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 12 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonInspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is in hospital with a broken leg, and an actress friend brings him pictures of historical figures to occupy him. One of them is a portrait of Richard III, and Grant cannot square the face with the monstrous uncle of the history books. The case he takes up is five hundred years old, and he has nothing to do but think about it.
Rating coming soonBrigadier-General Richard Hannay is recalled from the Western Front to hunt a German agent who is at large in Britain, and the work has to be done under cover. He goes about the country disguised as a pacifist, and the trail is not the one he expected to find. The war is still going on all around him.
Rating coming soonRichard Hannay is asked to look into rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world, and the enquiry takes him across wartime Europe towards Constantinople. What he finds there is a German plan to use religion as a weapon in the war. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War.
Rating coming soonTommy and Tuppence Beresford are brought back into intelligence work during the Second World War and sent to a seaside hotel, where they are to find a pair of enemy agents living under other names among the guests. The guests are a mixed company, and two of them are not what they seem to be.
Rating coming soonIn November 1963 a German freelance crime reporter follows an ambulance to the flat of a Holocaust survivor who has killed himself, and is given the dead man's diary. What the diary describes is a former SS commander, and the search for him has to be made inside a secret organisation. That organisation exists to protect men like the one he is hunting.
Rating coming soonIn 1939 a nineteen-year-old refugee from Prague arrives in New York and moves in with his seventeen-year-old cousin, who was born in Brooklyn. Between them they invent a superhero, and the two of them become part of the golden age of the comic book. The Escapist is their way of fighting back.
Rating coming soonWang Lung is a Chinese farmer who works his land and takes pride in it, and the novel follows him and his wife O-Lan from poverty to a position where the family of the great house nearby is no longer above him. The land is what he holds on to and what he loses sight of.
Rating coming soonIt is 1936 in Flint, Michigan, and Bud is ten years old, motherless and on the run. He has a suitcase with his own important things in it, a set of rules he has written for himself, and a belief about who his father might be. He has a plan of his own.
Rating coming soonJohn Grady Cole leaves Texas for Mexico, where he finds work breaking horses on a ranch and falls in love with the owner's daughter. What he has done to get there follows him, and the novel is the story of what it costs him. He is not the only person in the book who pays for it.
Rating coming soonCedric Errol is a small American boy who knows nothing about his father's English family until he is told that he is to be an earl. He goes to England to live with a grandfather who dislikes everything about him, and the two of them have to get used to each other. The boy does not hold any of it against him.
Rating coming soonWhen the last of the Roman legions leaves Britain, a young officer named Aquila decides that his loyalty belongs to the country he was born in rather than to Rome. He joins the forces of a Roman-British leader to fight the Saxons. The country has to be held together after the legions go.
Rating coming soonIn the England of 1377 a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother has just died is accused of theft by the steward of the manor and declared outside the protection of the law. He has nobody to go to and no name of his own beyond the one his mother gave him.
Rating coming soonAn American veteran of the Second World War goes back to Germany after the fighting to find the woman he left there, and stays. What he finds is a country in ruins where the currency everybody deals in is not money but American cigarettes. He stays there far longer than he meant to.
Rating coming soonHetty is fourteen and has just been discharged from the Foundling Hospital, and she goes into service as a scullery maid. She has also found out that the kitchen maid at the hospital is her mother, and she is trying to find out who her father was. Her mother is the kitchen maid at the hospital where she grew up.
Rating coming soonAnya had wanted to move to Britain and start again, and now that she is there she sits in a school where nobody understands her and thinks about the Polish summer skies she left behind. Then she meets a boy called Dan. He is not a good influence on her.
Rating coming soonElsie Kettle lives with her grandmother and is looking forward to going to London for the coronation of Elizabeth II, and then the two of them are taken into hospital with tuberculosis. What she finds on the ward is a set of other children and a hospital cat called Queenie. The ward is full of children in the same position.
Rating coming soonPenelope is sent to convalesce at her aunt's farmhouse in Derbyshire, and while she is there she finds herself slipping back into the 1580s. What she witnesses there is an attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, from her imprisonment. It is the scheme that history remembers as the Babington Plot.
Rating coming soonElizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, does not remember a time when she was the favourite at court. When her father dies she is overshadowed by her brother, the boy king, and then imprisoned during the reign of her older half-sister Mary. Much of her young adulthood is spent as the forgotten daughter of the king and his hated second wife.
