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 8 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonLady Emmalene Eberhart was eager to be a good wife, and when her husband died she was still a virgin. Her dowry and her hand then become part of a struggle over feudal power, and she is promised to Amaury de Aneford, a landless knight whose sword has preserved the King's crown. On the wedding day a rival knight is already riding towards the bridal chamber.
Rating coming soonAfter three London seasons looking for a husband, Daisy Bowman has been told by her father that she must find one now, and that if she cannot then she will marry the man he chooses: the ruthless and aloof Matthew Swift. Daisy is appalled, and being a Bowman she refuses to admit defeat, deciding to marry anyone rather than Matthew. What she does not expect is that Matthew has charms of his own.
Rating coming soonDanielle D'Aville is the ward of Edward III, and she is sworn to obey the King's order that she marry her enemy: Adrien MacLachlan, the Scottish knight who masterminded the fall of Aville, the home she loved. She becomes the reluctant wife of a man she has promised herself she will despise, and she is carried off to his castle in the Scottish Highlands.
Rating coming soonMarty Claridge's husband is killed in a horse accident, and she marries Clark Davis, a man who needs a mother for his daughter Missie. The arrangement is practical for both of them, and over the months that follow Marty becomes attached to the child and to her husband. When the wagon train returns in the spring, she has to decide whether to go home or stay.
Rating coming soonLinnet Berry Thrynne is a beauty, and she is betrothed to a beast. The man she is to marry is difficult and unlikely ever to love her in return, and she has no idea of the danger that presents to her own heart, or of what she will have to decide about the life she had planned for herself. The novel is a retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, set among the English nobility and in Wales.
Rating coming soonMadeline Deveridge is well aware of the whispers behind her back, and of the rumour that she dispatched her husband to the next world and concealed the crime. Being called the Wicked Widow is not, however, her most pressing problem: she has come to believe that she and her beloved aunt are being haunted, and there is nobody she can ask for help without inviting more of the gossip that already surrounds her.
Rating coming soonLady Sophia Bryant has no intention of ever marrying, but her parents have been estranged for fourteen years and her one wish is to bring them back together. Announcing a betrothal, even a false one, would force them both to attend to her. Lord Francis Sutton, a handsome and notorious rake, is perfect for the deception, being always ready for a game provided it costs him nothing.
Rating coming soonPoppy Hathaway loves her unconventional family, though what she longs for herself is an ordinary life. Then she meets Harry Rutledge, the enigmatic owner of a hotel and an inventor with wealth, power and a dangerous hidden side to the way he lives. When their flirtation compromises her reputation and the season's gossip starts, Poppy surprises everybody by accepting his proposal of marriage, and finds that she has married a man who will share his passion but not his trust.
Rating coming soonEdie was a ruined American heiress until the devil-may-care Duke of Margrave agreed to her proposal of a marriage of convenience. Five years later she is delighted with the arrangement, particularly because her husband is living on another continent. Then a brush with death brings him home, and he proposes a new bargain: ten days to win a willing kiss from his wife.
Rating coming soonJonty Rand was raised in a bawdy house and has posed as a boy all her life to keep the cowboys who use the place from noticing her. The most notorious of them, in her view, is Cord McBain. When her grandmother's dying wish makes Cord her guardian, Jonty is sure she will never be able to tell him who she is.
Rating coming soonCatherine Tremyne was stolen from her father's Cornish estate as an infant and raised by Gypsies, and she has grown into a beautiful young woman without knowing where she came from. Her life is turned upside down when she is carried off to Paris by Jason Savage, which begins a long passage through danger and captivity at the hands of a man she cannot escape.
Rating coming soonCorinne is the scandalous darling of Boston society, and she sails halfway around the world to Hawaii to ruin the man who ruined her: Jared Burkett, who took her, humiliated her, and left her with feelings she did not want to have. She hates him as much as she wants him, and he wants to possess her as well, whatever the cost to both of them.
Rating coming soonShe is beautiful, exasperating and, in the words of the story, a little hellcat with barnyard manners. Marshal Travis Kincaid has decided that if anybody is going to make a lady of her, it will be him, and he takes on the project even with outlaws overrunning his town. The novel is a western romance.
Rating coming soonAs the campaign for women's suffrage intensifies, Kathleen Bowen, known as Kat, is able to take part in it alongside her mother, her sister and many of the people close to her. The book is written as her diary, and it covers the winter of 1917, the picket lines outside the White House, the reactions they drew, and the argument over a federal amendment that would give women the vote.
Rating coming soonJames Goodenough brings his family to Ohio in 1838 to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp, having moved there from Connecticut, where the family had originally settled after leaving England. Swamp fever picks off their children one by one while they wrestle with survival. Fifteen years later the story continues with their youngest son Robert, who has been running west and has taken refuge among the redwoods of California.
