Best Historical Fiction Books

The London Institute is threatened with closure unless its leader can be vindicated. Will and Jem must uncover the Magister's true identity before a deadline expires — while Tessa finds her feelings for both of them becoming impossible to deny or resolve. The love triangle deepens into something that resists easy resolution.

Five characters across three time periods — fifteenth-century Constantinople, contemporary Idaho, and a generation ship in the distant future — are connected by a single ancient Greek manuscript. A meditation on why stories matter.

Jamie and Claire make their new home in the American colonies, building Fraser's Ridge in the North Carolina backcountry as the rumblings of revolution grow around them. Meanwhile, their daughter Brianna in the twentieth century discovers a letter predicting her parents' fate — and must decide whether to use the stones to change it.

The ninth Outlander novel brings Brianna and Roger back to the eighteenth century and to Fraser's Ridge, reuniting the family across time as the Revolutionary War reaches the Carolinas. Gabaldon navigates the complexities of a divided family during a divided war, with Jamie and Claire at the centre of a community trying to survive history.

Three women — debutante Osla, brilliant Mab, and mathematics prodigy Beth — work as codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Years later, on the eve of the 1947 royal wedding, one of them has been committed to a psychiatric facility with a vital secret, and the other two must find the traitor in their midst to get her out.

When Alice's grandmother, Babcia, has a stroke and starts whispering names that no one recognises, Alice travels to Poland to uncover the truth. Alternating with the story of a young woman in Nazi-occupied Poland who made impossible choices to protect those she loved.

1778. The Battle of Monmouth. Jamie Fraser believed dead — and then not dead. Lord John Grey facing impossible consequences of choices made for honour. Brianna and Roger in the twentieth century making their own decisions about time. The eighth Outlander novel keeps multiple generations moving through American history while the war reaches its decisive phase.

Victorian London, 1878. Tessa Gray arrives from New York looking for her brother and is captured by demons. Rescued by the Shadowhunters of the London Institute, she discovers she has a rare power: she can transform into anyone she touches. Set a century before the Mortal Instruments, the Infernal Devices prequel trilogy begins here.

Two interweaving storylines — one set during World War II, one in the late 1990s tech boom — converge on a buried treasure, a data haven, and the mathematics of cryptography.

Berlin, 1964. The Reich has won the war. A routine murder investigation draws SS detective Xavier March into a conspiracy that could expose the greatest secret of the Nazi empire — the secret that the rest of the world must never learn.

Set during the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 1960s, the novel follows three characters — twin sisters and a British writer — through one of Africa's most devastating postcolonial conflicts.

DeLillo's fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald — the conspiracy theorists who recruited him, the forces that shaped him, and the day in Dallas — is the most formally rigorous of the many Kennedy assassination novels. DeLillo is not interested in whether Oswald did it but in what kind of person could be shaped into such an act: a man made entirely of images, ideologies, and other people's narratives.

Based on the true story of Mila Pavlichenko — a Soviet history student turned Red Army sniper who becomes the most lethal female sniper in history with 309 confirmed kills. When she travels to America in 1942 on a propaganda tour, a shadowy figure begins targeting her, and Mila must use the same precision that kept her alive at Sevastopol.

As the American Revolution approaches, Jamie and Claire build a community at Fraser's Ridge through the early 1770s. The longest Outlander novel follows multiple characters through births, marriages, illnesses, and the Regulators uprising — a vast portrait of colonial life on the frontier of history.

Three days. One hill called the Heroes. Two armies trying to take it. Abercrombie compresses an entire war into a single brutal engagement, following soldiers on both sides as they fight, scheme, and die. A standalone novel set in the First Law world that is less interested in victory than in the human cost of the pointless fights that constitute war.

Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, loves the Romani dancer Esmeralda, who is pursued by the archdeacon Frollo and a captain of the guard. Hugo's second great novel is the one that made him famous and established historical fiction as a serious literary form in France.

Set in the Igbo village of Umuofia in pre-colonial Nigeria, Things Fall Apart follows the warrior Okonkwo whose rigid commitment to traditional masculine strength ultimately destroys him — and whose world is irrevocably transformed by the arrival of British missionaries and colonial administrators.

Two centuries after The Pillars of the Earth, the city of Kingsbridge is swept up in the arrival of the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the ambitions of builders, healers, merchants, and monks. Follett returns to his most beloved setting with a cast of characters as vivid as the original.

Thomas Cromwell orchestrates the fall of Anne Boleyn so that Henry VIII can pursue Jane Seymour — a second act of court destruction more morally troubling than the first. Winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Five families from England, Germany, Russia, America, and Wales are swept up in the cataclysm of World War One and the Russian Revolution. Follett's Century Trilogy opens with his most ambitious canvas yet — a panoramic story of the early twentieth century told through interconnected lives across five nations.

John Clark — the CIA field operative who has appeared across Clancy's Jack Ryan universe — is given command of Rainbow, a multinational counter-terrorism unit. When a series of hostage situations reveals a larger conspiracy involving bioterrorism and corporate eco-extremism, Rainbow must stop a plot aimed at reducing the human population.

Gustad Noble, a Parsi bank clerk in 1971 Bombay, is drawn into an ill-fated conspiracy involving an old friend, the Indo-Pakistani War, and a sum of money that will threaten everything he has built.

The story of Oscar de León — an overweight, sci-fi-obsessed Dominican-American from New Jersey who has never had a girlfriend — and the multigenerational curse his family carries from the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship.

Set in the small town of Ayemenem in Kerala, India, Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the lives of fraternal twins Rahel and Estha and the catastrophic consequences of their family's transgression of the Love Laws — the laws that determine who can love whom, and how, and how much.