Rating coming soonAda's clubfoot has finally been operated on, and the operation settles one question for her: she is not what her mother told her she was, damaged and deranged as well as crippled. It leaves another question open, because if she is not her mother's daughter any more, what is she instead? The war is still going on all around her.
Rating coming soonEnola Holmes has few people in her life beyond the occasional run-in with her brother Sherlock, and the closest thing she has to family is her landlady, Mrs Tupper, who is nearly deaf and cannot cook but is thoroughly endearing. So when Enola comes home to find that Mrs Tupper has been kidnapped, the search becomes personal almost at once.
Rating coming soonCassie Witting thinks there could be nothing better than a prairie wedding, and one is coming: two lovebirds brought together, aunts arriving from as far away as Maine, a long white dress with a veil, zinnias and satin ribbons, dancing under a clear blue sky. As the family gathers, Cassie finds that life brings the turning of seasons, joy and sorrow, and a dance only her grandfather does.
Rating coming soonDamaris is almost fifteen on the night she decides she can no longer live with what her father does when he comes home drunk and mean, and she begins planning how to get away from him. When the chance finally comes she carries two things with her, her grandmother's golden brooch and her grandfather's watch, both of which were hidden from her father for years, along with her name and the question of what it might mean for her.
Rating coming soonThe Chemin, also known as the Camino de Santiago, is a pilgrimage route centuries old that ends at Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain, and thousands of walkers follow it every year, some devout and many of them not. Zoe, an artist from California whose husband has just died, decides on impulse to walk it. Martin, an engineer from England, is testing a cart of his own design.
Rating coming soonIn the autumn of 1881 a divorce affidavit arrives at Sally Lockhart's house, and it says that a commission agent named Arthur Parrish is her husband and the father of her daughter, Harriet. Sally has never been married. The affidavit also says that Harriet's father wants custody of the child, and Sally's lawyer has no sympathy at all to offer a woman with no power of her own.
Rating coming soonTriss has not been well since she was rescued from the Grimmer, a pond near her family's holiday cottage, and her memory of what happened there is hazy. Her dolls keep coming alive, she is endlessly hungry and wants to eat her belongings as well as her food, she finds dead leaves in her hair, and her tears come out as spiderweb. Her sister Pen hates her.
Rating coming soonThis novel chronicles the life of Richard III of England, beginning in 1459 with him as a young boy and ending in 1485 with his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It is set against the Wars of the Roses, and it argues for a Richard very different from the one tradition has handed down.
Rating coming soonRandall is an orphan, the son of a Breton soldier and a Saxon mother, and he works as a dog-boy at Arundel Castle. A knight called Sir Everard d'Aguillon takes him home, and he is brought up alongside Sir Everard's grandson, Bevis. The novel follows the two of them as they grow up in England thirty to forty years after the Norman conquest.
Rating coming soonHenry VIII was a charismatic and extravagant king obsessed with his own power and with getting a male heir, and the six women he married were bound for divorce, beheading or death. This novel tells the story of his court and of each of those queens in turn, from Katharine of Aragon to Kateryn Parr, with Henry's own account among them.
Rating coming soonMedieval England is usually remembered as a place of knights on horseback rescuing fainting damsels, of merciless kings and of peasants mired in superstition and ignorance. Terry Jones and Alan Ereira set out to show a livelier and more inventive country, and to explain where some of the best known ideas about the Middle Ages came from, from witch burning to the flat earth.
Rating coming soonThe Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955 and set in Vietnam in the last years of French colonial rule. Its narrator is Thomas Fowler, a British journalist, and its story turns on his young Vietnamese lover Phuong and on Alden Pyle, an earnest young American whose certainty about how the country should be remade draws all three of them in.
Rating coming soonThe French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel by John Fowles, published in 1969 and set in Victorian England. Charles Smithson, a gentleman with a taste for natural history, is drawn to Sarah Woodruff, a former governess whose reputation has been ruined and whom the town has nicknamed the French Lieutenant's Woman, and the book tells their story while keeping one eye on the Victorian novels it imitates.
Rating coming soonThe Worst Journey in the World, published in 1922, is Apsley Cherry-Garrard's account of the Antarctic expedition that Robert Falcon Scott led between 1910 and 1913. The title refers not to the march on the South Pole but to a winter journey the author made in July 1911 to collect emperor penguin eggs, and the book is known for its unsparing account of what the expedition cost the men who were on it.
