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Historical fiction books

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 2 of the shelf.

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Showing 48 of 580 books

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War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy · 1869

Tolstoy follows five aristocratic Russian families through the years of the Napoleonic Wars, from drawing rooms and balls in St Petersburg and Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino and the French invasion of 1812. Between the narrative chapters the book argues about history and about how much credit any one man, Napoleon included, deserves for events. The private lives and the war move through each other: marriages, debts, duels, retreats and the long withdrawal from Moscow.

Historical fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel · 2009

Thomas Cromwell is the son of a blacksmith who has become a lawyer, a trader and a man useful to cardinals and kings. The novel follows his rise through the court of Henry VIII between 1500 and 1535, from inside his own head: the household he keeps, the accounts he manages, the people he protects and the ones he moves out of the way. At the centre of it is the king's need for a male heir and the marriage to Catherine of Aragon that stands in the way.

Historical fictionTudor fictionBiographical fiction

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The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough · 1977

The Cleary family leaves New Zealand for Drogheda, a sheep station in the Australian outback, where Paddy Cleary will work for his wealthy sister. Meggie Cleary is four years old when the family arrives and the youngest of seven, and the novel follows her from that arrival into adulthood against the running of the station, the drought, the sheep and the money. The other constant in her life is Father Ralph de Bricassart, a priest whose career in the church and feelings about Meggie grow at the same time and in opposite directions. The book runs from 1915 to 1969 and covers three generations.

Family sagaHistorical romance

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Moby-Dick

Herman Melville · 1851

Ishmael goes to sea because he feels like it, signs aboard the whaling ship Pequod in Nantucket and only discovers once the voyage has begun what the captain intends. Captain Ahab lost a leg to a white whale on a previous trip and has come back to sea for one purpose, which is to kill that whale wherever it leads him. The crew is a working crew of harpooners, boat handlers and a ship's carpenter, they are paid on the profits of the oil they render, and their captain has quietly converted the voyage into a private hunt. Ishmael narrates the whole of it, including the parts he cannot have witnessed.

Naval adventureLiterary historical fiction

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Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen · 1813

Mrs Bennet has five daughters and no son, which in the England of the novel means that the family estate is entailed away from the women and that all five will need to marry well or live on very little. When a wealthy young man rents a house nearby, the neighbourhood's mothers go to work on him. His friend, Mr Darcy, is richer still and worse at being liked. Elizabeth Bennet, the second daughter, is quick, stubborn and prepared to think badly of him, and he is prepared to think badly of everybody.

Historical romanceLiterary historical fiction

Rating coming soon

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck · 1937

George Milton and Lennie Small travel together from ranch to ranch in California during the Great Depression, looking for work and carrying one plan between them. Lennie is very strong and does not understand his own strength, and George has spent years keeping him out of the trouble he keeps finding. They take jobs on a farm where the other workers are paid a dollar a day, and they plan to save enough to buy a smallholding of their own. The dream is the part they keep repeating to each other, and the novel is short enough to read in one sitting.

Literary historical fictionFrontier fiction

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · 1884

Huck Finn has been taken in by the Widow Douglas, who is trying to educate him, and his father has come back to claim him and the money Huck found in an earlier adventure. Huck fakes his own death and gets away, and on an island in the Mississippi he meets Jim, a man escaping from slavery who used to work for the family he knows. The two of them build a raft and travel downriver, which means travelling south into the country where Jim's situation gets worse rather than better. The novel is told entirely by Huck, in his own voice, and it is one of the first American novels to work that way.

Literary historical fictionFrontier fiction

Rating coming soon

Catch-22

Joseph Heller · 1961

Yossarian is an American bombardier stationed on a Mediterranean island in the closing months of the Second World War, and he has decided he does not want to fly any more missions. The rule that governs his problem is the one that gives the novel its title: a man who asks to be grounded for insanity is demonstrating that he is sane, because caring about his own survival proves it. His commanding officers keep raising the number of missions that count as a tour of duty. The novel moves backwards and forwards through the squadron's history rather than in order.

War fictionWorld War II fiction

Rating coming soon

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens · 1859

Doctor Manette has been a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years when he is released, and by then his wife is dead and his daughter Lucie has been raised in England without knowing he was alive. Father and daughter are reunited in London, where Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his family and moved away, falls in love with Lucie. When Darnay returns to Paris out of duty during the Revolution, he is arrested and put on trial in a city where the courts are run by former servants and the sentences are fixed. The last act of the novel is about what one other man decides to do about it.

Literary historical fictionHistorical adventure

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Shadow of the Storm

Connilyn Cossette · 2016

Having left Egypt with the Hebrews during the Exodus, Shira is living in freedom at the foot of Mount Sinai. When the people build a golden idol in defiance of Yahweh, the chaos that follows gives her an unexpected chance to learn midwifery, and she discovers that her gifts show best when she is helping at a birth. Her mother wants her to keep to the family weaving trade, and Shira apprentices herself as a midwife anyway. Then a delivery goes badly wrong.

