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 4 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonUrsula Todd is born on a snowbound night in 1910, dies before she can take a breath, and is born again a few pages later. As her lives accumulate she moves through the decades around two world wars, and each version of her history gives her another chance to act on what the previous one taught her.
Rating coming soonThe Ingalls family leave their house in the Wisconsin woods and travel west by covered wagon into Kansas Territory, where Pa builds a one-room log house on land the Osage have been moved from. The family plants and hunts, meets a neighbour living alone on the prairie, and then learns they are living where they should not be.
Rating coming soonMaurice Hall is a schoolboy when a teacher explains the facts of life to him, and the explanation leaves him quite unprepared for what he feels for other men. The novel follows him through Cambridge, a failed affair and a period spent trying to cure himself, until a relationship with a gamekeeper's son gives him a way to live.
Rating coming soonIn 1832 thirteen-year-old Charlotte Doyle sails from England to join her family in America as the only passenger on a merchant ship. Caught between a murderous captain and a crew preparing to mutiny, she has to decide who to believe, and the voyage changes what she thinks a young woman of her class is able to do.
Rating coming soonFour young people make their way across the winter of 1945 towards the Baltic coast, hoping to board a ship out of the path of the advancing Soviet army. Their separate journeys converge on the liner Wilhelm Gustloff, packed with refugees, and on a disaster that few histories of the war mention and that the novel sets out to recover.
Rating coming soonIn England in 1020 a boy watches his mother die and decides to become a healer. Barred from studying medicine at home, Rob Cole travels across Europe and into Persia, where he conceals who he is in order to enter the school of a famous physician, and learns a medicine that Europe has not yet imagined.
Rating coming soonAt the end of the Second World War, four damaged people are living in a ruined Italian villa: a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief and a burned man who cannot remember his own name. As they care for the patient his past as a desert explorer returns in fragments, and the others reveal what the war has cost them.
Rating coming soonHugo Cabret is an orphan living in the walls of a busy Paris train station in the 1930s, keeping the station clocks and stealing what he needs to repair an automaton his father left him. His thefts bring him to the attention of a toy-seller, and to the story of the man behind the machine.
Rating coming soonThe Battle of Gettysburg is told over three days from the point of view of the officers who fought it, among them Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet for the South and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain for the North. The novel follows their decisions and the ground they have to take or hold, with the outcome of the war resting on them.
Rating coming soonIn an Indian city in 1975 and then during the Emergency of the mid-1980s, four people are thrown together: two tailors from a village, a young student, and a widow who takes them in as lodgers. The novel follows the arrangement they make, the pressures that force it apart, and how far the Emergency lets any of them go to protect themselves.
Rating coming soonWalter Moody arrives in Hokitika on the New Zealand goldfields in 1866 and walks into a meeting of twelve men who are trying to work out a series of crimes committed in the town. Each of them holds a piece of the story, and the novel assembles them into a structure that mirrors the heavens.
Rating coming soonJean Louise Finch, twenty-six and living in New York, returns to her home town of Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her father Atticus and finds the place changed less than she has. What she discovers about the people she grew up with forces her to separate the father she loves from the man he actually is.
Rating coming soonDavid Balfour, seventeen and newly orphaned, is cheated of his inheritance by an uncle and sold to a ship's captain to be carried to America. He survives a wreck and a stay on a small island, joins the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart, and is hunted across the Highlands for a murder he did not commit.
Rating coming soonTim Meeker's older brother Sam joins the rebel army at the start of the American Revolution while the family's store and tavern in Redding, Connecticut, are caught between the two sides. Tim has to decide where he stands, and the war takes the family's trade, its neutrality and finally its members, leaving him to work out what the argument was worth.
Rating coming soonTravis Coates is fourteen and in charge of the family farm in Texas with his mother and small brother while his father is away driving cattle, when a stray dog comes to the house and steals meat. Travis wants the dog gone, but the animal turns out to be useful, and the two of them become partners in the work of the farm.
Rating coming soonDaniel bar Jamin saw his father crucified by Roman soldiers and has lived in the mountains with a band of rebels ever since, waiting for the chance to fight. When his sister is left alone and unwell he has to care for her, and the teacher he meets near Capernaum asks him to give up the hatred he has built his life on.