Rating coming soonRoughing It in the Bush, published in London in 1852, is Susanna Moodie's account of settler life in Canada, where she had emigrated with her family in the 1830s. Written at her editor's suggestion as a guide for British readers who were thinking of making the same move, it mixes memoir with something closer to fiction and is arranged as a series of sketches in chronological order.
Rating coming soonV. S. Naipaul's In a Free State took the Booker Prize for 1971. Three stories sit inside a frame that opens on a ferry to Egypt and closes many years later, and the parts are arranged like movements in a piece of music, each one edging towards the same unstated subject: what freedom costs the people who have it.
Rating coming soonThe Wager is David Grann's account of a British warship lost off Patagonia in the 1740s, and of what the survivors did to stay alive. It is a story of shipwreck, mutiny and survival that ends in a court martial, and it was a best-seller in 2023; the ship had sailed in search of a Spanish treasure galleon, and the men who came home told two irreconcilable stories about what had happened to them.
Rating coming soonThe Diary of Samuel Pepys is the private journal he kept between 1660 and 1669, first published in the nineteenth century. It records his work at the navy office, his household and his pleasures day by day, it takes in the plague, a war and the Great Fire, and it is among the fullest eyewitness accounts of the English Restoration that survive.
Rating coming soonBritons is a work of history by Linda Colley about how a British national identity was made in the century after the union of England, Wales and Scotland in 1707. It was published in 1992, and it argues that war and empire did as much as anything else to give the peoples of the British Isles a sense of belonging together.
Rating coming soonElizabeth the Great is a biography of Elizabeth I by Elizabeth Jenkins, published in 1958. It sets out to describe the woman as much as the queen, and it follows her from a childhood in which her position was never safe to a reign that gave its name to an age.
Rating coming soonThe Ghost Map is a work of popular history by Steven Johnson about a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and about the physician whose investigation of it changed how people thought about disease. It also takes in the growth of cities in the nineteenth century and the beginnings of modern epidemiology.
Rating coming soonBernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Waterloo appeared in 1990 under the title Waterloo, and it was the eleventh novel in the series. It puts its hero back in uniform for the campaign that ended the Napoleonic Wars, with his old friend Patrick Harper at his side, and it follows the days before the battle in close detail.
Rating coming soonThe Ballad of the White Horse is a long poem by G. K. Chesterton about the wars of Alfred the Great against the Danes, published in 1911. It is written in the form of a traditional ballad, and it tells how Alfred came back from defeat to win at Ethandun, with help, in the poem's account, from the Virgin Mary.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Eagle is a historical novel by Bernard Cornwell, published in 1981, and it was the first of the Richard Sharpe books to appear. It is set in Spain in July 1809, during the campaign that ended at Talavera, and it puts its hero and his riflemen under a commander who has no business leading them.
Rating coming soonThe Ionian Mission is the eighth of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, first published in 1981. It begins with a marriage and a spell of blockade duty off Toulon, and it ends with the two of them sent to the Greek islands to look for a new ally among the pashas.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Gold is the second of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels to be published, though ninth in the series' internal order, and it is set in August 1810. Sharpe is sent behind enemy lines after a hoard of Spanish gold, and the story ends with the destruction of the fortress at Almeida. It belongs to the early part of the series, when its hero is still proving himself to the people above him.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Trafalgar is the fourth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2000, and the first of them to take its hero into the wars against Napoleon. Sharpe is on his way home from India as a passenger, and the voyage takes him to the fleet that fought at Trafalgar. He is aboard as a traveller with no business in the fighting at all, which is part of the joke.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Rifles is the sixth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels in the series' internal order, though the ninth to be published, and it came out in 1988. It follows Sharpe and his riflemen through the French invasion of Galicia in January 1809, during the retreat to Corunna, and it is the book in which he first meets the soldier who becomes his closest companion.
Rating coming soonSharpe's Fury is the eleventh of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2006 and set in 1811 during Wellington's campaign in the Iberian peninsula. It places Sharpe in the middle of the politics as well as the fighting, with Cadiz the last Spanish city still holding out. Sharpe is caught between the French in front of him and the politics of his own side behind him.
Rating coming soonHornblower's promotion to post-captain brings him the Atropos, a sloop of twenty-two guns and barely enough work to justify a captain at all. Before he can sail, he is handed one of the strangest assignments in the Royal Navy, which is arranging the funeral of Lord Nelson, whose death at Trafalgar has left the country in mourning. Then come the pearl divers, the salvage master with a temper, and a wreck full of British army pay.
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