Rating coming soonOskar Schindler was a German industrialist and war profiteer who, faced with the reality of the extermination camps, gambled his life and his fortune to save thirteen hundred Jewish people from the gas chambers. The novel is based on his true story, and on the testimony of the people he saved, and it sets out what it cost him to keep them alive through the war.
Rating coming soonPhilip Ashley was raised on a Cornish estate by his older cousin Ambrose, and the two of them lived contentedly without women until Ambrose travelled to Florence for his health. There he married, and there he died, writing letters home that blamed his wife. Philip inherits the estate and the letters, and then Rachel herself arrives in Cornwall.
Rating coming soonSamuel Johnson is melancholy, ill and increasingly difficult company when he is introduced to the family of a London brewer, whose country house at Streatham becomes his refuge. He grows closest to the eldest daughter, Hester Maria, known as Queeney, and the girl watches a friendship between her mother and the great man that nobody in the house can quite name.
Rating coming soonThis is a retelling of the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and of the legend that has grown around Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. The story is told through the voices of the people who were there, in a deliberately Elizabethan style, and the character the book is named after is only one figure among many.
Rating coming soonA narrator named Bram Presser tries to find out what happened to his grandparents during the war, working from the small hoard of writing and correspondence they left behind. Jakub Rand and Dasa Roubickova were deported from Poland to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz, and the closer he gets to the record the more the family stories and the documents refuse to agree.
Rating coming soonIn 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano Lopez begins courting Eliza Lynch, an Irish woman who becomes his mistress and follows him to Paraguay. In Asuncion she lives as the first lady of a country she does not understand, while the man she came with rises to lead the nation into the Paraguayan War of 1865 to 1870.
Rating coming soonThe Zane family's settlement at Wheeling, on the Virginia frontier, is the furthest American outpost in that country, and in 1782 it comes under attack by Native American and Loyalist forces. The novel follows the family through the years of the Revolution, and the youngest daughter, Betty, whose own part in the defence is remembered in the family's history.
Rating coming soonHenry Rathbone and Clara Harris grew up in the same house as stepbrother and stepsister, and their marriage was the subject of gossip before it happened. In April 1865 they accepted an invitation to sit in the President's box at Ford's Theatre, and the night of the assassination became the event that defined the rest of their lives.
Rating coming soonGiordano Bruno has left the monastery and the Inquisition behind and reached Elizabethan England, where his ideas about astronomy and other worlds attract the attention of the queen's spymaster. Sent to Oxford to look into a matter for Francis Walsingham, he finds the university full of old arguments, a killer at work among the fellows, and the deaths treated as accidents.
Rating coming soonHenry James spends the 1880s and 1890s moving between London, Venice and Paris, writing novels, cultivating friendships and trying to succeed in the theatre. The novel follows his friendship with the artist George Du Maurier, his attachment to the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, his disaster as a playwright, and the long years afterwards. It is as much about the cost of a vocation as about the famous man himself.
Rating coming soonErnest Hemingway married four times, and this novel gives each of the four women a turn: Hadley Richardson in Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn in Spain and Cuba, and Mary Welsh. Each of them tells what it was like to be married to a man who turned his own life into material, and each learns in her turn that the role has a successor already in view.
Rating coming soonLee Miller arrives in Paris in the late 1920s intending to work as an artist rather than be looked at as a model, and she becomes the assistant and then the lover of a celebrated photographer. The novel follows her discovery of what she can do with a camera, the cost of living inside a more famous man's life, and the work she went on to do as a correspondent during the war.
Rating coming soonThe Weber family lives in a crowded house in Mannheim in 1777, where the father copies music and the four daughters sing and play well enough to be noticed. One of them, Aloysia, takes the attention of a young composer passing through, and the novel follows the sisters over the years in which he marries one of them.
Rating coming soonHatshepsut is the daughter of a pharaoh, and she grows up expecting to rule Egypt in her own right, which no woman has done. The novel follows her from a childhood spent in temples and on the river to her marriage to her half-brother, the years in which she governs, and the opposition of priests and courtiers who cannot accept a woman on the throne.
Rating coming soonKid McCoy was a championship boxer, a jewellery thief and a confidence man, and he was married often enough for the count to become part of his legend. The novel follows him from his boyhood in Indiana through the fights, the swindles and the smart company of the years around 1900, and lets him tell much of it himself.
Rating coming soonIn 1897 the explorer Robert Peary brings six Inuit from Greenland to New York, where they are put on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Among them are a father and son, and when the father dies the museum keeps his bones. The novel tells the story of Minik, the boy who was left behind.
