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 3 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonIn Providence, Rhode Island in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of an eleven-year-old boy named Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared. The boy's story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist, and the investigation places a real disappearance beside the kind of fiction its investigator writes. Edmund has almost no authority of his own, which is why he needs the writer.
Rating coming soonMary Russell continues as a student of Sherlock Holmes and an increasingly skilled investigator in her own right. Looking for rest in London after a stupefying visit from relatives, she meets a friend from Oxford who introduces her to a charismatic woman named Margery Childe, who leads the New Temple of God. Then a series of murders claims members of the movement.
Rating coming soonReturning home to Sussex one afternoon, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes find a stone in their garden that once belonged to the Imperial gardens in Kyoto. It brings back the spring of 1924, when on their way back from India they agreed to do a small but dangerous job for the emperor of Japan, and when Russell met a young Japanese woman who guided them into a secret meeting with the Prince Regent.
Rating coming soonThe shadows of war are drawing over the city of Fez, and Holmes badly wants the wisdom and courage of his wife, whom he has learned, to his horror, has gone missing. As Holmes searches for her, and Russell, suffering a temporary loss of memory, searches for herself, each of them tries to solve parallel puzzles before it is too late for them, for Africa and for the peace of Europe.
Rating coming soonAfter exposing a suitor's dishonourable intentions toward the daughter of a client, Harry Cartwright is hired by a wealthy marquis to solve a murder that takes place at a house party. The case is complicated by the host's wish to keep the matter discreet, which limits what can be asked and of whom.
Rating coming soonHours after returning from solving the riddle of The Moor, Holmes and Russell are visited by a bloodied stranger who pleads for their help. Recovered, he tells them the story of Marsh Hughenfort, younger brother of the Duke of Beauville, who returned to England on his brother's death and wants the truth about the death of the hall's expected heir, Gabriel Hughenfort, which scandalised the family during the First World War.
Rating coming soonTravelling incognito, Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes head for India to search for a missing spy, the man whose story is said to have inspired a famous imperial adventure novel. They find themselves caught in an intrigue that involves more than one government's interests in the region, and the search has to be conducted behind cover.
Rating coming soonIt began as a problem in one of Holmes's beehives, led to a murderous cult, and appeared to end with an escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have stirred the anger and the resources of the people they thwarted, and now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police and pursued across the Continent.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes investigate a death on Dartmoor, together with sightings of a phantom coach on the moor. The case places the two of them in a landscape whose legends are as much a part of the evidence as the physical traces, and the investigation has to separate the two.
Rating coming soonA Regency mystery in which a young woman becomes involved in an investigation, in the setting of a country England where the conventions of the period limit what a woman can ask and where she can go. It sits between the historical romance, the woman-detective story and the Regency novel rather than being a straightforward crime novel.
Rating coming soonEsperanza and her mother are forced to leave a life of wealth and privilege in Mexico for the labour camps of southern California, where Mexican farm workers are living through the years before the Great Depression. Esperanza has never had to work, and the novel follows her as she learns how, alongside people who have been doing it for years and in a place where her family's old standing is worth nothing.
Rating coming soonNel Wright and Sula Peace meet as children in the town of Medallion, Ohio, and their friendship survives the town's opinion of them, a secret they share and the very different lives they choose. Nel marries and stays; Sula leaves and comes back. The novel follows both women and the community around them across four decades.
Rating coming soonIn the gold country of California in 1850, Angel has been sold into prostitution as a child and expects nothing from men but betrayal. Michael Hosea, a farmer who believes he has been directed to marry her, does so and sets about loving her without conditions, and the novel follows her resistance and the flight that answers it.
Rating coming soonTwo boys are born on the same day in 1906 on opposite sides of the world: William Lowell Kane, the son of a Boston banking family, and Abel Rosnovski, born in a Polish forest and raised in poverty. Neither knows the other exists, and the novel follows the rivalry that grows between them over the next fifty years.
Rating coming soonIn sixteenth-century London, a poor boy named Tom Canty and the Prince of Wales discover that they look exactly alike, and they exchange clothes for a few minutes to see how it feels. The exchange is not undone, and each boy is taken for the other: Tom is treated as the heir to the throne while Edward is driven out into the city.
Rating coming soonThree children, three journeys. Josef is a Jewish boy leaving Nazi Germany by ship in 1939, Isabel is a Cuban girl sailing for Florida on a raft in 1994, and Mahmoud is a Syrian boy walking towards Europe in 2015. The stories are separated by decades and continents, and the book links them through the families and the objects they carry.
