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 7 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonWhen Mr Dashwood dies, the estate passes to his son by his first marriage, and his second wife and three daughters are left with very little to live on. Taken in by a distant relative, Elinor and Marianne must each find their way in a world where a woman's marriage is the only security available, and where feeling and prudence pull the two sisters in opposite directions.
Rating coming soonIn the provincial town of Middlemarch, in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, Dorothea Brooke marries a scholar she believes will give her a life of useful work, and Tertius Lydgate arrives as a new doctor with plans to reform the medicine of the town. Both of those ambitions meet the expectations of a community in which everyone knows everyone else's business.
Rating coming soonA young widow called Helen Graham arrives at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion that has stood empty for years, with her small son and one servant. She keeps to herself, sells her paintings for money and refuses to explain her past, and the village decides that a woman living like that must be hiding something, until the man who falls in love with her learns the truth.
Rating coming soonTess Durbeyfield is sixteen, the eldest child of a haggler in a poor rural family, when the local parson tells her father that his surname is a corruption of d'Urberville and that he is descended from an ancient Norman family. Her father celebrates by drinking, the family's wagon crashes on the road to market, and the loss of their horse starts everything that follows.
Rating coming soonIn the late summer and autumn of 1952, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's farm in rural Arkansas alongside hired Mexican workers and a family of hill people from the Ozarks. His family is in debt and the harvest has to pay for the whole year, and over the months that follow Luke sees and hears things that the adults around him would far rather he had not.
Rating coming soonAgnes Grey is the younger daughter of a clergyman whose attempt to improve the family's fortunes leaves them poorer than before, and she decides that she will support herself as a governess. What follows is a series of positions in gentry households where the children are ungovernable, the parents careless and her own position somewhere between a servant and a guest.
Rating coming soonTom and Maggie Tulliver grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire. Maggie is clever and hungry for affection, and her brother Tom is the one sent away to be educated and given authority in the family, and the difference in what is expected of the two of them shapes everything that happens between the brother and sister.
Rating coming soonSimon Basset, Duke of Hastings, comes back to London in 1813 with a reputation for arrogance and no intention of ever marrying. Daphne Bridgerton is the eldest daughter of a large and noisy family whose mother has pushed her into the marriage market, and the two of them agree to a pretence that will keep the matchmaking mothers of the ton away from both of them for the season.
Rating coming soonA correspondence that began as an exchange of letters has continued long enough for Sir Phillip Crane to feel that he knows Miss Bridgerton, although the two of them have never met. He writes to invite her to visit him, on the understanding that they may find they suit, and the visit is not what either of them had pictured from the letters.
Rating coming soonMichael Stirling is known in London as a rake, and the moment his life changed was the first time he saw Francesca Bridgerton. She married his cousin instead, and Michael spent years away from England, coming home when that marriage ended and finding that the woman he could never speak to honestly is now available, free and in need of a friend.
Rating coming soonAfter her mother dies, Whitney Stone's father cannot manage her high-spirited behaviour, so he sends her to France with her aunt and uncle to be educated. She leaves behind Paul Sevarin, the older man she has decided she is in love with, and returns several years later as a polished young woman expecting to win him, only to find that her father has already made an arrangement on her behalf.
Rating coming soonRowena Belleme has been ordered to produce an heir, and if she does not the stepbrother who controls her family's lands will destroy what is left of her inheritance. Her answer is to take a prisoner: Warrick deChaville, a knight, is seized and held so that he can father the child that will save her, and he is not the sort of man to accept such an arrangement for long.
Rating coming soonLady Aline Marsden has been raised for one purpose, which is to make an advantageous marriage to a man of her own class. Instead she gives herself to John McKenna, who works on her father's estate, and when the affair is discovered the consequences fall on the person with no family and no position to protect him. McKenna leaves England, and Aline stays behind to face what the household decides.
