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 5 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThomas Peaceful is a soldier in France, looking back over his life from a village childhood in Devon to the farm he worked on and the girl he grew up with. His brother Charlie is somewhere nearby, and Tommo has a single night in which to remember how the two of them came to be where they are now.
Rating coming soonSir Waldo Hawkridge is thirty-five, unmarried and famous in society for his athletic skill, which is why everyone calls him the Nonesuch. When a cousin he has never met leaves him a ramshackle property in the West Riding, he travels north to look at what he has inherited, and his arrival turns the neighbourhood upside down.
Rating coming soonJemmy is an orphan kept in a palace for one purpose: whenever Prince Horace misbehaves, Jemmy is punished in his place. He has learned to read, write and do mathematics while living in the castle, he is beaten several times a day, and he would rather be back out on the streets that he came from.
Rating coming soonUther, High King of Britain, is dead, and his only heir is an infant. The king's illegitimate nephew Arthur takes charge of the country as its protector, holding together kingdoms that are ready to fall apart while enemies arrive from across the sea and the loyalties of the men who served the old king come into question.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonSeymour Levov, known to everyone as the Swede, is a successful businessman and a former school athlete in Newark, New Jersey, and his life looks settled from the outside. Then the politics of the 1960s reach into his own household, and the ordinary American happiness that he had built for his family comes apart.
Rating coming soonJudah Ben-Hur is a prince of Jerusalem whose life is overturned when someone he had trusted accuses him, and he is enslaved and sent to the galleys. From there he works his way back, through a sea battle and a chariot race, towards his family and the man who had ruined him.
Rating coming soonIn 1943 a British aircraft comes down in occupied France, and the woman who survives is taken prisoner by the Germans. The account of how she came to be there, and of the pilot who was flying her, is written by a captive who tells the story she has to tell in order to stay alive.
Rating coming soonThe battle of Thermopylae is told by Xeones, a free non-citizen of Sparta who is one of only three Greeks to come out of the pass alive. He describes how he came to Sparta, what he was taught there, and what the three hundred did in the narrow pass between the mountains and the sea.
Rating coming soonIt is 1926 and the city is Harlem, where a man in his fifties has killed the girl he was in love with and his wife has taken a knife to the body at the funeral. The story of all three of them, and of what brought each of them to that room, reaches back into the American South of the previous century.
Rating coming soonIn 1842, thirteen-year-old Maria Merryweather is left an orphan and goes to live with her guardian in a village in the West Country of England. Moonacre Manor is beautiful, the village is charming, and the whole estate is under an old curse that has been running for generations and that nobody living there is willing to explain.
Rating coming soonElizabeth Woodville is a young widow with two sons when she puts herself in the path of King Edward IV to ask for her late husband's estate back. The two of them marry in secret, and the match makes enemies of the men who had believed they controlled the king, since the family she brings with her becomes a political problem for the crown.
Rating coming soonThe Wart is a boy being raised in the household of Sir Ector, with no idea that he is anyone important. When the magician Merlyn arrives to tutor him and Sir Ector's son Kay, the lessons turn into a series of transformations into fish, hawks, badgers and snakes, none of which quite explain what the magician is preparing him for.
Rating coming soonIt is 1799 and Richard Sharpe is a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot, serving in southern India, with a talent for trouble and no prospect of promotion. Sent into the enemy camp in disguise, he finds himself in a siege that will make a hero out of a soldier the army would rather forget.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonMoose Flanagan is twelve years old in 1935, when his father takes a job as an electrician and guard on Alcatraz, and the family moves onto the island. Moose has to make a life in the strangest neighbourhood in America while also looking after his sister Natalie, who needs more help than anyone else gives her.
Rating coming soonA team of archaeologists opens a tell in Israel, the mound left behind by one settlement built on top of another across thousands of years. Each layer they cut through releases the story of the people who lived on that ground, from a Canaanite town to a family in the twentieth century.