Historical romanceAncient world fiction

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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Mildred D. Taylor · 1976

In rural Mississippi in 1933, nine-year-old Cassie Logan lives with her three brothers on land the family owns, which is unusual for a Black family of the period, since most around them sharecropped. Cassie has grown up protected and strong and has not yet understood that a white person could force her to be untrue to herself. One turbulent year, with night riders and burnings, shows her why the land matters so much.

Historical fictionComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

Garden of Shadows

V. C. Andrews · 1987

The novel travels back to meet Malcolm Foxworth as a young and ambitious man. On a trip to Connecticut he meets Olivia Winfield, who is tall, stern and bookish and has resigned herself to remaining unmarried, until he proposes. Soon after she arrives at Foxworth Hall the shadows gather and his darker side appears, and the children born to the house include one beautiful girl who will change everything. The house itself becomes the explanation for everything the series later describes.

Family novelModern horror

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Knight Triumphant

Heather Graham · 2002

After her husband Afton, Lord of Langley, dies of plague, the Englishwoman Igrainia finds herself a captive in her own castle, held by the Scottish warrior Eric Graham, whose wife and son died as prisoners of Lord Langley. When the king refuses a trade, Graham forces Igrainia to marry him, though she would rather rot in her own dungeons than accept a kindness from her captor.

Historical romanceMedieval fiction

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By Right of Arms

Robyn Carr · 1986

In fourteenth-century Aquitaine, under King Edward and his son the Black Prince, the English domains expand and the stronghold of De la Noye is taken from the French. Among those seized by the conquering Sir Hyatt is Lady Aurelie, the young widow of Giles de Pourvre. Recognising her courage and discretion, Hyatt marries her in an attempt to draw the English and French of the province together.

Historical romanceMedieval fiction

Rating coming soon

Head in the Clouds

Karen Witemeyer · 2010

Adelaide Proctor longs for a storybook hero of her own, and when a husband-hunting episode leaves her humiliated she vows to abandon her romantic notions. She interviews for a governess position on a remote Texas sheep ranch, where Gideon Wescott is raising a daughter who has not spoken since her mother died. When the child's uncle comes to claim her and her inheritance, the two of them have to work together.

Historical romanceWestern

Rating coming soon

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain · 1876

Tom Sawyer is a boy growing up along the Mississippi River in the 1830s and 1840s, in the fictional town of St Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived as a child. He has a series of adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn, and the novel follows him through predicaments that include running away to an island, pursuing a treasure and being trapped in a cave.

Historical fictionClassic adventure

Rating coming soon

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini · 2003

Amir grows up in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, the son of a wealthy man, and his closest friend is Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Their friendship is shaped by the inequality between them. The novel follows Amir into adulthood, through the Soviet invasion, the flight of Afghan refugees and the rise of the Taliban, as he reckons with an act of betrayal he committed as a boy.

Historical fictionComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad · 1899

Charles Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames: an assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior, and a voyage up a river into the Congo Free State in search of a man. The man he is sent to find, an ivory trader named Kurtz, has gone native, and the pursuit becomes the whole of the book.

Modern classicsColonial fiction

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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850

Hester Prynne conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and is punished by being made to wear a scarlet letter as a mark of adultery. Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1642 and 1649, the novel follows her attempt to build a life of repentance and dignity in a community that has decided what she is, and follows the two men connected to her secret.

Historical fictionModern classics

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Little Women

Louisa May Alcott · 1868

The four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, grow up during the American Civil War, and the novel follows them from childhood towards adulthood through their work, their friendships and their losses. It is loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, and it was published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869, before being issued as a single novel in 1880.

Family novelComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

The Help

Kathryn Stockett · 2009

It is 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter has returned home after graduating from university, and her mother will not be satisfied until she has a ring on her finger. Aibileen is a Black maid raising her seventeenth white child, changed by the death of her own son. Minny is her closest friend and the sassiest woman in the state, and cannot keep her opinions to herself. The three of them take one step together.

Historical fictionSocial realism

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The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 1939

The Joads are a poor family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, changes in the agricultural industry and bank foreclosures. They take to the road in a battered truck and head for California to look for work, and find hundreds of others in the same position, forced to accept breadline wages. They begin as fruit pickers, and then as strikebreakers.

Social realismFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Number the Stars

Lois Lowry · 1989

Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think about life before the war, but it is now 1943 and life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages and Nazi soldiers in the streets. When the Jews of Denmark begin to be relocated, Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family, and Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous errand.

