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 13 of the shelf.
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In 1327 four children in Kingsbridge see a knight bury a letter in the woods after killing two soldiers, and what they have witnessed shapes the rest of their lives. Over the decades that follow, the town has to survive a plague that empties its streets, a war with France that takes its young men, and a prior with plans of his own for the cathedral and everyone who depends on it.
In 1666 the plague reaches a small village in Derbyshire, and the villagers decide to shut themselves in rather than carry the infection out into the country around them. The story is told by Anna Frith, a housemaid who stays through the year that follows and has to work out what she believes about it.
Laura Hewitt travels out to India with the man she intends to marry and is drawn instead to his brother, Oliver Erskine, who is the hereditary ruler of a private kingdom and the commander of his own army. He answers both to the British Crown and to India, and the country around them is about to rise against the Company's rule.
Zoya Konstantinovna Ossupov is a Russian countess and a young cousin of Tsar Nicholas II when the revolution arrives and takes her world apart. She escapes with her grandmother and a servant, arrives in Paris with nothing, and has to build a life out of what she can do rather than who she was.
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