Rating coming soonHelen Irvine is eighteen and has just married Lord Giles Cardross, a man some years older than she is. She is also convinced that he married her out of duty rather than affection, and her attempts to manage the situation without asking him anything produce a series of disasters for both of them, made worse by a brother whose gambling keeps emptying her purse.
Rating coming soonRobin is ten years old and about to be sent away to serve as a knight's page when illness takes the use of his legs. With the plague sweeping through London and the household that was to take him in emptied by it, he is left behind with nothing to do and has to find another way of being useful in a country that has already decided what a boy like him can be.
Rating coming soonHolling Hoodhood is the only Presbyterian in his seventh-grade class, which means that every Wednesday afternoon, while his classmates go off to religious instruction elsewhere, he stays behind with Mrs Baker, a teacher he is convinced dislikes him. Over the school year of 1967 and 1968 the two of them read Shakespeare together, while the war in Vietnam and Holling's father's expectations close in on him.
Rating coming soonGrace Melbury comes home from school to the woodland village where she grew up and finds that she has risen above the man she was expected to marry. Giles Winterborne is an honest woodsman, and the education that was meant to improve her chances has made the two of them impossible for each other in the eyes of everyone around them.
Rating coming soonFrances McGrath is twenty and training as a nurse in Southern California when she is told that women can be heroes, and she joins the Army Nurse Corps to serve in Vietnam. Her family tells her that women do not go to war, and the country she comes home to tells her the same thing again, which leaves her with the years she lived through and nobody willing to hear about them.
Rating coming soonThe Logans are farming in Mississippi in 1935, and the Depression has made a hard life harder for everyone in their community. Cassie Logan watches the adults around her work out how to keep the land, the family and their standing with their neighbours while the law, the county's white residents and the falling price of cotton make all three uncertain.
Rating coming soonNaomi Nakane is a schoolteacher in her thirties when the news of her uncle's death sends her back to the aunt who raised her and to the years she has spent not thinking about. Her family were Japanese Canadians, and the war took their houses, their work, their freedom and, for a long time afterwards, any way of speaking about what had happened to them.
Rating coming soonAt Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland, officers who have broken down in the trenches are sent to be treated and returned to the front. Among the patients are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the doctor who has to decide what recovery is supposed to mean in a war like this one.
Rating coming soonAzriel is a spirit summoned out of the ancient world and bound to serve whoever holds him, and in present-day New York he watches a young woman be murdered. He decides to act for himself rather than for a master, and to explain what he has become he tells the story of the life he was taken from, beginning with his family in Babylon and the bargain that turned a merchant's son into a servant of the bones.
Rating coming soonZoya 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.
Rating coming soonIn Maine in 1789 the Kennebec River freezes over, and the body of a man is found locked in the ice. Martha Ballard is called out to examine him because she is the midwife and healer for the district, and the death turns out to be connected to a case she is already entangled in.
Rating coming soonAnn Hamilton is ten years old in 1784 when her family settles on land west of the Allegheny Mountains, in a cabin whose door faces west because that is the way the family came from. She is lonely for the town she left behind, and then a stranger rides up to the house and everything about the place looks different.
Rating coming soonRichard Shelton is a young man in the England of the Wars of the Roses, and the guardian who is supposed to protect him and his inheritance is not to be trusted. When a black arrow carries a threat of vengeance into the forest, Richard has to work out who killed his father and which side of the war he belongs to.
Rating coming soonIn the winter of 1940 German troops arrive in a small Norwegian village and take it over, and nobody there expects to be able to do anything about it. Then Peter Lindstrom's uncle explains what the children can do with their sleds, and a plan begins that puts the country's gold bullion and their own lives on the same sled run down the hill.
