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 6 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonTorak is twelve and living in the forest with his father in the Stone Age when a bear possessed by something evil kills the man and leaves the boy alone. He is joined by an orphaned wolf cub, and the two of them have to travel north to find help before the same creature finds them again.
Rating coming soonAtretes is a German warrior who won his freedom in the arena as a gladiator, and he means to go home to the forests he was taken from as a child. He takes with him a young Christian woman named Rizpah and her son, and the journey north runs through a Roman Empire that is not finished with any of them.
Rating coming soonIn Connecticut in 1666 an ancient spirit wakes in the woods, and the settlers who live near it have a name for him and a use for it. To Abitha, a young widow who is being squeezed out of the land her husband left her, he is the one thing in the colony that is not pretending to be respectable.
Rating coming soonLeonie de Conyers is an aristocratic young woman whose life is broken by the French Revolution and who lives afterwards in the shadow of the guillotine. Roger St. Eyre is an English nobleman who sets out to bring her to safety, without knowing what taking her out of France will cost either of them.
Rating coming soonTomi Nakaji is thirteen and mostly worried about baseball, school and a local bully, until the bombing of Pearl Harbor upends his family's life on Oahu. His father and grandfather are taken away to a camp on the mainland, neighbours start treating the Nakajis as enemies, and Tomi has to work out what loyalty means in a country that no longer trusts him.
Rating coming soonIn 1972, workers digging foundations in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well, and a mezuzah found beside it points the police towards the town's only Jewish resident. A hurricane then washes the scene away, and the novel travels back to the 1920s and 1930s and to Chicken Hill, where Black and Jewish families lived side by side and where a deaf boy needed hiding.
Rating coming soonEvery August from 1929, Joey Dowdel and his younger sister Mary Alice are put on a train out of Chicago and sent to spend a week in their grandmother's small Illinois town. Grandma Dowdel keeps a shotgun, holds her own against every neighbour who crosses her, and finds trouble wherever she looks, and over seven summers the children learn what their grandmother is really made of.
Rating coming soonOlivia Dunne, a Denver minister's daughter who had planned to study archaeology, finds herself pregnant and quickly married off to a farmer she has never met in southeastern Colorado. In a landscape of beet fields and wartime shortages she starts a life with a patient stranger and makes friends with two Japanese American sisters held at a camp nearby.
Rating coming soonIn 1900 a twelve-year-old girl is sent by boat to be married to a widower she has never met, and arrives at a family estate in Kerala where the household keeps a water tree, a family record marked with the names of the drowned. In every generation at least one member of the family dies in water, and the novel follows the girl who becomes Big Ammachi.
Rating coming soonTayo comes home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation after surviving the Pacific war and a Japanese prison camp and finds that sleep, drink and his own family cannot hold him together. His cousin Rocky died on the Bataan Death March, the reservation is caught in a drought, and the medicine men Tayo visits tell him his cure lies in stories older than the war.
Rating coming soonJohn Butler was four years old when Lenape warriors took him from his family's Pennsylvania farm, and eleven years later he is True Son, accepted as a son by the man who raised him. When a treaty obliged the Lenape to give up their white captives in 1764, he is handed back to a father he does not remember and a life he does not want.
Rating coming soonOn Christmas Eve the fiddlers and singers of the Mellstock parish choir make their rounds of the village, and the youngest of them, Dick Dewy, catches sight of the new schoolmistress at her window. Fancy Day has other suitors and a gift for the organ, and an incoming vicar's plans for church music threaten the choir Dick was born into.
Rating coming soonAshton Wingate's bride Lierin is lost to the river only days after their wedding, leaving the Mississippi planter to mourn a marriage that had barely begun. Three years later his carriage collides with a cloaked rider on horseback, and the woman carried into his house, wearing Lierin's face, wakes up with no memory of who she is.
Rating coming soonMariam is an illegitimate teenager from Herat, married off to a shoemaker in Kabul after a family tragedy. A generation later Laila grows up in the same city with more than Mariam ever had, until a loss of her own forces her to accept a proposal from Mariam's husband, and the two women's lives become one story. Around them the country they live in is being remade by war.
Rating coming soonIn 1843 two servants of a household in Canada West were convicted of murdering their employer and his housekeeper. James McDermott was hanged, and Grace Marks was imprisoned for life, her case argued over by everyone who read about it. Years later a young American doctor begins visiting her in the penitentiary, hoping to establish what a woman like her could possibly have done.
Rating coming soonMichelangelo Buonarroti is apprenticed to a painter's studio in Florence as a boy, is taken up by the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, and spends the next sixty years working in marble, paint and stone. The novel follows the sculptor from his first carved figure through the quarries, the workshops and the long quarrels with the popes and patrons who wanted him for themselves.
