men to carry it out.
Rating coming soonA newly arrived lieutenant joins HMS Renown and finds that her captain's suspicions of his officers have grown into something close to madness. The story is told by William Bush, one of those officers, which leaves the reader to work out for themselves what happened in the hold on the night the captain fell.
Rating coming soonRewarded for a famous action with the command of a two-decker he does not want, Horatio Hornblower takes HMS Sutherland to sea under an admiral who is married to the woman he loves. His orders are to escort a convoy of East Indiamen along the Spanish coast, in a ship short of men and in waters full of French privateers.
Rating coming soonBeth Gallatin has wanted only one thing out of life: to settle in a single town, with one man, and raise a family there. Her father's restless wandering made that impossible while he lived, and now that he has died she means to claim the Montana frontier as her own home and to stay.
Rating coming soonRhine Fontaine has built a life for himself in a Nevada town on the strength of passing for white, and he has kept the arrangement going for years without much trouble. Then he rescues a young woman in the desert, and for the first time he finds himself wanting to step out from behind it.
Rating coming soonJacky Faber is on her way home to marry the man she has loved for years when British Naval Intelligence takes her off the ship and hands her another assignment. She is to lead an expedition after a Spanish treasure ship that went down with millions in gold, and she is promised a share of it and a pardon for her past.
Rating coming soonIn 1644 a young minister of the Church of Scotland arrives at a parish in the Scottish Borders and finds that the people he has come to lead are not all what they seem. The novel opens with a narrator looking at the ruin of the parish kirk and recalling the story of its last minister, who vanished.
Rating coming soonHistorians at Oxford in the middle of the twenty-first century do their field work by travelling into the past to observe it, using a portal that stays behind in their own time, and each of them can only return when somebody in the future opens it again. Several of them are sent into England during the Second World War.
Rating coming soonTwo months after Elizabeth Holland comes home to Manhattan, society is waiting to see her take her place again, and she refuses. Her sister Diana is left to face the questions alone, while further uptown the city's most celebrated newly married couple have little but scorn for each other. The papers call Penelope's friend Carolina Broad an heiress, and her fortune is not what it appears to be.
Rating coming soonIn Rome in the year 70, an informer called Marcus Didius Falco meets a frightened young woman in the Forum and makes the rash decision to help her. She is carrying a burden that turns out to be connected to a pile of silver ingots stolen from Britain, and to the people who want them back.
Rating coming soonIn 1634 the investigator Samuel Pipps is put aboard a ship at Batavia to be taken back to Amsterdam, where he is to be tried and probably executed for a crime he may or may not have committed. His bodyguard Arent Hayes goes with him, determined to clear him, and the voyage begins badly. What follows happens almost entirely aboard that one ship.
Rating coming soonEmily agrees, at her friend's insistence, to go to a party at the country house of a man she dislikes and finds odious. Her host has also invited an Austrian countess who was once romantically linked with Emily's fiance, and by the end of the evening the host is dead and a friend's husband is under arrest.
Rating coming soonThe Amazing Arden is the best known female illusionist of her day, famous for the trick in which she appears to saw a man in half. One night in Iowa she uses a fire axe instead of a saw, her husband is found dead under the stage, and the policeman who catches up with her hears a story he cannot quite believe.
Rating coming soonIn 1718 a headstrong fifteen-year-old girl in a parish near Newcastle begins an affair that ruins her, and when the man denies that they were ever joined she has to leave for London. There she takes a position in the household of an apothecary, hoping to salvage what she can of her reputation. What she finds in that house is not what she was promised.
Rating coming soonYu Yuan is a young Chinese officer sent to Korea as one of the volunteers Mao contributed to the Communist side, and he is captured by United Nations forces. Because he knows some English he becomes the unofficial interpreter in the psychological warfare that runs through the prison camp, and the book is his memoir of what happened to him there. It is the camp, and the men in it, that the book is really about.
Rating coming soonOn an island in Puget Sound, where the people make their living from salmon fishing and strawberry farming, a Japanese American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a fellow fisherman. It is 1954, the war is recent, and the internment of Japanese Americans during it hangs over the courtroom. The case turns on what the islanders remember and what they would rather not.
Rating coming soonGeneral William Tecumseh Sherman marches sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then north into the Carolinas, in the last months of the American Civil War. His soldiers live off the land as they go, and a population of freed people and refugees follows them. It is the people in the path of the army that the novel follows.
Rating coming soonIn a mining town in southern Illinois, a man is tried and convicted of shooting his neighbour during a weekend gathering of the two families, and sentenced to be executed. Days before the sentence is to be carried out he is rescued by masked men and disappears, and what follows is the story of what became of him and of his family.
Rating coming soonAlmeyda grows up as a slave on a plantation in Brazil in the 1670s, with a mother who is stern and a grandmother who is not like anybody else. She hears about Palmares, a city governed by freed and escaped slaves, and her life becomes a long journey through the country. She is looking for her husband, and the country is very large.
Rating coming soonGareth St. Clair has been left an old family diary by a father who detests him and who is determined to ruin what should have been his inheritance. The diary may hold the secret of his past, but it is written in a language he cannot read, and the woman he asks to translate it is Hyacinth Bridgerton.
Rating coming soonA captain in the Confederate cavalry is in the middle of a battle when the air around him turns to a strange mist, and he finds himself somewhere he does not recognise. A woman dressed in the clothes of a different century takes him prisoner, and neither of them knows how they came to be there.
Rating coming soonHaven Ambrose, a nautical archaeologist, comes to Positano to look at the shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast, and she is also privately searching for a trove of gemstones her father saw on his last dive. Then maelstroms and misfortunes begin to trouble the town. The water off that coast has swallowed a great deal, and it is still taking things.
Rating coming soonMoshe Fisher is born without skin, as the people of his Jamaican village put it, and nobody who looks at him can tell what race he belongs to. Arrienne Christie makes it her business to protect him, and the novel follows the two of them across most of a lifetime. It is also the history of an island.
Rating coming soonBerta grows up hearing everybody exclaim over her little sister Glenna, and somewhere along the way she decides that whatever Glenna is, she will not be. The two sisters become opposites, and the distance between them grows until it has to be faced. The novel is about what caused the rift and what it cost them both.
Rating coming soonThey came west by river and by wagon train, across the distances of the Great Plains and through the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada, and the novel follows a set of them: men like Linus Rawlings and women like Lilith Prescott, who fled her family and fell for a gambling man.
Rating coming soonOscar de León is a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey who is overweight, loves science fiction and fantasy, and keeps falling hopelessly in love. His family is also carrying a curse, and the novel follows them back to the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo. It is a family history as much as it is the story of one boy.
Rating coming soonAn American serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian army during the First World War falls in love with an English nurse, and the two of them try to live a life of their own while the war goes on around them. The novel is told in his voice.
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