Rating coming soonIn 1868 a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a deserted tower with crucifixes, holy water and a rifle, and prays to survive the night. He has already decided that if he lives, he will write down everything that led him there, and the novel is the record he produces, assembled from his own diaries and the letters of the people who were caught up in the same events.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and Sherlock Holmes come home to Sussex in 1924 after seven months travelling in India and Japan, and within days Holmes's estranged son arrives asking for help. A woman and a child have disappeared, the search leads into a religious community in the English countryside and then to Scotland, and the whole case is bound up with the personal failure Holmes has never been able to settle.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have built a working partnership over a decade, and each of them has secrets that the other has learned to leave alone. This time the secrets belong to the household around them: the housekeeper who has kept Holmes's house since long before Russell arrived, and who has a history of her own that nobody in the house has ever thought to ask about.
Rating coming soonIn a West African city recovering from a long civil war, a dying man named Elias Cole spends his last weeks talking about a woman he was obsessed with and her husband, whose life he ruined. A psychologist newly arrived from England listens, and a local surgeon who lived through the war has his own account of what happened.
Rating coming soonMadeleine McCarthy is eight years old when her father's posting takes the family to a quiet air force station near the Canadian border in the early 1960s. The base is friendly and orderly, the Cold War is being watched from the other side of the fence, and then a child goes missing from the neighbourhood and the local investigation reaches into her own household.
Rating coming soonHaiwen is buying bananas in a supermarket in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, the girl he knew in Shanghai, for the first time in sixty years. To him it feels like a second chance; to her it is an interruption of a life she has survived by refusing to look back.
Rating coming soonLittle Nettlebed is a village where the uncanny is part of ordinary life: strange creatures wash up on the riverbed and ravens settle on the roofs of people who are about to die. Then the villagers begin to hear barking at night, and one of them claims that he has watched the Mansfield sisters change shape in front of him in the lane outside his own house.
Rating coming soonLaura 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.
Rating coming soonParis in 1871 is a city under siege and then a city in revolt, and Babette is an artist's model in the middle of it. Around her the people she knows have to decide what they believe and whom they will stand with at the barricades, and an affair none of them can control threatens everything that one of them values.
Rating coming soonIn 1886 Agnes Foster is told to leave the orphanage in New York where she grew up and make her own way in the world. She takes a teaching post in Persimmon Hollow, a town in frontier Florida that she has never seen and knows only from a newspaper advertisement, and arrives with her Catholic faith and not much else.
Rating coming soonClaire Fraser has lived in the North Carolina backcountry with her husband Jamie for years, keeping the secret of where she came from. The colonies are moving towards a war that she knows the outcome of, and the family she has built in the eighteenth century is caught between the side it belongs to and what is coming.
Rating coming soonIt is late summer in 1793 and Philadelphia is filling with mosquitoes and rumours of fever. The deaths begin near the docks, and then the serving girl at the coffeehouse where fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook works becomes one of them, and the wealthier families begin leaving the city while the people who cannot afford to go stay behind.
Rating coming soonHenry Montague was raised to be a gentleman and has spent his life avoiding it, with the gambling halls and the late nights and the company of whoever he pleased. His father's last attempt at reform is a grand tour of Europe with his best friend and his sister, and the tour goes wrong almost immediately when somebody else's property ends up in his hands.
Rating coming soonErienne Fleming's father, the mayor of a small town in the north of England, owes money to everyone he has ever met, and her brother has been maimed in a duel fought over the family's honour. The plan to repair both is to marry Erienne to a wealthy suitor, whether she agrees to the match or not.
Rating coming soonClaire Randall has kept her secrets for twenty years, and she is returning to Scotland with her grown daughter to tell the truth about them. What she has to explain involves the Jacobite rising, the Battle of Culloden and the husband she left behind in the eighteenth century, and her daughter has never been told any of it.
Rating coming soonIn a Yorkshire mill town during the Napoleonic wars, the machinery that keeps the local economy going is being destroyed by men who have no work, and the mill owners are waiting for the army to arrive. Two young women in the neighbourhood are deciding what to do with their lives while the men around them argue about trade and wages.
Rating coming soonJim overhears that he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, and he runs while he works out what to do next. At the same time Huck Finn has faked his own death, and the two of them set off down the river together, with Jim's own account of the journey replacing the one that readers know.
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