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 9 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThe Ingalls family is in debt, the years at Plum Creek have gone badly and Mary has been left blind by illness. Pa goes west to work as a bookkeeper in a railroad camp in the Dakota Territory and sends for his wife and four daughters. They become the first settlers in the new town of De Smet, and the railroad follows them.
Rating coming soonIt is 1889 in Wyoming, where homesteaders have claimed land that a cattleman named Luke Fletcher used to run his herds across. The Starrett family are among the settlers, and a stranger rides into their lives: a quiet man with a past who takes work on their farm, says nothing about where he came from and is plainly more than a hired hand.
Rating coming soonHermann Kermit Warm is going to die, because the man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and the hired killers are Eli and Charlie Sisters. Eli does not share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, and on the road to a gold-mining claim he begins to wonder what he does for a living.
Rating coming soonThe Pioneers is set in a settlement beside Lake Otsego, where a new town is working out how to live on land it has only recently taken. Into this comes Natty Bumppo, a hunter and frontiersman whose understanding of the forest is shared by almost none of his neighbours, and whose freedom the new laws do not protect.
Rating coming soonAfter an October blizzard the Ingalls family leaves their claim shanty for the town of De Smet, intending to wait out the winter there. A local man has predicted seven months of bad weather. The trains stop running, the town runs short of food, and the blizzards keep arriving one after another.
Rating coming soonMatthew Penicuik has raised his ward Kitty Charing in the country, and his fortune will become her dowry only if she marries one of his three great-nephews. Kitty finds the condition intolerable. She has already lost her heart to Jack Westruther, a rake who knows it and has done nothing about it.
Rating coming soonLaura and Almanzo Wilder are married and working their own homestead on the prairie, and this book follows the first four years of their life together. There are good crops and bad ones, debts, weather, neighbours, sickness and livestock, and a daughter called Rose, and not everything the couple builds survives the seasons that follow.
Rating coming soonSarah Noble is eight years old when she travels with her father into the Connecticut wilderness to build a new home for the family. She is left in the care of a neighbouring Native family while her father goes back for the other children, and she has to find her courage in a place she has never been.
Rating coming soonPhilip Jettan is a provincial squire in eighteenth-century England, and his childhood friend Cleone Charteris has come home from finishing school with a taste for polished, aristocratic men. Philip is none of those things. Encouraged by his father, he leaves for Paris to acquire the manners Cleone says she wants, and returns home a different man.
Rating coming soonBarnabas Sackett is leaving England for good to make his fortune in the New World, but a warrant sworn against him by Queen Elizabeth sends him into hiding instead. What put the crown on his trail was a handful of rare gold coins he found and sold, believed to be part of a treasure King John lost.
Rating coming soonAlmanzo Wilder grows up on a farm in rural New York, and this book describes his childhood from the age of about eight: the work of the farm, his parents and his brothers and sisters, and the education a boy received in a place where the seasons decided what everybody did next. The family is prosperous by the standards of the time.
Rating coming soonNatty Bumppo, called Deerslayer, is a young frontiersman on Otsego Lake in upstate New York in the 1740s, before the wars that will make his name. He is travelling to meet a friend of his father's when he falls in with two men who are much less particular than he is. One of them, Harry March, wants to take scalps, and Deerslayer will not.
Rating coming soonIn 1659, with her grandmother condemned as a witch, fourteen-year-old Mary Newbury is taken to the docks and put aboard a ship for the New World. Her grandmother has told her to hide what she can do, and Mary writes the voyage down in a journal she means to survive. The colony she lands in has its own opinion about women who are different.
Rating coming soonJack Crabb is 111 years old and has two fathers, one white and one a Cheyenne chief who named him Little Big Man. He has been a Cheyenne, a white man, a buffalo hunter, a shopkeeper's assistant and a survivor of the fight at the Little Bighorn. He tells the whole story to a credulous young man who has come to write it down.
Rating coming soonDuncan McKaskel is taking his wife Susanna and their twelve-year-old son west to start again, and he has prepared for the travelling and the weather. What he has not prepared for is the men who follow families like his, or for Con Vallian, the stranger who saves his life one night and does not explain why. The family's own camp is the part he cannot read.
Rating coming soonTyrel Sackett is eighteen when he has to leave Tennessee, having killed a man who was trying to kill his brother. Orrin catches up with him, and the two of them head west to New Mexico, where land grants are being voided by fraud and where a man with a gun and a willingness to use it is not automatically welcome.
Rating coming soonIn 1756, in the settlements of upper New York, ten-year-old Edward Van Alstyne and his mother are left to look after the farm while his father goes with the militia. The house holds an old Spanish matchlock gun, far too heavy for a boy to manage, and news keeps arriving of raiders burning farms up the valley.