World War II fictionComing-of-age

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Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883

A story of buccaneers and buried gold, originally serialised in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881 and 1882 under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola and credited to the pseudonym Captain George North. It is set in the eighteenth century, and it is traditionally read as a coming-of-age story known for its atmosphere, characters and action.

Classic adventureTreasure hunt

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The Lost Symbol

Dan Brown · 2009

A thriller set in Washington DC after the events of The Da Vinci Code, built on Freemasonry for both its recurring theme and its major characters. It centres on the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and a kidnapping that proceeds through the symbols and secret societies of the American capital, with a deadline attached to the search.

Conspiracy thrillerHistorical mystery

Rating coming soon

East of Eden

John Steinbeck · 1952

The novel details the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories, in the Salinas Valley of California. Its material includes identity, grief and the question of what it means to be human, and the book is tinged with biblical echoes of the fall of Adam and Eve and the rivalry of Cain and Abel across two generations.

Family sagaLiterary historical fiction

Rating coming soon

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 1906

The novel follows a Lithuanian immigrant family in the Chicago stockyards at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it exposes the conditions of their working lives. Sinclair set out to show the odds against immigrants and other working people who were trying to secure a share of the American dream, and the book instead became a national scandal about the meatpacking industry.

Social realismImmigrant fiction

Rating coming soon

The Hired Girl

Laura Amy Schlitz · 2015

Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs has been unhappy since her mother's death, living like a servant on her father's farm near Lancaster under the thumb of her father and three sullen brothers, doing the cooking and cleaning. When her father tells her she can no longer go to school, she runs away, becomes a hired girl on six dollars a week, and sets out to become her own young woman.

Historical fictionComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

The Garden of Evening Mists

Tan Twan Eng · 2011

Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen when she first heard of the man who had been the gardener to the Emperor of Japan, and a war and a decade would pass before she travelled up to the Garden of Evening Mists in 1951 to see him. A survivor of a Japanese camp, she has been helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, and she asks the gardener to create a memorial garden for her sister.

Historical fictionLiterary historical fiction

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The Mirror and the Light

Hilary Mantel · 2020

The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's trilogy charts the last four years in the life of Thomas Cromwell, minister at the court of King Henry VIII, from 1536 until his execution in 1540. It follows Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and completes the rise and fall of the man who ran the king's business, on whom the whole machinery of the reign depends.

Literary historical fictionTudor fiction

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The Silver Sword

Ian Serraillier · 1956

In Warsaw in 1942 the war is raging and people live in fear from day to day. Ruth, Bronia and Edek have to fend for themselves when both of their parents are taken by the Nazis, and the novel follows their attempt to survive and to find each other again across a continent that has been broken up by the fighting.

World War II fictionSurvival fiction

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A Worthy Pursuit

Karen Witemeyer · 2015

In Texas in 1891, the teacher Charlotte Atherton is on the run in order to keep a little girl entrusted to her care safe. The tracker Stone Hammond is in close pursuit, until he learns the truth of the situation, and then discovers that his heart may have found a new object to pursue. What began as a hunt becomes a shared obligation.

Historical romanceWestern

Rating coming soon

Blake's Reach

Catherine Gaskin · 1958

Born illegitimate, Jane Howard inherits nothing but her mother's red hair and the spirit of the Blake family. When Anne Blake dies, it is Jane who sets out to restore the debt-ridden house in London, and she does it with the profits of smuggling along the Kent coast. Then Charles Blake returns, fleeing the French Revolution, to claim his inheritance.

Historical romance

Rating coming soon

Clara and the Cowboy

Erica Vetsch · 2010

From an abusive and alcoholic father, to townspeople who treat him as though he were cut from the same cloth, to his own insecurities, nothing Alec does is ever good enough. He cannot see how he could let himself love the boss's daughter, or why she would have declared her love for him. Then Clara's life is threatened by cattle rustlers and he has to answer for both.

Historical romanceWestern

Rating coming soon

Fire Along the Sky

Sara Donati · 2004

It is 1812 and Hannah Bonner has returned to her family's mountain home in Paradise, and her parents can see that she is not the woman who left. She has come back without her husband and without her son, and with a story of loss she cannot bring herself to tell. As she resumes work as a healer among the sick, she begins to heal herself, and then the war calls her away.

Historical romanceFamily saga

Rating coming soon

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens · 1838

Oliver Twist is raised in a workhouse and escapes to London, where he falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. He discovers the secrets of his parentage and reconnects with the family he has left. The novel portrays the lives of criminals without romance and exposes the treatment of the many orphans in England in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Victorian fictionComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

John Boyne · 2006

Bruno is a German boy whose father becomes the commandant of a concentration camp, and the novel follows his friendship with a Jewish detainee named Shmuel. Bruno's understanding of what is happening around him is deliberately limited by his age, and the book's plot develops from that gap rather than from adult comprehension of the situation.