Rating coming soonAt a party in Portofino in 1953, the playwright Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo meet a young Swedish woman who will not say much about herself. The novel follows the three of them across the next decade, through the theatre, the film business and the friendships that held Williams's work together, and the success that came to one of them rather than the other.
Rating coming soonIn the 1950s Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate killed a series of people across Nebraska and Wyoming, and the case has been told over and over since. This novel comes at it from three directions: Caril Ann looking back on the beginning of the relationship, a collector in Manhattan haunted by the crimes, and the man's wife.
Rating coming soonHarry Clifton grows up in Bristol expecting to work on the docks like his father and uncle, and he has one thing they did not: a voice good enough to be noticed. A choir mistress, a schoolteacher and an old soldier all take an interest in him, and the question of who his father really was follows him from the docks to a scholarship and a war.
Rating coming soonLyman Ward is a retired historian who uses a wheelchair and has lost touch with his son, and he decides to spend what time he has writing the story of his grandparents. Their letters describe a life spent on the frontier of the American west, and the work of reconstructing it makes him examine his own marriage at the same time.
Rating coming soonFelix has been in a Catholic orphanage in Poland for more than three years, and he believes his parents are coming back for him. When he sees the nuns burning the library's books, he decides to go and find them, and the journey takes him through a country where the danger in the streets is not the sort of thing he has been told about.
Rating coming soonParvana is eleven and lives in a one-room flat in Kabul with her family, and since the Taliban took the city she has rarely been outside. Her father, the person who could go out, is arrested, and the family has no man to send to the market. To feed them Parvana has to become something the authorities will allow in the street.
Rating coming soonEskibahçe is a village in south-western Anatolia where Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims have lived beside each other for centuries, speaking a mixture of both languages and sharing the same water, weddings and grief. Two children growing up there, Philothei and Ibrahim, fall in love, and the century that follows does not allow them to keep it.
Rating coming soonRajkumar is a poor boy in Burma when the British invade in 1885, and he is there when the royal family is taken out of their palace and sent into exile. He becomes friends with Dolly, one of the queen's attendants, and from that beginning he builds a life in the Burmese timber trade, and a family whose story runs through the century that follows.
Rating coming soonLouisa Mae Cardinal is twelve and living in New York in the 1940s when a car accident kills her father and leaves her mother unable to look after anybody. She and her younger brother are sent to the Virginia mountains to live with a great-grandmother they hardly know, on a farm where the work is real and the neighbours have long memories.
Rating coming soonThe Memory Cathedral takes Leonardo da Vinci past the sketchbook and gives him a working flying machine. In this version of the Renaissance he builds the devices he only ever drew, takes his inventions into the service of a Syrian general, and sees his designs for war used in a battle in the Middle East.
Rating coming soonSummer, 1927. Bonnelyn Parker sings in church, works hard and plans to lift her family out of poverty, and when the money runs out she takes a night job at Dallas's newest speakeasy without telling anyone. The secret life brings her into the orbit of a convicted felon named Clyde Barrow, while her family believes she is simply working late.
Rating coming soonTomas de Torquemada and the Spanish knight Don Alvaro de Rafel have been friends for many years. When the king names Torquemada Grand Inquisitor of Spain and whispers begin about Alvaro's secret Jewish past, the friendship becomes the first casualty of the new office. Nothing in the novel is settled by argument, because the Inquisition has other methods.
Rating coming soonRachel Fleischer has good reasons not to be at her father's deathbed, and she nearly misses the funeral entirely. When a stranger there gives her an odd gift and an apology, she is drawn into the story of her father's war as a Jewish sergeant in charge of a platoon of Black soldiers, and the scandal that shaped his life.
Rating coming soonThe Indians called him Dark Eagle, his soldiers worshipped him as a hero and his enemies learned to respect him. Dark Eagle follows Benedict Arnold's rise in the Continental Army from 1775 to 1780, and the wounds, slights and money troubles that carried him towards the crime that replaced his name with the word traitor. The novel moves between both armies as his reputation corrodes.
Rating coming soonFelix is ten years old and hiding in occupied Poland when he and his friend Zelda escape from a train bound for the death camps. They are alone, and being Jewish and on the run is a matter of daily invention. A farmer named Genia takes them in, and she has her own reasons for hating Germans.
Rating coming soonCharles Dickens is not feeling the Christmas spirit. His latest book has been a flop, the critics have turned against him, and relatives on every side are asking him for money. When his publishers try to blackmail him into writing a Christmas book he refuses, and then meets a mysterious woman on one of his night walks.
Rating coming soonGeorg Christoph Lichtenberg was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer in eighteenth-century Gottingen and an aphorist and satirist on the side. This novel tells the story of his real relationship with Maria Stechard, the flower seller he met near his laboratory and called the model of beauty and sweetness, and of the household the two of them made together.
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