Best Historical Fiction Books

Based on the real Dozier School for Boys in Florida, two Black teenagers — Elwood Curtis and Turner — navigate brutal abuse at the Nickel Academy in 1960s Jim Crow America. Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 1921, Protestant Anglo-Irish landowners prepare to leave Ireland for England. Eight-year-old Lucy Gault runs away to prevent them leaving; she is assumed drowned; her parents depart in grief. She grows up alone in the empty house. The novel follows the consequences across sixty years.

1890s Brazil: a messianic prophet leads the poor and desperate to the remote community of Canudos. The new Brazilian republic sends four military expeditions to destroy them. Based on the real Canudos War (documented by Euclides da Cunha), this is Vargas Llosa's most epic novel—a portrait of religious fervor, political incomprehension, and mass violence.

1845. A German explorer named Johann Ulrich Voss leads an expedition across the Australian continent that no European has crossed. In Sydney, he exchanges letters with a young woman, Laura Trevelyan, who comes to know him more truly than any member of his party. Based on the real explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, Voss is White's masterpiece—and Australia's greatest novel.

A dead-end alley in wartime Cairo is home to a cast of characters — a beautiful girl who dreams of escaping, a wise poet, a corrupt barber, a philosophical beggar — whose lives Mahfouz follows with the compassion and precision of a naturalist.

Homer Wells grows up in an orphanage in Maine run by Dr Larch, a physician who performs both deliveries and abortions. When Homer leaves for the apple orchards of the coast, he carries the doctor's skills and convictions — and must eventually decide what he believes. Irving's most political and most moving novel.

Inspector Grant, bedridden after an accident, investigates the murder of the Princes in the Tower — a 400-year-old cold case. Voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association, Tey's intellectual detective story is a meditation on history, rumour, and how received narratives harden into fact.

Two brothers return to their ancestral village in a forest valley in Shikoku to restore the family storehouse and confront their family's history. One brother descends into political activism and mythologized violence; the other watches, drinks, and tries to understand. Against the backdrop of Japan's 1960s student protests, Ōe creates his most ambitious novel.

In a remote English village in 1491, a priest investigates the drowning of the richest man in the parish — the novel moves backwards through four days of Lent, arriving at the confessions that reveal what actually happened.

Ned Kelly, Australia's most famous outlaw, narrates his own life in a single long letter to his unborn daughter — from his impoverished Irish-Australian childhood through his years as a bushranger to the siege at Glenrowan and his capture in the iron armour he forged himself.

Late seventeenth-century Virginia, before race solidified into the defining hierarchy of American slavery. A small farm operated by a Dutch trader, his English wife, a Native American servant, and an enslaved African woman whose daughter Florens is given away as partial payment of a debt—an act the mother calls a mercy.

Mevlut Karataş comes to Istanbul from a village in central Anatolia at age twelve and spends the next four decades selling boza—a traditional fermented drink—on the city's streets at night. His life and Istanbul's transformation from 1969 to 2012 unfold together in Pamuk's most warmhearted and expansive novel.

German East Africa in the early twentieth century: Ilyas was taken as a child by German colonial troops and served them as an askari soldier. When he returns to his village, he discovers his sister Afiya has grown up in servitude. Their lives intersect with Hamza—another askari, damaged by his years in German service—and with the chaos of World War One in East Africa. Gurnah's most recent novel before the Nobel was awarded.

Portugal, 1711. A soldier with a missing hand and a woman who can see inside human bodies fall in love against the backdrop of the Inquisition, the building of the great Mafra Convent by King João V, and a mad priest's plan to build a flying machine powered by human wills. Saramago's most romantic novel.

On the eightieth birthday of Heinrich Fähmel, three generations of a German architect family reckon with what was built and what was destroyed: the grandfather designed an abbey, his son destroyed it during the war, his grandson—a billiards player—must decide what to do with what remains. Böll's most structurally ambitious novel.

A French bishop and his vicar work to establish the Catholic Church in the New Mexico Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. Cather's most beloved novel is not a conventional narrative but a series of luminous episodes, meditations on landscape, and character sketches across forty years.

A German shepherd dog—passing from a miller's family to a German boy to Hitler himself—becomes the thread connecting three narrators' accounts of Danzig, the Nazi period, and postwar West Germany. The third and most complex volume of the Danzig Trilogy.

A writer in rural China sends a series of letters to a Japanese playwright about his aunt—a village midwife and family planning enforcer under the one-child policy who delivered over ten thousand babies, then spent decades enforcing forced abortions and sterilizations. One of the most direct literary reckonings with China's one-child policy.

In 1920s Mexico, a young woman accidentally frees the Mayan god of death from a wooden chest and must accompany him on a quest to reclaim his throne from his usurping brother. A lush fantasy rooted in genuine Mayan mythology, set against the Jazz Age and the Mexican Revolution's aftermath.

Toronto in the 1920s and 30s: immigrant workers build the bridges, waterworks, and tunnels of a city that will barely remember them. Patrick Lewis, a searcher who drifts between the city's construction projects and its underclass, is the novel's haunted centre.

A landlord executed in 1950 is reincarnated through a series of animals—donkey, ox, pig, dog, monkey—on the farm his family was forced to surrender during China's land reform, witnessing half a century of Chinese history from a uniquely non-human vantage point. Mo Yan considered this his finest novel.

18th-century Cartagena. A twelve-year-old marquesa bitten by a rabid dog is sent to a convent to be exorcised. A young priest is assigned to document her case and falls in love with her. Based on a real crypt García Márquez discovered as a journalist, this is his most compact late novel.

Oscar Hopkins, a devout Anglican clergyman from Devon, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an heiress who owns a glassworks in Sydney, share a compulsive gambling habit that brings them together and ultimately drives them to bet a glass church against each other's soul on an impossible voyage through the Australian interior.

In 1930s Shandong Province, a fierce and beautiful woman is taken in a palanquin to marry a leper she has never met, falls in love with her palanquin bearer, and helps lead resistance against the Japanese invasion — narrated by her grandson from a perspective that includes the dead and the supernatural.