Rating coming soonAlexandra Lawrence is a country girl with no interest in the rules of fashionable society, and she marries Jordan Townsende, the Duke of Hawthorne, a man whose wealth and position have never obliged him to explain himself to anyone at all. Their marriage takes her into London society, where the two of them have to work out what they actually owe each other.
Rating coming soonAmanda Briars is a successful novelist who has reached her thirtieth birthday without ever having been kissed, and she decides to buy herself an improper present: one night with a stranger. The man who arrives at her house turns out to be Jack Devlin, a businessman of considerable reputation, and he is willing to keep the arrangement private only for a price.
Rating coming soonEvelinde has agreed to marry the most notorious laird in Scotland, known to everyone as the Devil of the Highlands. Her reason is simple: anything is preferable to remaining with her cruel stepmother, and although the stories about her new husband should give her pause, the man himself turns out to be harder to read than the rumours suggest.
Rating coming soonIliana Wildwood is being pressed into marriage by a baron who wants her lands, and her answer is to run for the Highlands and marry a Scottish laird instead. Duncan of Dunbar Castle is a warrior with a household and a reputation, and the wife who arrives with her own reasons for the marriage is not what he expected to be sent.
Rating coming soonChristina Wakefield is seventeen when the promise of adventure takes her to the Arabian desert, and she is captured soon after arriving there. The man holding her is a sheikh known as Abu, and she has met him before under another name in England, which complicates a situation in which she has no power at all and no way of getting home.
Rating coming soonVikings come from across the sea and take the Celtic noblewoman Brenna captive, and she swears that no barbarian will ever be her master. Garrick Haardrad, the son of the Viking chieftain, decides that he wants her for a wife, and he is a man who has never been refused anything he has asked for in his life.
Rating coming soonLady Kathryn Grayson has a privileged future ahead of her until her uncle decides that he wants her fortune, and the simplest way to take it is to have her committed to an asylum. Her escape is to hide in the carriage of a stranger, Lucien Montaine, the Marquess of Litchfield, who is travelling away from the city with no wish for company.
Rating coming soonJudith marries Gavin Montgomery at an altar decorated with flowers, and the ceremony is celebrated by everyone except the two people in it. She has decided that her husband will get nothing from her that he does not take, and Gavin, who has married her for reasons that have nothing to do with affection, is not prepared to be refused anything.
Rating coming soonEvangeline Jenner is the shyest of the group of young women known as the Wallflowers, and she stands to become extremely rich when her inheritance comes due. To get to it she has to escape the relatives who mean to take it from her, so she approaches Viscount St. Vincent, a notorious rake, with a proposal he has no respectable reason to accept.
Rating coming soonGary Gilmore became famous in 1976 after he robbed two men in Utah and killed them, and after he was tried and convicted he insisted on being executed for it. He then had to fight a legal system that was prepared to keep him alive long after he had given up on the idea himself. The book follows the short and blighted life that led to the killings and what happened when he refused to let the case be appealed.
Rating coming soonKatherine of Aragon is born Catalina, the Spanish Infanta, to parents who are both rulers and warriors, and at four years old she is betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales. In this version of her life the marriage becomes a real and loving partnership with plans to rule England together, and it ends after three months when Arthur dies of the sweating sickness. What follows is the rest of her career in England.
Rating coming soonBagoas is a young Persian from an aristocratic family who is captured by his father's enemies, castrated and sold as a slave to King Darius III, who makes him his favourite. When Alexander the Great overthrows Darius and takes the Persian Empire, Bagoas becomes his lover and most faithful servant. The novel is narrated by Bagoas and covers the last seven years of Alexander's life.
Rating coming soonH. Hatterr is the son of a European merchant officer and a lady from Penang, raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. His story is a search for enlightenment that takes him through seven Oriental cities, and it is told in a prose that leaps and puzzles and refuses to settle into standard English. Desani described his hero as a portrait of the common vulgar species, found everywhere in the East and the West.
