Best Historical Fiction Books

Two centuries after The Pillars of the Earth, the city of Kingsbridge is swept up in the arrival of the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the ambitions of builders, healers, merchants, and monks. Follett returns to his most beloved setting with a cast of characters as vivid as the original.

Thomas Cromwell orchestrates the fall of Anne Boleyn so that Henry VIII can pursue Jane Seymour — a second act of court destruction more morally troubling than the first. Winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Five families from England, Germany, Russia, America, and Wales are swept up in the cataclysm of World War One and the Russian Revolution. Follett's Century Trilogy opens with his most ambitious canvas yet — a panoramic story of the early twentieth century told through interconnected lives across five nations.

Inspired by the true story of Lexington, the most successful American racehorse of the nineteenth century, Horse moves between antebellum Kentucky, Civil War-era Washington, and present-day New York — examining the intersecting histories of race, art, and the animal whose image persisted while the humans who cared for it were erased from the record.

John Clark — the CIA field operative who has appeared across Clancy's Jack Ryan universe — is given command of Rainbow, a multinational counter-terrorism unit. When a series of hostage situations reveals a larger conspiracy involving bioterrorism and corporate eco-extremism, Rainbow must stop a plot aimed at reducing the human population.

Gustad Noble, a Parsi bank clerk in 1971 Bombay, is drawn into an ill-fated conspiracy involving an old friend, the Indo-Pakistani War, and a sum of money that will threaten everything he has built.

The story of Oscar de León — an overweight, sci-fi-obsessed Dominican-American from New Jersey who has never had a girlfriend — and the multigenerational curse his family carries from the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship.

Set in the small town of Ayemenem in Kerala, India, Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the lives of fraternal twins Rahel and Estha and the catastrophic consequences of their family's transgression of the Love Laws — the laws that determine who can love whom, and how, and how much.

A trio of Nazi hunters — a war correspondent, a Soviet night-bomber, and a young Boston woman — track a female war criminal known as the Huntress across postwar Europe and America. Based on the all-female Night Witches regiment of the Soviet air force.

In eleventh-century England, a young orphan named Rob Cole discovers he has an uncanny gift for sensing when people are near death; driven by this gift and a burning desire to understand medicine, he makes an extraordinary journey across the medieval world to study under the greatest physician of the age, Ibn Sina, in Persia.

Hester Prynne, condemned to wear the scarlet letter A for adultery in Puritan New England, lives with her illegitimate daughter Pearl while the father of her child — the revered minister Dimmesdale — declines into secret guilt.

Set at a German concentration camp modelled on Auschwitz, Martin Amis's novel is narrated by three characters — a disgraced SS officer posted to the camp, the commandant's wife who begins to see the reality around her, and a Sonderkommando who bears witness — in a style that deploys Amis's characteristic dark comedy against the backdrop of industrial murder.

Elena pursues academic success and marriage while Lila works in brutal factory conditions; their lives diverge further as political upheaval grips 1970s Naples.

Two sisters discover their cold, distant mother was once something entirely different — a young woman in Leningrad during the Siege, telling a fairy tale that is really the story of her own survival. Alternating between contemporary Oregon and wartime Soviet Russia, Winter Garden is about secrets kept across generations.

Ravic, a German surgeon living illegally in Paris in 1939, practises medicine under a false name and pursues the Gestapo officer who destroyed his life. Remarque's wartime novel was written in American exile and captures the atmosphere of Paris just before the German occupation with the precision of someone who knew the city and understood what was about to happen to it.

The story of Joanna, illegitimate daughter of King John of England, who is given in marriage to Llewelyn Fawr, Prince of Wales, and finds herself caught between loyalty to her father and love for her husband as English and Welsh powers collide.

Hyacinth Bridgerton recruits the roguish Gareth St. Clair to translate his grandmother's Italian diaries — and discovers that the diaries contain a secret that changes both their lives.

Jack Boughton and Della Miles, a Black schoolteacher, meet in St. Louis in the late 1940s and fall in love in a state where their relationship is illegal.

The first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin novels. In the Napoleonic Wars, the newly promoted Captain Jack Aubrey takes command of his first ship and forms an unlikely friendship with the physician and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, launching one of historical fiction's great series.

Narrated by Stingo, a young Southern writer who moves to Brooklyn in 1947, Sophie's Choice tells the story of his friendship with Sophie Zawistowski — a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor — and her volatile lover Nathan Landau, and the secret at the heart of Sophie's experience in Auschwitz.

1634. A merchant ship departs Batavia for Amsterdam carrying a disgraced detective, his bodyguard, a mysterious prisoner, and a demon that appears to be killing the passengers. Samuel Pipps must solve an impossible mystery from the ship's hold while his bodyguard Arent Hayes investigates on deck above. Turton's locked-room mystery at sea.

The second novel of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. London, 1918: Billy Prior, recovered enough to return to intelligence work, is caught between his duties and his sympathies as the state turns on pacifists and homosexuals, while Dr. Rivers treats minds the war has split.

Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, suspects her new husband intends to kill her. O'Farrell reimagines the brief life of the young Duchess of Ferrara — likely the subject of Browning's 'My Last Duchess' — through a portrait sitting that becomes a meditation on art, survival, and female agency.

T.H. White's retelling of the Arthurian legends follows Arthur from his education by the wizard Merlin — who lives backwards through time — through the founding of the Round Table, the love triangle with Lancelot and Guinevere, and the final destruction of Camelot.