Best Historical Fiction Books

A man awakens with no memory in the body of a different person each morning, forced to relive the same day at a country house party until he can identify the killer of Evelyn Hardcastle — or be trapped forever.

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army narrates his journey from the fall of Saigon through Los Angeles exile to reeducation camp, examining what it means to be perpetually between worlds.

The second book of the Century Trilogy. Following five interrelated families through the rise of the Third Reich, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the dawn of the nuclear age, Ken Follett turns the twentieth century's darkest decades into sweeping, character-driven drama.

After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, two of the men who signed Charles I's death warrant flee to New England, pursued across the Atlantic by a relentless royal manhunter determined to see every regicide brought to justice.

A multigenerational story spanning 60 years and several continents, beginning with a poor Afghan family's decision to give away a daughter and rippling outward through the lives of those touched by that act of sacrifice. Hosseini's most structurally ambitious novel.

Daphne Bridgerton and the Duke of Hastings enter a fake courtship to mutual benefit — and discover that playing at love is a dangerous game when real feelings get involved.

Paula McLain's bestselling novel imagines the marriage of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in 1920s Paris. Narrated by Hadley, it portrays their love, the dazzling expatriate world of the Lost Generation, and the slow unraveling of a marriage in the shadow of genius.

The origin story of John Kelly — who will become John Clark, Jack Ryan's right-hand operative — set during the Vietnam War. A grieving Navy SEAL wages a one-man war against a Baltimore drug ring while simultaneously being recruited for a secret POW rescue mission in North Vietnam.

Jack Ryan has become National Security Advisor when a trade war with Japan escalates into economic warfare and then military conflict in the Pacific. The novel that introduced the concept of a coordinated attack on financial infrastructure, and that ends with an act of terrorism that presaged 9/11.

The conclusion of the Century Trilogy. Following the five families through the Cold War — civil rights, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the fall of the Iron Curtain — Ken Follett brings his century-spanning saga to a close.

On the night of Willie Lincoln's death in 1862, Abraham Lincoln visits his son's crypt as the dead in the Bardo surrounding it attempt to guide the boy to his next passage.

In 1950s Mexico, glamorous socialite Noemí Taboada investigates her cousin's mysterious illness at a decaying English family's remote estate — and uncovers something monstrous.

In the summer of 1914, as Europe slides toward catastrophe, British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith pours secret state intelligence into passionate love letters to a young aristocrat — a real affair that endangered national security on the eve of the Great War.

On his hundredth birthday, Allan Karlsson escapes his nursing home through the window and embarks on an unexpected adventure, while flashbacks reveal a century of history in which he was improbably present at every major event.

A young woman discovers her father's cache of documents — a mysterious old book stamped with a dragon and letters from a professor — and begins uncovering a multigenerational quest to find the actual tomb of Vlad the Impaler, who may still be alive.

Philippa Gregory's bestselling Tudor saga told through Mary Boleyn, sister of the doomed Anne. As the Boleyn family pushes its daughters toward Henry VIII's bed in pursuit of power, Mary watches her sister's dizzying rise and catastrophic fall from the inside.

A witch-historian at Oxford's Bodleian Library unearths an enchanted alchemical manuscript and finds herself at the center of a centuries-old conflict between vampires, witches, and daemons — and falling for a 1,500-year-old vampire geneticist.

The daughters of King Minos — Ariadne, who saves Theseus from the Labyrinth only to be abandoned, and Phaedra, who inherits the consequences — reclaim two lives silenced at the edges of the Theseus myth.

Tom Hazard was born in 1581 and ages so slowly he has lived through Shakespeare's London, Captain Cook's voyages, and 1920s Paris — now working as a history teacher in present-day London while belonging to a secret society that forbids its members from falling in love.

The Infernal Devices reaches its devastating, then beautiful, conclusion. Mortmain's clockwork army threatens every Shadowhunter, but it is the question of Will, Jem, and Tessa — and whether love can survive impossible choices — that makes this ending one of the most discussed in young adult fiction.

Jean Valjean, paroled after nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, spends the rest of his life pursued by the relentless Inspector Javert while trying to become a better man. Hugo's vast novel about poverty, redemption, and the Paris barricades of 1832 is one of the most epic and emotionally overwhelming novels ever written.

The four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — come of age in Civil War-era New England, each navigating the tension between social expectation and personal aspiration in Alcott's masterpiece about ambition, sisterhood, and growing up.

Edmond Dantès is wrongly imprisoned, escapes after fourteen years, acquires a vast fortune, and returns to Paris as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo to execute a perfectly planned revenge on those who destroyed his life. Dumas's epic is the greatest revenge story ever told — intricate, theatrical, and utterly compelling.

Four characters — a widow, a student, and two tailors — are brought together in 1975 India during Indira Gandhi's Emergency, finding in each other a fragile refuge against catastrophe.