Rating coming soonCaddie Woodlawn is eleven and growing up in Wisconsin in the 1860s, running wild with her brothers while her mother wants her to become a lady. The family has settled near a Native American community, and the novel follows Caddie's adventures, the practical work of a frontier farm and the trouble her curiosity creates.
Rating coming soonIn a Japanese prison camp in Singapore during the Second World War, an American corporal called King has built a position for himself by trading with the guards and the other prisoners. Peter Marlowe, a captured RAF officer, is drawn into his operation, and the novel follows what survival costs in a place with no rules.
Rating coming soonIn 1915, after The Birth of a Nation casts its spell over the country, the Ku Klux Klan grows in number and something else comes with it: the Klansmen are not entirely human. Maryse Boudreaux hunts them with a sword, and she and her companions follow the trail back to the source of the power.
Rating coming soonTwin sisters Stella and Desiree Vignes run away from the small Louisiana town of Mallard as teenagers, and their lives separate completely. Desiree returns years later with a daughter, while Stella passes for white, marries and disappears into a life in California, and the novel follows the generation that comes after both of them.
Rating coming soonNan King works in her family's oyster house in Whitstable until she sees Kitty Butler perform as a male impersonator and follows her to London. Nan becomes part of the act, and then has to make her own way through the music halls, the streets and the households of 1890s London.
Rating coming soonJoey, a farm horse, is sold to the army in the First World War and taken to France, where he passes between owners on both sides of the front. His first owner's son, Albert, is too young to enlist, and the novel follows both of them towards the same war and the search for each other.
Rating coming soonKimball O'Hara is an orphaned boy growing up on the streets of Lahore in British India, able to pass between communities and languages. He attaches himself to a Tibetan lama who is looking for a holy river, and then to the British secret service, and the novel follows both apprenticeships at once.
Rating coming soonHoward W. Campbell Jr, an American who grew up in Germany, became a famous playwright and then a broadcaster of Nazi propaganda. He is also, by his own account, an American agent, and the novel is his memoir, written in an Israeli prison while he waits to be tried for what he said on the radio.
Rating coming soonDuring the French and Indian War the daughters of a British commander are escorted through the wilderness towards a fort under siege, accompanied by an outlawed scout called Hawkeye and two Mohican men, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. The journey becomes a pursuit by enemy forces and by Huron warriors after a guide betrays the party.
Rating coming soonAlexandra Bergson inherits the family farm on the Nebraska Divide when her father dies, and makes it succeed while her brothers doubt her judgement. The novel follows the family for more than a decade, and then turns to the next generation and to the people Alexandra has loved, among them the man she has waited for since she was young.
Rating coming soonIn a Mexican state where the church has been suppressed, a whisky priest is the last of his kind still at large, moving between villages and avoiding the police. He is not a good man, and the novel follows his flight and the people who shelter or betray him as the pursuit closes in.
Rating coming soonThomas Sutpen arrives in a Mississippi town with a group of enslaved people and builds a plantation out of nothing, and the novel is the story of what he did and what it cost his family. Several narrators reconstruct it, among them his son, his friend and a student at Harvard who hears the story second-hand.
Rating coming soonIn a small town in Georgia in the 1950s, a store owner named Paris Trout kills the younger sister of a man he has been doing business with and wounds the man's mother. The killing follows a car deal that went wrong, and the town has to decide what it is prepared to do about a man everybody knows.
Rating coming soonBeth is married to Frank, a farmer, and the two of them have built a life on the understanding that the past stays where it is. Then Frank's brother shoots a dog that has been worrying the sheep, and the dog turns out to belong to Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager, who has come back to the village with his young son.
Rating coming soonMarguerite is the heir to a fortune until she is orphaned and her guardian takes charge of both her money and her life, spending the inheritance and taking her with him on an expedition to New France. On the voyage she and the guardian's servant fall in love, and when the affair is discovered the two of them are punished and left on a small island with no prospect of rescue.
Rating coming soonIt is 1928, and Matilda Simpkin, once a militant in the suffrage campaign who was jailed five times, now lives on lectures and small routines. Finding an old wooden club in a cupboard brings the past back, and a meeting with an old comrade who has joined the Fascists convinces her that a new cause has arrived. She starts a club for girls.