Rating coming soonKatherine Mary O'Fallon is sixteen when she travels from Boston to Calgary in 1907 to visit her uncle and recover from pleurisy, and there she meets Sergeant Mike Flannigan of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They marry and go north into the Canadian wilderness, where the two of them live among the hardships and the landscape of the early twentieth-century North. The novel is based on the stories of the real Katherine Mary O'Fallon Knox.
Rating coming soonRoseanne McNulty is approaching her hundredth birthday in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where she has spent most of her adult life and which is about to be demolished. She begins to write the story of herself and of her parents in Sligo at the turn of the twentieth century, and hides it under a floorboard in her room. The hospital's chief psychiatrist, Dr Grene, is meanwhile trying to establish which of his patients can be released.
Rating coming soonWilliam Buelow Gould is a convict in Van Diemen's Land, and his life is told here as a fictionalised account of the real convict artist of that name. The novel is built around twelve fish, each of which gives a chapter its heading: the pot-bellied seahorse, the kelpy, the porcupine fish, the stargazer, the leatherjacket, the serpent eel, the sawtooth shark, the striped cowfish, the crested weedfish, the freshwater crayfish, the silver dory and the weedy seadragon.
Rating coming soonA baby is born to a humble Jewish family in first-century Israel with a great destiny ahead of him, and the novel follows him as a boy of seven or eight beginning to understand his own powers and the whispered mysteries surrounding his birth. The tyrannical rule of King Herod has driven the family out of the Holy Land to the relative safety of Alexandria, and the story begins with their return.
Rating coming soonMarie Antoinette is fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranges for her to leave her family and her country to marry the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. She comes of age in the most public of arenas, and her marriage does not produce the child and heir that she and the French people expect, because her husband repeatedly fails to consummate it. The novel is her own account of her life from Versailles to a prison cell.
Rating coming soonLucanus grows up in the household of his stepfather, the Roman governor of Antioch, studies medicine in Alexandria and becomes one of the greatest physicians of the ancient world, travelling through the Mediterranean healing the sick. In time he learns of the life and death of Christ and recognises in him the God he has been seeking, and he sets out to discover everything he can about a man he never met. The novel is the story of how he came to write the third Gospel.
Rating coming soonA devastating palace fire has killed the royal family of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, leaving Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen Nefertiti, as a survivor whose family has been branded heretical. She is pushed aside and left to run wild in the palace until the Pharaoh's aunt takes her in hand and has her educated as a future queen. Then she catches the eye of the crown prince, and much of Egypt objects to the match.
Rating coming soonJohn Tradescant is the greatest gardening pioneer of his day and a man of humble birth who is trusted by politicians, aristocrats and royalty. He collects, raises and nurtures plants and travels the known world looking for new species, and his position gives him a view of the most secret activities at the court of Charles I. His loyalties are tested when he enters the orbit of the Duke of Buckingham, the most powerful man in England.
Rating coming soonRanulf is the English conqueror known as the Black Lyon, darkly handsome and rich beyond imagining, and a man no woman has been able to win. Then he meets Lyonene, a tawny-haired beauty whose temper matches his own, and the two of them are married after a whirlwind courtship. A web of lies spread by a jealous rival drives Lyonene away from her home and across the Irish Sea, and only Ranulf can undo the plot against their marriage.
Rating coming soonJace Montgomery comes to Chandler, Colorado, as a stranger: tall, proud and homesick for his family in Maine. He takes immediately to Nellie Grayson, the shy elder sister who has spent her life helping her beautiful younger sister Terel become the belle of the town, and gives Nellie her very first kiss. Nellie has no confidence that a man like Jace would choose her over Terel, and an unexpected new friend helps her see the situation differently.
Rating coming soonSara Fielding is a prim and proper gentlewoman who writes novels, and curiosity takes her out of her country cottage and into the London gambling world of Derek Craven, a man who rose from poverty to become the owner of the most exclusive gaming house in the city. He finds that the innocent woman he had dismissed as a mouse can be something quite different, and she finds that a cynical gambler can be shaken by what he feels.
