Best Historical Fiction Books

Two love stories set forty years apart — Jennifer Stirling in 1960s London, trapped in a loveless marriage, and journalist Ellie Haworth in the present day — are connected by a cache of passionate letters discovered in a newspaper archive.

A radical reimagining of the life of Christ — depicting Jesus as a man torn between the flesh and the spirit, tempted on the cross by a vision of the ordinary human life he might have lived.

Sarah Waters's slow-burning Gothic novel. In postwar England, a country doctor becomes entangled with the genteel, declining Ayres family and their crumbling estate, Hundreds Hall — where a series of disturbing events suggests something malevolent, or something all too human, at work.

Oskar Matzerath, narrating from a mental institution, recounts how at age three he decided to stop growing, and how he witnessed the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the collapse of Danzig through the perspective of a child in an adult world — beating his tin drum and shattering glass with his voice.

Ta-Nehisi Coates's debut novel follows Hiram Walker, a enslaved young man in antebellum Virginia who discovers he possesses a mysterious power called Conduction — a magical ability linked to memory and loss — and who becomes involved with the Underground Railroad.

Eloise Bridgerton has been writing letters to a widowed botanist for months. When she decides to meet Sir Phillip Crane in person, she discovers that a man on paper and a man in a home are not the same man at all.

Michael Stirling falls in love with Francesca Bridgerton at first sight — and discovers that she is about to marry his cousin. This is the darkest, most formally daring novel in the Bridgerton series.

A British historian in post-Soviet Moscow discovers a notebook that may contain Stalin's most dangerous secret — one that leads him to the remote Arctic city of Archangel and a discovery that could reshape Russia's future.

An unnamed researcher interviews dozens of people about Leni Pfeiffer—a German woman who survived the Nazi period, the war, and the postwar economic miracle by simply being, refusing ideology and staying human. The novel is assembled from testimony. Böll's most humanist and most comprehensive work—the book that won him the Nobel Prize.

Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn on the Cornish moors to live with her aunt, and finds a place of terror run by her brutal uncle Joss Merlyn, who is involved in wrecking ships on the coast for their cargo.

In 1926 Harlem, a man shoots his young lover at her funeral while his wife grieves, attacks the dead girl's face, and attempts to understand what the city and their history have made of them all.

The longest and most ambitious Clavell novel, set in Hong Kong in 1963 — the Noble House descended from Dirk Struan battles takeover bids, Chinese Communists, the KGB, American businessmen, and internal family conflict during a single tumultuous week. A sprawling portrait of Hong Kong at a pivotal moment in its history.

Set during the Mercenary War in Carthage (240-238 BC), Flaubert's archaeological novel follows mercenary soldier Mâtho's obsession with Salammbô, daughter of Hamilcar Barca and guardian of the sacred veil — a deliberate departure from domestic realism into extreme historical otherness.

As the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars convulse England, the people of Kingsbridge face new machines, hungry mills, and the fight for workers' rights. Ken Follett returns to his beloved cathedral town for a sweeping fifth saga of ambition, injustice, and resilience.

In 16th-century Andalusia, a Moorish boy named Hernando is born to a Christian father who rapes his Muslim mother. Caught between two worlds and two faiths, he tries to preserve the legacy of the Moors as Spain expels them.

During the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, a mysterious English nobleman known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel leads a daring league to rescue condemned French aristocrats from the guillotine, while his wife Marguerite desperately tries to uncover his true identity.

Sebastian Barry's Booker-shortlisted novel of memory and Irish history. Roseanne McNulty, nearing one hundred and confined for decades in a mental hospital, secretly writes the story of her life, while her psychiatrist investigates her past — two accounts that circle a buried tragedy of love, faith, and a punishing society.

Dejima, 1799: the Dutch trading post is the only window between Japan and the Western world. Clerk Jacob de Zoet arrives hoping to restore his family's fortune and falls in love with a Japanese midwife student. Mitchell's most disciplined novel is a masterwork of historical fiction.

Thessaloniki (Salonika) in the early twentieth century: a city of Greeks, Jews, Turks, and refugees, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Mediterranean. The Thread follows two families — one Greek Orthodox, one from the city's ancient Jewish community — across eight decades of fire, war, occupation, and transformation, as the city loses its plurality and becomes something more singular. Hislop's most historically ambitious novel.

As the Greek fleet sails home from the ruins of Troy, the enslaved healer Ritsa accompanies the doomed prophet Cassandra toward Mycenae and the vengeful queen Clytemnestra, in Pat Barker's fierce conclusion to her Women of Troy trilogy.

A sequel to The Silence of the Girls, following Briseis and the Trojan women through the aftermath of the war's end as the Greeks are stranded on the beach, unable to sail home, and old wounds refuse to heal.

Athens, 1941. The German occupation begins, and with it the great famine in which hundreds of thousands of Greeks die. Themis, a young woman from a divided Athens family — some Communist, some right-wing, all suffering — lives through the occupation, the resistance, the civil war that follows, and the decades of political fracture that define 20th-century Greek history. Hislop's most politically complex novel, spanning sixty years of Greek history.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's landmark debut, the first English-language novel by an East African writer. Through the hopes of young Njoroge, who longs for education, it tells of a Kenyan family and community torn apart by the Mau Mau uprising and the violence of British colonial rule.

In sixteenth-century Europe, Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald are caught on opposing sides of the religious wars tearing apart England, France, and the Netherlands, as Protestant and Catholic factions fight for the soul of the continent.