Rating coming soonJake Barnes lives in Paris in the 1920s among American and British expatriates, and he is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an attachment that cannot be consummated. The group travels south to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín, where the drinking, the bullfights and the tensions between them come to a head.
Rating coming soonIn 1959 Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary, takes his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. The family's belongings and beliefs are both transformed by the country they arrive in, and the novel is told by the five women who came with him.
Rating coming soonSadako Sasaki was born in Hiroshima and was in the city when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. By the time she is twelve she is ill with leukaemia, and recalling a Japanese legend that a sick person who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish, she begins to fold.
Rating coming soonOn a June evening in 1925, at their home on the Sussex Downs, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes take a telephone call about an old friend's aunt, who has not returned from a supervised outing from Bedlam. Russell has had a difficult few weeks, and the search for the missing woman takes her from the asylum to Venice.
Rating coming soonRoots begins with Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka youth captured near his village in the Gambia as a teenager and carried to North America, where he is sold into slavery and renamed. From his daughter Kizzy and her son Chicken George, the book follows seven generations of the same family through plantations, the Civil War and freedom, down to the author's own lifetime.
Rating coming soonAnna and her younger brother Caleb live on a prairie farm with their father, who advertises in a newspaper for a wife after their mother dies. Sarah Wheaton writes back from Maine and comes to stay for a month, bringing her cat, her seashell collection and her longing for the sea, while the children watch for any sign that she means to stay.
Rating coming soonHenry Fleming leaves his mother's farm to enlist in the Union Army, imagining battle as a parade of glory. In his first engagement he runs from the firing line, then wanders behind the lines among the wounded and the dying, ashamed of himself and longing for a wound of his own before he can face his regiment again.
Rating coming soonLeningrad, winter 1942. Lev, a seventeen-year-old arrested for taking a parachute from a German body, and Kolya, a cheerful deserter, are offered a way to avoid execution: find a dozen eggs for a Soviet colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their search takes them out of the starving city, through the wreckage of the front and towards the German lines.
Rating coming soonHercule Poirot is holidaying in Egypt when a wealthy young heiress, Linnet Ridgeway Doyle, is shot aboard the Nile steamer Karnak during a cruise south towards Abu Simbel. Almost everyone on the boat has a reason to dislike her, including the friend whose fiance she married, and Poirot has to work out how and when the killing happened.
Rating coming soonBeginning with a Welsh boy's first day in the coal mine in 1911, Fall of Giants follows five families, Welsh, English, German, American and Russian, through the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the campaign for votes for women. Coal owners, miners, embassy staff and orphans meet across the years as the old order breaks apart.
Rating coming soonRobert Jordan, an American attached to a Republican guerrilla band during the Spanish Civil War, is sent into the mountains to blow up a bridge during an offensive. He lives with the band in a cave, meets Maria, a young woman escaping the Nationalist advance, and waits for an order that will commit them to the attack.
Rating coming soonJess Goldberg grows up working-class and butch in the second half of the twentieth century, leaves home as a teenager and finds factory work, bar life and a community in Buffalo and New York. The novel follows her through police raids, hormones, violence and the search for a body and a life she can live in.
Rating coming soonIsabel Archer, a young American with more imagination than money, is taken to Europe by an aunt and refuses two good proposals to keep her independence. A legacy from her cousin changes her situation entirely, and the freedom it gives her becomes the ground on which two expatriates scheme to arrange her life for her.
Rating coming soonAda has never been allowed outside: her mother is ashamed of her club foot and keeps her shut in a London flat while she cares for her younger brother Jamie. When the city's children are evacuated in September 1939, Ada slips away with Jamie and is billeted in the countryside with Susan Smith, a woman who did not ask for either of them.
Rating coming soonIn February 1862, Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery. The novel follows Willie into the bardo, a space between death and rebirth peopled by ghosts who will not accept that they have died, and follows the grieving president who returns at night to hold his son's body.
Rating coming soonAnnis Wychwood is twenty-nine, wealthy, unmarried and long past the age when society expects her to marry. When she takes up the cause of Lucilla Carleton, a runaway heiress, she cannot avoid the girl's guardian, Oliver Carleton, a man with a reputation for rudeness, and the two of them meet far more often than either would choose.
Rating coming soonThe Ingalls family travels from Kansas to Minnesota and settles in a dugout cut into the bank of Plum Creek, near the town of Walnut Grove. Laura and Mary make friends and start school, their father plants a wheat crop on credit at the store, and a season of grasshoppers followed by a hard winter tests what the family has put into the farm.