Rating coming soonIn 1920 Jack and Mabel have left Pennsylvania for a homestead in the Alaskan wilderness, and the work is harder and the isolation longer than either of them expected. Mabel is still grieving the baby they lost. The night of the first snow they build a girl out of snow, and in the morning she is gone, and there are small human tracks at the edge of the property.
Rating coming soonNatty Bumppo, called the Pathfinder, is in his middle years and guiding a party across the country towards Lake Ontario, the inland sea of the title. The journey takes them through forest and water and past men who would rather they did not arrive. Among the travellers is a young woman, Mabel Dunham, and Natty finds his own convictions tested by her.
Rating coming soonIn 1875 a group of American women travels west under a government programme that will marry them into the Cheyenne nation, in exchange for horses sent to Washington. The scheme was proposed by a Cheyenne chief and taken up by the administration as a way of assimilating the tribes. The novel is the journal of one of the women who volunteered.
Rating coming soonMary Jemison is twelve and takes her family's farm in eastern Pennsylvania for granted until a war party takes the household captive in 1758. She is separated from her parents and travels to a Seneca village, where she has to learn the language, the work and the customs of people she was brought up to fear. She tries several times to run away.
Rating coming soonMarguerite Ledoux is thirteen and alone in the world when she is taken on as an indentured servant by a family settling on the Maine coast in 1743. The family regards her as very little better than the people they are afraid of, and the first winter is not kind. She earns her place slowly, by knowing what to do when nobody else does.
Rating coming soonFay Larkin is being held prisoner in a hidden canyon near a Mormon village where wives are sealed to their husbands, and anyone who finds the place is not expected to leave it. John Shefford, who wants to marry her, goes looking for her through the canyon country. He does it without a gun.
Rating coming soonLydia Bryant joins a wagon train bound for Texas with a secret she does not intend to explain and a determination that no man will ever have power over her again. Ross Coleman is travelling the same road, with a past that has followed him out of the law's reach. They are thrown together by the journey, and by the men pursuing both of them.
Rating coming soonSarah Kennedy was orphaned at thirteen, married at fourteen and widowed at sixteen, and has learned to rely on nobody; her brother Conner and the injured hawks she nurses are the only things she loves. Case Maxwell came out of the Civil War with a list of men he intends to find and a rule about loving nothing that can die. He is nearly killed by the family Sarah has reason to fear.
Rating coming soonDuring the American Revolution, the strip of New York country between the British and Continental lines is nobody's ground, and both armies move through it at night. At a house called The Locusts, a Loyalist family shelters a stranger from a storm, and a peddler named Harvey Birch arrives behind him. Nobody in the house can agree on whether the peddler is a patriot, a thief or a British agent, and the fighting that follows is as much about who deserves to be trusted as it is about which army wins.
Rating coming soonFramboise Simon comes back to Les Laveuses, the village on the Loire where she grew up, and opens a small restaurant there. Nobody recognises her as the daughter of the woman the village still blames for what happened during the German occupation, and she intends to keep it that way. In the scrapbook of recipes and notes her mother left her, she begins to find the record of one summer, and of a girl of nine who kept a secret from her family.
Rating coming soonSara Smolinsky is ten years old and lives with her parents and three older sisters in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the rent is almost always overdue. Her father studies the Torah and will not take a job to feed them, and her mother takes in boarders to keep the family in the room. Sara decides early that she will not live the way her sisters do.
Rating coming soonThe winter of 1857 has left Abner Marsh with one working steamboat and a reputation he cannot afford. So when a soft-spoken stranger named Joshua York offers to pay for a boat finer and faster than anything on the Mississippi, Marsh takes the money. York asks only that his business on the river be nobody else's concern.
Rating coming soonOn 22 June 1941 Tatiana Metanova turns seventeen the next day, and the morning begins with her older sister Dasha announcing that she is in love and with the radio reporting that Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. Later that day, waiting for a bus in Leningrad, Tatiana is watched by a Red Army officer. His name is Alexander Belov, and he is Dasha's new love.
Rating coming soonIn the early 1950s there is no work for Eilis Lacey in her Irish town, and a visiting priest arranges a job and lodgings for her in New York. She sails alone, works the floor of a department store, takes night classes in bookkeeping and lives in a boarding house run by a woman who misses nothing. Then she meets Tony Fiorello at a dance.
Rating coming soonChristopher Banks grows up in the Shanghai International Settlement with his parents and his friend Akira, and then both of his parents disappear within a short time of each other. He is sent to England, becomes the country's most celebrated detective, and never stops thinking about the case he could not solve. He returns to Shanghai to finish it.
Rating coming soonLin Kong is an army doctor in a Chinese city, and for seventeen years he has been in love with a nurse called Manna Wu. In his home village there is a wife called Shuyu whom his parents chose for him, and every year he goes back to ask her, again, for a divorce. The two lives he is keeping apart take a long time to meet.
