Best Historical Fiction Books

Paul Bäumer enlists in the German army at 18, full of patriotic idealism, and spends the next few years watching his friends die one by one on the Western Front while the world that sent them there carries on. Remarque's novel is the definitive anti-war testimony: written in the flat, precise language of men who have stopped expecting rescue.

D'Artagnan arrives in Paris from Gascony, nearly duels Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and promptly makes them all friends. Together the four Musketeers serve King Louis XIII while foiling the schemes of Cardinal Richelieu and the mysterious Milady de Winter. Dumas's greatest adventure novel is relentless entertainment — swashbuckling, witty, morally simple, and structurally impeccable.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest for life in Moscow's Metropol Hotel — and over three decades, he discovers that one can build an extraordinary existence within any set of constraints.

Two Afghan women from different generations are bound together by the brutal circumstances of their marriages and the friendship that becomes their only source of survival.

A blind French girl and a German orphan boy, connected by a radio broadcast, move toward each other across the chaos of occupied France in the final days of World War II.

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana begin lineages that diverge across two continents and three hundred years, one through slavery in America, one through colonial and postcolonial Ghana.

Following four generations of a Korean family from Japanese-occupied Korea to Osaka's Korean minority community, Pachinko is an epic about survival, identity, and the persistence of discrimination.

Set in Nazi Germany, a young girl's love of words and storytelling sustains her through air raids, poverty, and death — narrated by Death itself.

A multigenerational saga spanning seventy years of a South Indian Christian family whose members drown in every generation, told against the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial India.

Two French sisters take radically different paths through the Nazi occupation of France, one hiding Jews in her home, one becoming a resistance fighter guiding Allied pilots to safety.

In postwar Barcelona, a young boy discovers a mysterious novel by a nearly forgotten author, and his obsession with the book's creator leads him deep into a dark labyrinth of secrets, loves, and betrayals.

Frances 'Frankie' McGrath enlists as an army nurse in Vietnam after her brother deploys — and returns to an America that doesn't acknowledge what women did or suffered in the war.

Based on the true story of Hunter's own family, a Polish Jewish family scatters across four continents during World War II, each member fighting for survival along a different path.

A high school teacher travels back to 1958 through a time portal with a mission to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A reimagining of the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet and its impact on the women of his household, told through Agnes (Anne Hathaway) and the loss that may have inspired Hamlet.

A retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man, revealing what Twain's classic looks like when its silent center finally speaks.

A Black woman in 1970s California is repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland, where she must keep a white slaveholder alive to ensure her own existence.

A brilliant chemist in 1960s California is sidelined by sexism and single motherhood until she accidentally becomes the host of a cooking show — and treats it as applied chemistry and women's liberation.

Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen helps her Jewish best friend's family escape to Sweden during the Nazi occupation of Denmark in 1943, in Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning novel based on true events.

Four generations of the Trueba family navigate love, power, magic, and political upheaval in an unnamed Latin American country, culminating in the military coup that destroys what they have built.

A privileged Afghan boy's act of betrayal against his loyal servant's son haunts him across decades and continents, from Kabul to California and back.

Set in twelfth-century England, the novel follows the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge over decades of civil war, religious conflict, and human ambition.

Stephen Wraysford's doomed love affair in pre-war France is followed by his experiences in the trenches of the Somme — and, decades later, by his granddaughter's attempt to understand what he survived.

Based on the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, Human Acts traces the aftermath of a massacre through the perspectives of the living, the dead, and those caught between.