Rating coming soonIn 866 the Danes attack Northumbria and kill the father of ten-year-old Uhtred, who is taken as a boy by the Danish earl who raised him and taught him to fight. When events send him into the service of Alfred of Wessex, Uhtred has to choose between the culture that made him and the kingdom that needs him.
Rating coming soonAyla and Jondalar, travelling with two horses and a wolf, reach the camp of the Mamutoi, the Mammoth Hunters, and are taken in by the Lion Camp. Ayla must learn the Mamutoi language and customs before she can be accepted, and the attentions of a man from another camp put the bond she and Jondalar have formed under strain, while the camp's ceremony and hierarchy shape what she is allowed to say.
Rating coming soonLucy Honeychurch travels to Florence with her cousin Charlotte, where the rooms they are given look out on a courtyard and the other guests at the pension prove more interesting than the guidebook. Back in England she becomes engaged to the cultured, condescending Cecil Vyse, and the question of what she actually wants refuses to settle. When the Emerson family moves into the neighbourhood, the argument she thought she had left in Italy starts again.
Rating coming soonBento Santiago tells the story of his life in retirement, beginning with his boyhood love for Capitu, the neighbour's daughter he was sent to a seminary to forget. He describes their marriage, his friendship with his school companion Escobar, and the suspicion about his wife that comes to define everything he remembers about his own household. The account belongs to the husband, so the reader has to weigh how much of it is evidence.
Rating coming soonTen-year-old Mia Tang lives with her parents in the motel they run, where her parents clean the rooms and she works the front desk for the owner, Mr. Yao. She also knows something she must not say: her parents let immigrants stay in the empty rooms for nothing, and one word to the owner would end everything.
Rating coming soonSara Crewe arrives from India as the richest pupil at Miss Minchin's London boarding school, and is kept as a show pupil because she has no mother and a wealthy father. When her father dies and his fortune turns out to be gone, Sara is stripped of her belongings and put to work as a servant in the same house.
Rating coming soonElizabeth Cameron, the Countess of Havenhurst, is discovered in the arms of Ian Thornton, a gambler whose wealth and lineage are both a mystery, and the scandal that follows changes her position in society. Years later the two meet again, each with reasons to distrust the other, and are drawn into an arrangement neither of them planned. Both believe the worst of the other and have their own reasons for it.
Rating coming soonThe long winter is over and the town of De Smet comes back to life around the Ingalls family. Laura is fifteen, takes her first paid work away from home, goes back to school, and sets out to earn a teaching certificate so that her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind.
Rating coming soonSet in Jamaica in the 1830s and 1840s, Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the early life of the woman Charlotte Bronte left in an English attic. Antoinette Cosway grows up on a ruined estate after the end of slavery, marries an Englishman who has come for her fortune, and is renamed and carried away from everything she knows.
Rating coming soonAyla and Jondalar, with their horses and the wolf, complete their journey across Europe and are greeted by the Zelandonii, Jondalar's own people, at the Ninth Cave. Ayla has to be accepted by a community that regards the Clan who raised her as animals, while her healing knowledge and her pregnancy shape how she is received.
Rating coming soonLaura Ingalls is fifteen and begins taking teaching posts to earn money so her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind. The first school is twelve miles from De Smet and the family she boards with is bleak, but the drives back to town in Almanzo Wilder's sleigh begin to change her plans for the future.
Rating coming soonClaire Randall, back in the twentieth century after the events of Dragonfly in Amber, goes looking for evidence that Jamie Fraser survived Culloden. The search through old documents produces a discovery that makes a return through the stones possible, and sends her back into a world where twenty years have passed for everyone but her.
Rating coming soonHank Morgan, the superintendent of a Hartford arms factory, is struck on the head during a fight and wakes in sixth-century Britain, where he is captured by one of King Arthur's knights. He works out where he is, saves himself from execution with an eclipse, and starts modernising the kingdom with schools, newspapers, telephone lines and industry.
Rating coming soonDavid Copperfield is born after his father's death and spends a happy early childhood with his mother and their housekeeper, Peggotty, before his mother remarries. Sent away to school and then to work in a London warehouse by his stepfather, he sets out to make his own life, helped by an eccentric great-aunt and a long series of friends.
Rating coming soonJohnny Tremain is a fourteen-year-old apprentice silversmith in Boston in 1775, badly burned when a crucible he has been told to hold breaks. With his hand ruined he has to find another trade, and the work he takes up brings him into the town's political circles just as the quarrel with Britain becomes the Revolutionary War.
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