Rating coming soonSquire Allworthy comes home from a trip to London and finds a baby asleep in his bed. He decides to raise the foundling, calls him Tom Jones, and the boy grows up beside the squire's nephew and near the daughter of a neighbouring landowner. Tom is generous, careless, good-natured and always in trouble, and his feelings for Sophia Western are the beginning of a long journey.
Rating coming soonOn a Virginia plantation in the years before the Civil War, the oldest and most respected enslaved man on the estate begins to tell the story of his life. His son Chapel has taught himself to read, has fallen in love with the owner's daughter, and intends to run north. The father has to decide what he is willing to do about it.
Rating coming soonDiana Bishop is a historian from a family of witches, and Matthew Clairmont is a vampire who has been alive for centuries. They are looking for a manuscript whose contents could explain what they are. To find it they travel back to Elizabethan London, where Matthew's old acquaintances are waiting and where a woman who is not supposed to practise magic needs to be taught how.
Rating coming soonWilliam Laurence wakes on a shore in Japan with no memory of the years he has spent as an aviator, or of the dragon he serves. He is taken for a foreigner who has broken the rules about where Europeans may go, and the local magistrate keeps him in comfortable confinement at Nagasaki. Temeraire, meanwhile, is repairing the transport that has run aground on a reef, and has no idea where his captain is.
Rating coming soonRobin Blyth is a baronet with a younger sister to raise, an estate emptied by his parents and no idea what to do with either. An administrative mistake puts him in the civil service post that liaises with a hidden magical society. His counterpart is Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly opposite number in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were somewhere else.
Rating coming soonBetween 1979 and 1981 more than forty black children were taken and killed in Atlanta, in a city that had elected its first black mayor and liked to describe itself as too busy to hate. Zala Spencer holds down several jobs and is raising three children on her own. One Sunday morning in July 1980 she wakes to find her teenage son Sonny gone.
Rating coming soonFitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet leave Pemberley to travel through England, visiting friends and relations, and this is the story of the first part of their marriage. The weddings are over and the story that Pride and Prejudice left unfinished has to be arranged: a great estate to run, a household to establish, and a family that includes the relations Elizabeth's husband has spent years avoiding.
Rating coming soonFive hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, five hundred miles into the Louisiana Purchase, a party of squatters crosses the prairie in 1805 looking for somewhere to settle. Among them are the rough Ishmael and Esther Bush and their grown sons, Esther's brother Abiram White, a niece called Ellen Wade and an eccentric naturalist, Dr Obed Bat, and they are watched by an old trapper who knows the country better than they do.
Rating coming soonIn 1855 Jane Peck sails from Philadelphia to Shoalwater Bay in Washington Territory to join William Baldt, the man who proposed to her. Her passage is on a ship called the Lady Luck and she is accompanied only by her Irish maid Mary, and the voyage costs her more than she expected. Nothing at Miss Hepplewhite's finishing school prepared her for the frontier.
Rating coming soonPhilippe Charboneau is the illegitimate son of James Amberly, the sixth Duke of Kent, and in November 1770 he travels with his mother Marie from Auvergne to England to stake his claim to his inheritance. The Duke's family refuses to recognise him, an altercation leaves the Duke's legitimate son crippled, and mother and son flee to London.
Rating coming soonBen Cowan and Bijah Catlow have been bound as friends since childhood, but they grew into different men: Catlow became a top cowhand with a wild streak, and one disastrous confrontation with a band of greedy ranchers turned him into an outlaw. That left it to Cowan, now a United States marshal, to bring him in alive, if Catlow will let him.
Rating coming soonMarian Forrester and her husband, Captain Daniel Forrester, live in the western town of Sweet Water, on the line of the Transcontinental Railroad, where he belongs to the age of the pioneers and she is the socialite everyone watches. Niel Herbert grows up in the town and falls in love with what she represents, and her slow social decline comes to stand for the end of the American frontier.
Rating coming soonAlvin Miller, a seventh son of a seventh son, is staying at a boarding house where mixed-blood children are cared for when he uses his knack to clear the mosquitoes and the disease out of a well. A young woman the people call Dead Mary asks him to heal her mother, who has yellow fever, and the cure spreads through Nueva Barcelona and heads off a war over slavery.
Rating coming soonIn the middle of the 1840s a thirteen-year-old English boy named Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by a group of Aboriginal people. Sixteen years later, when white settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans and is given shelter by the McIvors, but fear and mistrust are already at work in the settlement.
Rating coming soonOscar Hopkins is an Anglican priest from Devon and Lucinda Leplastrier is a young heiress from Parramatta who owns a glass factory in Sydney, and they meet on a ship from England to Australia. Both of them gamble, one obsessively and one compulsively, and Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot carry a glass church to a remote settlement four hundred kilometres up the coast.
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