Rating coming soonNeville Wyatt, Earl of Kilbourne, is waiting at the altar for his bride when a ragged woman runs down the aisle instead. He stares at her, and then announces to the assembled company that she is his wife: Lily, the woman he married, loved and lost on a battlefield in Portugal, whom he had believed to be dead. He says he will honour his commitment to her, and then Lily speaks, and what she asks for changes what he had planned.
Rating coming soonWulfric Bedwyn, the Duke of Bewcastle, is the eldest of the six Bedwyn brothers and sisters, and he is cool, arrogant and mysterious, the head of a family of passion and privilege. All of London is waiting for his arrival at the most glittering social event of the season, and the only woman in the room who is not trying to capture his attention is the one who interests him. Then he invites Christine Derrick to become his mistress.
Rating coming soonIn the twelfth century, with Scotland under siege, King David looks for warriors willing to fight for him with their blood and their hearts. Waryk de Graham, the greatest of them, is knighted Lord Lion, and the honoured position of Scottish chieftain comes with a price attached: a Viking bride who has sworn to resist him. Mellyora MacAdin rules her ancestral lands like a Valkyrie, and now she is an unwilling captive of his power.
Rating coming soonIn colonial New England, the British are hunting a masked patriot whose raids frustrate them at every turn, and he is known only as the Raider. Jessica Taggert, proud and quick-tempered, is thrilled by the Raider's midnight embrace and despises Alexander Montgomery, the drunken town buffoon. The two men are the same person, and only his success against the Redcoats will let him tell her so.
Rating coming soonFreya is eighteen when she is taken captive in battle, and she is furious that her captor takes no account of her noble birth and treats her as he would any woman captured in a raid. Alaric, the prince who took her, has spent years planning to humiliate the daughter of a man he hates, and he intends to keep her as a slave in his own household. Neither of them plans for what develops between them.
Rating coming soonIn Wessex in 873, Kristen Haardrad is nineteen and defiant, and she has been made a prisoner by Royce, Thane of Wyndhurst. He intends to keep her as a slave, and she has no intention of being one, and the two of them recognise in each other a pride and a strength neither had expected. He also carries a hatred for a crime committed by her people, and it was not her crime.
Rating coming soonBrianna Munro escapes into Scotland at night to avoid the marriage her guardian has arranged for her, and travelling alone and fearing for her safety she takes shelter at Castle Glenloch. She intends to stay for a single night, and then she meets Hugh Christie, Laird Glenloch. She tells him she is a lady's maid running from a vengeful employer, and he can see that she is hiding something.
Rating coming soonRue has thought Hawke Masters the most insufferable man she has ever met from the moment she saw him: proud, arrogant and overbearing, and insultingly clear that although her grandfather's shotgun forced him to marry her, nothing would make him share a bed with a scrawny backwoods girl like her. Then he takes her home to his ranch to look after his orphaned niece and nephew.
Rating coming soonLady Averill Mortagne has spent years learning to control a fierce temper, and her father's habit of parading her in front of English lords who look sideways at her flame-coloured hair is testing it. Her only relief is the time she spends with Kade Stewart, a wounded Scot her brother brought home from the Crusades. He is grateful to her for helping save his life, and he does not think he could subject a gentle lady to the life of a laird's bride.
Rating coming soonCatherine Enderly is sixteen and on her way to boarding school when she is abducted and taken from England to the coast of Ireland, where she becomes the prisoner of Sean Culhane, a young and powerful man who has sworn vengeance against her family. She meets him with a defiance out of proportion to her size, and his determination to have his revenge becomes complicated by what he begins to feel for her.
Rating coming soonAdrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, has been warned that Lady Clarissa Crambray is dangerous: she steps on toes and sets things alight, and she has earned a nickname for the mayhem she causes. He is a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and considers one woman and her unfortunate past to be a challenge he can handle. Clarissa, meanwhile, wants a husband, though possibly not as much as her mother wants one for her.
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