Best Historical Fiction Books

An early nineteenth-century sailing ship crosses the equator. Edmund Talbot, a young aristocrat keeping a journal for his godfather's amusement, records the humiliation and death of the Reverend Colley—a man whose shame kills him as surely as disease. Golding's Booker Prize winner and the first of the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy.

The last journey of Simón Bolívar: dying of tuberculosis in 1830, stripped of power, his Gran Colombia already disintegrating, the Liberator travels by river toward an exile he will not survive. García Márquez's meditation on the cost of greatness and the loneliness of power.

Saramago retells the Gospels from a resolutely human perspective: Jesus is the son of a carpenter who carries guilt for being complicit in the Massacre of the Innocents, is seduced by Mary Magdalene, and discovers that God intends to use him not to redeem humanity but to expand his own power and territorial reach. A novel so controversial it was pulled from consideration for a Portuguese literary prize under government pressure.

Leo Auberg, a seventeen-year-old Romanian German, is deported to a Soviet labor camp in Ukraine in 1945. Based on the testimony of Müller's friend and collaborator Oscar Pastior, who survived five years in such a camp, The Hunger Angel follows Leo through five years of coal shoveling, starvation, and the psychological distortions of extreme deprivation.

Three moments in the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich: waiting by the lift in Leningrad expecting arrest in 1936; meeting NKVD officer Vsevolod Power in Washington in 1949; accepting the chairmanship of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1960. A meditation on what art costs when the state controls your life.

At the 1939 Marian Anderson concert on the National Mall, a German Jewish émigré physicist meets an African American woman. Their children — David, Jonah, and Ruth — grow up in New York in a household defined by music and by the refusal to admit that race determines who you are. A multigenerational novel about music, race, and the cost of idealising beyond the possible.

Pampa Kampana, blessed by a goddess as a child, breathes an empire into existence in 14th-century south India. The empire of Bisnaga rises and falls across two hundred and fifty years while Pampa watches, intervenes, suffers, and records — a mythological history that is also an allegory of power, imagination, and the persistence of storytelling.

British India, 1920s: an idealistic English woman and her companion arrive hoping to see the 'real India'. When Dr Aziz, a Muslim physician, is accused of assaulting the Englishwoman in the Marabar Caves, the fragile relationships between colonisers and colonised shatter. Forster's masterpiece.

The Trojan War is retold entirely through the voices of the women caught in it — goddesses, queens, slaves, and prophets — with the Muse Calliope insisting that their stories are as worth telling as any hero's.

In 1962, a young Italian innkeeper on a remote Ligurian cliff meets a dying American actress, and their brief encounter echoes across fifty years, two continents, and a Hollywood dream factory that chews up everyone who enters it.

Mother is the matriarch of the Shangguan family in Northeast China. Through her eyes—and through the nine daughters and one son she bears—Mo Yan tells the story of China's twentieth century: the Japanese occupation, civil war, the Communist revolution, the Cultural Revolution, reform and opening. An epic of endurance told through the body, specifically through the mother who survives everything.

A fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe's life — reimagined as Norma Jeane Baker, a woman of extraordinary sensitivity and intelligence consumed and ultimately destroyed by the cultural construction called Marilyn Monroe that she inhabits but does not fully control.

Zanzibar, 1899: a British colonial officer collapses in the street and is taken in by an Indian merchant, falling in love with the merchant's sister. Decades later, their descendants try to understand what happened between their grandparents and why it still shapes their lives. Gurnah's novel about the long shadow of a single colonial encounter.

Frank Money, a Korean War veteran, is hospitalized in 1950s America, escapes, and makes his way back south to rescue his sister Cee from medical experimentation. Morrison's slimmest novel, about homecoming, brotherhood, and the specific horrors awaiting Black veterans in Jim Crow America.

A postcolonial reimagining of Great Expectations: an Australian ex-convict named Jack Maggs returns illegally to London to find the young gentleman he secretly funded, while a novelist named Tobias Oates uses hypnosis to extract Maggs's story for his own purposes. A brilliant novel about exploitation, colonialism, and the ethics of storytelling.

An all-Black Oklahoma town founded by freed slaves attacks a nearby convent housing women who have fled their former lives. The third novel in Morrison's Beloved trilogy, Paradise asks what happens when a community built to protect its own becomes as oppressive as the society it fled.

Twelve-year-old Yusuf is left as a debt-pawn with a prosperous merchant and travels with him into the African interior on trading expeditions. Set on the Swahili coast at the turn of the twentieth century, as German colonial rule begins to transform East Africa, this coming-of-age novel draws on the Quranic story of Yusuf and the Biblical Joseph.

An elderly Briton couple journey across post-Arthurian Britain to find their son in a land afflicted by a strange mist of collective forgetfulness, eventually uncovering a buried atrocity that the forgetfulness was designed to conceal.

Briseis, the enslaved queen who becomes Achilles's war-prize, narrates the Trojan War from the ground level of the Greek camp, where women survive at the mercy of the men who own them.

Mary, mother of Jesus, is old and living in Ephesus, watched over by two men who want her testimony. She tells them what she saw — the wedding at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the crucifixion — without consolation, without miracles, without the story they want. She fled the crucifixion. She does not believe her son was the son of God.

A Venetian scholar is captured by Ottoman forces in the seventeenth century and given as a slave to a Turkish man of learning who looks exactly like him. Over years of intellectual collaboration and obsessive mutual study, the two men—master and slave, East and West—begin to exchange identities.

Vietnam, 1963 to 1983. Skip Sands is a CIA officer working for his uncle, a legendary colonel running a psychological operations program called Tree of Smoke. Around him: two brothers from Arizona, a Canadian missionary, a double agent. Johnson's National Book Award winner is the major American novel about the Vietnam War.

Christopher Banks, London's most celebrated detective in the 1930s, returns to Shanghai where his parents disappeared when he was a child. As the Sino-Japanese War rages around him, his investigation into his parents' fate reveals that his entire understanding of his childhood was a kind construction rather than reality.

On a Friday noon in July 1714, the finest bridge in Peru collapses and sends five travellers to their deaths. Brother Juniper, who witnesses the accident, spends the next six years investigating their lives to determine whether their deaths were divine plan or pure accident.