Rating coming soonChristy Mansel runs into her cousin Charles in Damascus, and because the two of them are young, rich and used to doing as they please, they decide to visit their eccentric Great-Aunt Harriet. The family has a rule against arriving unannounced at Dar Ibrahim, her crumbling palace in the Lebanese hills, and the cousins go anyway.
Rating coming soonHarrison William Shepherd is born in the United States and grows up in his mother's Mexico, where he mixes plaster for the mural painter Diego Rivera and then cooks for Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. He also works as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile, and the politics he witnesses there follow him north.
Rating coming soonJacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader making his living on the edges of colonial America when he accepts a young girl, Florens, from a debtor in place of payment and takes her home to his farm. His wife Rebekka came from England to marry a man she had never met, and the household they make is one of people who have all lost the places they came from.
Rating coming soonAgnes Magnusdottir is a servant in northern Iceland who has been condemned to death for the murder of two men, one of them her employer. While she waits for the sentence to be carried out she is sent to live with a farm family who do not want her, and the only person willing to listen to her account of what happened is a young priest.
Rating coming soonCharles Dickens is at the height of his fame in 1865 when a train he is travelling in runs off the rails at Staplehurst, and the disaster lays the ground for the last five years of his life. The man telling the story is his friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, whose account of Dickens cannot be trusted.
Rating coming soonWill Andrews leaves Harvard in the 1870s, persuaded by the writing of Emerson that a man should find an original relation to nature, and travels west. In the Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing he falls in with a hunter who tells him about a vast herd hidden away in the Colorado mountains, and puts up the money to join an expedition that goes after it.
Rating coming soonMark Castallack is a proud and difficult man who brings his bride Janna home to Penmarric, the great house on the Cornish coast that gives the family its name and its standing. What follows is a feud inside one family, carried on by children and grandchildren, with the house and the land it stands on as the prize.
Rating coming soonPaul-Edward Logan is the son of a prosperous white landowner and a woman of Black and Native American ancestry, and he is raised openly by his father in Georgia after the Civil War. He looks white, which means Black people distrust him and white people turn on him when they learn about his mother, and he has to find a place of his own.
Rating coming soonSarai is a princess of Ur in Mesopotamia, and a serious, dutiful one compared with her older sister Qira, who is to marry a desert prince named Lot. Sarai has been promised to the temple as a priestess, until Lot arrives with his uncle Abram, who tells her that he will come back one day and marry her himself.
Rating coming soonEcho Sackett has never been far from her Tennessee home until the day she sets out for Philadelphia to collect an inheritance left to her family. She is sixteen, she can handle herself as well as any of the Sackett men, and the city lawyer who means to take the money from her has no idea what he has taken on.
Rating coming soonGeorge Mallory is a Cambridge graduate and a climber with a reputation for going on where other men turn back, and his ambition is the summit of Everest. The novel follows his expeditions and his marriage, and it takes seriously the old question of whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the top of the mountain in 1924, twenty-nine years before anyone else.
Rating coming soonThe bells are ringing for Elizabeth in the autumn of 1558, and the country she inherits is bankrupt and divided. Her adviser tells her she can only hold it by marrying a strong prince, but the man she wants is Robert Dudley, who is already married, and Amy, his wife, has no intention of setting him free. Around the queen, a court of ambitious men watches to see which way her favour will fall.
Rating coming soonHetty Grimke, known as Handful, is an enslaved girl in an early nineteenth-century Charleston household, and she wants a life on the other side of its walls. Sarah Grimke grows up in the same house certain that she is meant for something large, and on her eleventh birthday the two of them are handed a relationship neither of them chose.
Rating coming soonKing David of Israel is old, close to death and in no mood to make his memoirs tidy. He remembers the sheep, the prophet Samuel, the giant Goliath, Saul and Jonathan, Bathsheba and the arrangements around her, and the children whose quarrels he could never settle, and he argues with God about all of it.
Rating coming soonKatherine de Roet is the daughter of a minor knight from Flanders with no prospects of her own apart from a sister who serves the queen and is to marry Geoffrey Chaucer. Through that connection she marries Sir Hugh Swynford, and through her husband's service she meets John of Gaunt, the duke whose notice changes the whole course of her life.
Rating coming soonRodrigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander VI, and his belief that his office will excuse anything is the assumption his family lives on. His son Cesare is an ambitious soldier and politician, his daughter Lucrezia is married off to one husband after another for the sake of alliances, and the family's interests are always the first question in Rome. The city's other powers have to decide whether to work with them.