World War II fictionComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

The Clan of the Cave Bear

Jean M. Auel · 1980

A five-year-old girl named Ayla, who readers come to understand is Cro-Magnon, is orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake. She is taken in by a group of Neanderthals, and the novel follows her upbringing among people unlike her, in a story that speculates about the interactions between Neanderthal and modern human populations in prehistoric Europe.

Ancient world fictionFamily saga

Rating coming soon

White Fang

Jack London · 1906

White Fang is a wolf and dog cross who is raised among people and becomes a deadly fighter. The novel follows his journey in the opposite direction to the one Jack London had used in The Call of the Wild: it begins with a wild animal and traces his movement towards domestication, in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories during the Klondike gold rush.

Classic adventureWilderness adventure

Rating coming soon

Emma

Jane Austen · 1815

Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home, and she is also spoiled, headstrong and satisfied with herself. She overestimates her own abilities as a matchmaker, is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives, and her imagination frequently leads her astray. The novel is set in the village of Highbury and the estates around it.

Historical romanceComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 1922

Siddhartha sets out on a spiritual journey of self-discovery during the lifetime of the Gautama Buddha, and the novel follows his search rather than his arrival. It is written in a simple, lyrical style, and it is a compact work that reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom rather than a biography of its subject.

Modern classicsLiterary fiction

Rating coming soon

Island of the Blue Dolphins

Scott O'Dell · 1960

A young girl named Karana is stranded alone for years on an island off the California coast after being left behind by her family and her village. She learns to do the work that only the men of her tribe did before, and she has to deal with the hunters who visit the island as well as her own loneliness.

Survival fictionComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

Inside Out & Back Again

Thanhha Lai · 2011

In February 1975, Hà Kim and her family celebrate the new year in South Vietnam while the war continues. As the fall of Saigon approaches, she leaves school early, the search for her missing soldier father goes on, and the family prepares to evacuate. On 30 April they flee on a navy ship, and the novel follows the first year of their life in the United States.

Immigrant fictionComing-of-age

Rating coming soon

Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen · 2006

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was thrown by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early years of the Great Depression, and the circus he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just short of his degree, he was put in charge of the menagerie, where he met Marlena and an untrainable elephant named Rosie.

Historical romanceFamily saga

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The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton · 1920

Newland Archer is charming, tactful and thoroughly a product of the New York society of the 1870s. He accepts its standards and abides by its rules while recognising its limitations, and his engagement to May Welland promises him a safe and conventional future. Then May's cousin Ellen Olenska arrives, independent and separated from her husband, and Archer has to decide where his loyalty lies.

Literary historical fictionHistorical romance

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The Plot Against America

Philip Roth · 2004

An alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the Roth family through the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families are persecuted on various levels. The narrator is the young Philip, whose confusion and terror are rendered closely.

Literary historical fictionFamily novel

Rating coming soon

The Secret Life of Bees

Sue Monk Kidd · 2002

Lily Owens is fourteen, and her life has been shaped around a blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When her stand-in mother Rosaleen insults three of the town's most committed racists, Lily decides that the two of them should leave, and they travel to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town that holds the answer to her mother's past. There they are taken in by three beekeeping sisters.

Coming-of-ageFamily novel

Rating coming soon

O Jerusalem

Laurie R. King · 1999

Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are pursued by murderous strangers through the bazaars of Jerusalem in 1918. In Palestine they meet Mahmoud and Ali Hazr, two apparently Bedouin guides, and set out to counter a plot against the British administration under General Edmund Allenby, with Russell dressed as a young Bedouin man and learning Arabic as she goes.

Historical mysteryEspionage

What fits on this shelf

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.

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Historical fiction books

The historical fiction shelf

War and Peace

Wolf Hall

The Thorn Birds

Moby-Dick

Pride and Prejudice

Of Mice and Men

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Catch-22

A Tale of Two Cities

Shadow of the Storm

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Garden of Shadows

Knight Triumphant

By Right of Arms

Head in the Clouds

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Kite Runner

Heart of Darkness

The Scarlet Letter

Little Women

The Help

The Grapes of Wrath

Number the Stars

Treasure Island

The Lost Symbol

East of Eden

The Jungle

The Hired Girl

The Garden of Evening Mists

The Mirror and the Light

The Silver Sword

A Worthy Pursuit

Blake's Reach

Clara and the Cowboy

Fire Along the Sky

Oliver Twist

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Clan of the Cave Bear

White Fang

Emma

Siddhartha

Island of the Blue Dolphins

Inside Out & Back Again

Water for Elephants

The Age of Innocence

The Plot Against America

The Secret Life of Bees

O Jerusalem

What fits on this shelf

The other shelves

Romance

Fantasy

Sci-Fi

Horror

Mystery & Thriller

Literary Fiction

Adventure

Who writes about these books

Baby Bat