Rating coming soonAiley Pearl Garfield grows up in a northern city and spends her summers in Chicasetta, Georgia, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors were brought from Africa. Her grandmother expects her to become a doctor and Ailey wants to be a historian. The book moves between her own life and the generations before her, from slavery through the civil rights movement to the present.
Rating coming soonFlora is a young woman of mixed parentage who belongs fully to neither of the worlds she moves between. The story follows her from a remote village in western China to Shanghai and then to England, where her history is as much a problem as an opportunity. She grows up being told what she is by people who have decided in advance.
Rating coming soonTess Meredith and Raven Following grew up sharing the Montana plains, and the hardships that fell on the Sioux drove Raven away from his people and from her. He has rebuilt his life in Chicago as a different man, and then Tess arrives there, having become a suffragette. She is there to fight for the causes she believes in, not to find him.
Rating coming soonA tenth-century Arab diplomat, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, is sent north and falls in with a company of Vikings, who take him with them to a settlement that is being attacked by something nobody can describe. The account of the journey is presented as his manuscript, and the second half of the book retells the story of Beowulf.
Rating coming soonThe novel covers a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, and follows three people through it: Stephen Dedalus, a young man with literary ambitions, Leopold Bloom, who sells advertising space, and Bloom's wife Molly. Almost nothing of consequence happens, and everything is in it. Much of the book is spent inside the heads of the three of them.
Rating coming soonHadassah is a young Jewish believer whose family is killed when Jerusalem falls to the Romans in AD 70, and who is then taken to Rome and sold. She is bought by a wealthy family to serve their daughter Julia, a wilful girl with no interest in restraint, and has to keep her own faith hidden in order to survive.
Rating coming soonAyla and Jondalar are travelling west along the Great Mother River, away from the lands of the Mammoth Hunters and towards the country Jondalar was born in. The journey crosses the territories of many peoples, each with its own customs and its own way of treating strangers, and the two of them have to find a way through all of them.
Rating coming soonIn 1558 the cathedral at Kingsbridge is still standing, and Europe is dividing along religious lines. Ned Willard comes home hoping to marry Margery Fitzgerald, whose family has taken the other side in that division, and the split between them becomes part of a conflict that runs for nearly fifty years.
Rating coming soonJack's aunt must sell the family house and it still is not enough to clear her debts. Twelve-year-old Jack sails for California to find gold, taking the family butler with him, and the two of them discover that a gold rush is far more crowded, far more expensive and a great deal less glamorous than they had imagined it.
Rating coming soonGillian lost her sister as a child and watched her father killed by a baron who wanted a jewelled box belonging to King John. Years later, while she is searching the border country for her sister, she is taken by a Scottish laird who has his own reasons for holding on to her and for keeping her alive.
Rating coming soonProfessor William Waterman Sherman sets out to cross the Pacific alone in a balloon, intending to spend a year by himself above the ocean. Three weeks later he is pulled out of the Atlantic surrounded by the wreckage of twenty balloons, and the account he gives of how he got there makes up the rest of the novel.
Rating coming soonHadassah was thrown to the lions in the arena, and the young physician who chose her body to study finds that she is still alive. She is carried away to heal in secret while the man whose family she once served begins to look for the faith she would not give up, even when it cost her everything.
Rating coming soonA boy lives with his sharecropper family and their dog, Sounder. When his father is jailed for stealing a ham from the place where he works in order to feed them, the family loses what little security it had, and the boy goes out to make his own way by learning to read.
Rating coming soonHeather Simmons is an orphan in London, put into service and then forced onto a ship bound for America. Brandon Birmingham, a wealthy planter, comes across her at the docks and takes her with him, and the marriage that follows is not one that either of them chose or wanted at that moment.
Rating coming soonPeekay is an English-speaking boy in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, sent away to a boarding school where being English among Afrikaans children is reason enough to be a target. The people he meets along the way shape the rest of his childhood and decide what he will do with it.
Rating coming soonThe Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, live in a London of books, music and conversation, while the Wilcox family lives in a London of business and property. Between them stands Howards End, the Hertfordshire house where the two families and the people they have damaged have to work out what they owe one another.
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