Best Historical Fiction Books

In 1974, a Vietnam vet moves his family to remote Alaska wilderness, where the land's magnificent isolation amplifies his PTSD and the family's survival depends on his wife and daughter's strength.

Patroclus, the unassuming son of a minor Greek king, tells the story of his life alongside Achilles — the most beautiful and most doomed of Greek heroes — and the love between them.

The second Neapolitan novel follows Lila into her disastrous marriage and Elena through her university entrance exams and early years of higher education, as their friendship navigates the widening gap of their diverging lives.

Anthony Bridgerton, London's most notorious rake, decides to marry for convenience — but falls helplessly in love with his intended's sharp-tongued, fiercely protective sister, Kate Sharma.

In the early 1980s, physics professor Joan Goodwin joins NASA's Space Shuttle program and discovers, among a tight-knit class of astronaut candidates, a love that could cost her everything as a mission goes catastrophically wrong.

A Chinese orphan is brought to Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation in 1830s England, where the silver-working magic that powers the British Empire depends on the loss inherent in translation.

When the US government launches a covert military operation against Colombian drug cartels, Deputy National Security Advisor Jack Ryan uncovers a political conspiracy to disavow the soldiers involved — leaving them to die in the jungle rather than admit the mission existed.

When the Pope dies suddenly, the College of Cardinals gathers in the Sistine Chapel to elect his successor. Behind the locked doors of the Vatican, Dean of the College Cardinal Lomeli presides over a conclave of intrigue, ambition, and hidden sin — where faith and politics are indistinguishable.

A fictional oral history of one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s, told through interviews with band members years after their legendary breakup.

William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski are born on the same day in 1906 — Kane to a wealthy Boston banking family, Abel to a Polish peasant family — and their parallel lives, shaped by the First World War, the Depression, and the Second World War, converge in a rivalry of consuming intensity that spans decades and continents.

An eighteenth-century Paris parfumeur with an extraordinary sense of smell and no odor of his own commits a series of murders to create the world's most perfect perfume.

In 1940s Ohio, a young Black girl named Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes, believing beauty — as defined by the white standards she has absorbed — is the one thing that could save her from her world's cruelties.

In 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is released from a juvenile work farm, intending to drive west with his brother and start a new life — until two unexpected companions redirect his journey to New York.

Based on a true story, a Slovakian Jew assigned to tattoo numbers on prisoners at Auschwitz falls in love with a woman he marks, and the two survive the Holocaust through luck, courage, and each other.

Twin sisters from a small Black town in Louisiana take radically divergent paths — one stays in the community, one passes as white — and their daughters' lives intersect decades later.

In 1935, a thirteen-year-old girl's false accusation destroys two lives — and she spends the rest of hers trying to atone for it through the act of writing.

Tennis legend Carrie Soto comes out of retirement at 37 to protect her all-time Grand Slam record from being broken by the sport's rising star.

The fourth Kingsbridge novel is actually a prequel, set in the Dark Ages — 997 AD — showing how the town of Kingsbridge came to be founded. A builder, a monk, and a noblewoman navigate the dangerous world of Viking raids, Norman invasion, and the beginnings of English civilization.

Tracy Chevalier's bestselling novel imagines the story behind Vermeer's famous painting. Griet, a sixteen-year-old maid in seventeenth-century Delft, enters the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer and is slowly drawn into his art — and the quiet, charged tension of his studio.

In an alternative Napoleonic England where magic was once commonplace, two very different magicians attempt to restore English magic — with dangerous and unforeseen consequences.

A sweeping family epic set across one legendary night in 1983 Malibu, tracing the four Riva siblings through their sun-soaked, complicated lives.

In Depression-era Kentucky, English transplant Alice joins a band of fierce women delivering books on horseback through the Appalachian mountains as part of Eleanor Roosevelt's Packhorse Library, finding sisterhood, courage, and herself along the way.

A medieval monk and his novice investigate a series of mysterious deaths in a fourteenth-century Italian abbey, where the labyrinthine library may hold the answer — and a secret someone will kill to protect.

Bernhard Schlink's international bestseller. In postwar Germany, a teenage boy has an affair with an older woman who abruptly disappears — only to reappear years later in a courtroom, on trial for Nazi war crimes, forcing him to confront guilt, complicity, and the generation that came after.