Rating coming soonWhen Yance Sackett's sister-in-law is taken from her home, the family has one response. Yance and his brother Kin leave their Carolina settlement and ride north into country they do not know, following the men who took her and expecting to be welcome nowhere along the way. They are travelling towards a frontier where kidnapping, the slave trade and the claims of the nations whose land they cross all have to be answered.
Rating coming soonNed Kelly writes the story of his own life for the child he will never meet, beginning with his father, an Irishman transported to Van Diemen's Land and settled in the colony of Victoria. From the family's farm at Avenel to the years on the run, the account is Kelly's own, and it is written for a country that never stopped arguing about him.
Rating coming soonConstanta is dying when a stranger saves her, and the life he offers her turns out to be one of obedience inside his household. Over the centuries that follow she comes to understand what her rescuer is, and she begins to ask whether she and his other consorts have any way out of the house he has made.
Rating coming soonJody Tiflin is ten years old and lives on his father's ranch, where the work is hard, the grown men are mostly busy and the days have a shape he has grown used to. Then he is given a red pony of his own, and looking after it teaches him things about birth, illness and death that the ranch hands could not have explained to him.
Rating coming soonTwenty children are living at a boarding school in the French countryside during the German occupation, and they agree to hide ten Jewish children among them. When soldiers come to the school with questions, the arithmetic of the arrangement becomes a matter of life and death for everybody in the building, and the youngest of them are the ones who have to keep their answers straight.
Rating coming soonNed Begay is sent to a boarding school where he is taught that his own language is useless, and punished for using it. Then the Marine Corps comes looking for Navajo men, and the language he was told to forget becomes the basis of a code the American military uses through the islands of the Pacific.
Rating coming soonVictorian London has a murderer the newspapers have christened Jack the Ripper, and the police have nothing to show for their investigation. A well-off young woman, more interested in dead bodies and forensic work than in the marriage her family has in mind for her, decides that she is going to work out who he is, using the parts of London society that the police cannot enter.
Rating coming soonDouglas Sherbrooke, Earl of Northcliffe, needs an heir, and an heir means a wife, so he sets about acquiring one. Alexandra Chambers, the youngest daughter of the Duke of Beresford, has loved him since she was fifteen, but the sister everyone considers incomparable is the one he had in mind, and the two families have their own ideas about how it should end.
Rating coming soonLondon, 1890, and a fine art dealer named Edmund Carstairs comes to Baker Street to ask for help. A man in a flat cap has followed him all the way from America and means him harm, and in the days that follow his house is robbed and his family is threatened, so that a case beginning as a matter of intimidation leads somewhere the doctor is careful about setting down.
Rating coming soonIn July 1916, Chet Roscow is fascinated by the newspaper reports of a great white shark attacking people along the New Jersey shore, not far from the town where he is living. He reads the accounts the way a boy reads a ghost story, until the day he goes swimming in Matawan Creek himself.
Rating coming soonEnola Holmes is the much younger sister of the detective Sherlock Holmes, and she has been brought up quietly in the country by a mother who does not care what the neighbours think. On her fourteenth birthday her mother disappears, leaving a small amount of money and no explanation, and Enola's older brothers arrive to arrange her future.
Rating coming soonTom Barton and his uncle Jack are smugglers, and they are good at it: quick wits, a fast vessel and secret cargo holds have kept them ahead of the authorities for years. What they are carrying through Europe in the 1500s is more dangerous than the goods they usually run, and the people who want it stopped have the power of the law behind them.
Rating coming soonLara had been told that her husband was lost at sea, and the marriage he left behind was cold, formal and unloving, so she had made her peace with being a widow. Then a man walks into her life claiming to be Hunter, Earl of Hawksworth, and proving what he says with private details that only a husband could possibly have known.
Rating coming soonHenry Smart is born in the Dublin slums in 1901, the son of a one-legged whorehouse bouncer, and he has to grow up fast because the city gives him no other option. He is in the General Post Office during the Easter Rising as a boy soldier, and he carries what he learns there into the guerrilla war that follows.
Rating coming soonLucas loves football more than anything except Benny, his father's friend, who is a firefighter and a former football player. When his parents decide the sport is too dangerous and tell him to stop, Lucas goes to the one person who will understand, and he happens to be in New York on a Tuesday morning in September 2001.
Rating coming soonLaura Ingalls lives with her Ma and Pa, her older sister Mary and the baby Carrie in an isolated log cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, where the nearest neighbour is miles away and the family lives off what it can grow, hunt and preserve. The book follows a year of that life, from the work of autumn through a winter spent almost entirely in the cabin.
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