Best Historical Fiction Books

A trio of Nazi hunters — a war correspondent, a Soviet night-bomber, and a young Boston woman — track a female war criminal known as the Huntress across postwar Europe and America. Based on the all-female Night Witches regiment of the Soviet air force.

In eleventh-century England, a young orphan named Rob Cole discovers he has an uncanny gift for sensing when people are near death; driven by this gift and a burning desire to understand medicine, he makes an extraordinary journey across the medieval world to study under the greatest physician of the age, Ibn Sina, in Persia.

Hester Prynne, condemned to wear the scarlet letter A for adultery in Puritan New England, lives with her illegitimate daughter Pearl while the father of her child — the revered minister Dimmesdale — declines into secret guilt.

Elena pursues academic success and marriage while Lila works in brutal factory conditions; their lives diverge further as political upheaval grips 1970s Naples.

Two sisters discover their cold, distant mother was once something entirely different — a young woman in Leningrad during the Siege, telling a fairy tale that is really the story of her own survival. Alternating between contemporary Oregon and wartime Soviet Russia, Winter Garden is about secrets kept across generations.

Ravic, a German surgeon living illegally in Paris in 1939, practises medicine under a false name and pursues the Gestapo officer who destroyed his life. Remarque's wartime novel was written in American exile and captures the atmosphere of Paris just before the German occupation with the precision of someone who knew the city and understood what was about to happen to it.

The story of Joanna, illegitimate daughter of King John of England, who is given in marriage to Llewelyn Fawr, Prince of Wales, and finds herself caught between loyalty to her father and love for her husband as English and Welsh powers collide.

Hyacinth Bridgerton recruits the roguish Gareth St. Clair to translate his grandmother's Italian diaries — and discovers that the diaries contain a secret that changes both their lives.

Jack Boughton and Della Miles, a Black schoolteacher, meet in St. Louis in the late 1940s and fall in love in a state where their relationship is illegal.

Narrated by Stingo, a young Southern writer who moves to Brooklyn in 1947, Sophie's Choice tells the story of his friendship with Sophie Zawistowski — a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor — and her volatile lover Nathan Landau, and the secret at the heart of Sophie's experience in Auschwitz.

1634. A merchant ship departs Batavia for Amsterdam carrying a disgraced detective, his bodyguard, a mysterious prisoner, and a demon that appears to be killing the passengers. Samuel Pipps must solve an impossible mystery from the ship's hold while his bodyguard Arent Hayes investigates on deck above. Turton's locked-room mystery at sea.

Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, suspects her new husband intends to kill her. O'Farrell reimagines the brief life of the young Duchess of Ferrara — likely the subject of Browning's 'My Last Duchess' — through a portrait sitting that becomes a meditation on art, survival, and female agency.

T.H. White's retelling of the Arthurian legends follows Arthur from his education by the wizard Merlin — who lives backwards through time — through the founding of the Round Table, the love triangle with Lancelot and Guinevere, and the final destruction of Camelot.

In 1959, Baptist preacher Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the Belgian Congo to serve as a missionary — and the novel, narrated by the five women whose lives he commands, traces the consequences of his rigid certainty against the backdrop of Congolese independence.

Palestinian terrorists acquire a nuclear device and plant it at the Super Bowl. CIA Deputy Director Jack Ryan must identify the threat and prevent detonation while the world's superpowers are being manipulated toward confrontation. Clancy's most complex thriller works across multiple continents, governments, and ideologies simultaneously.

The Turbin family in Kiev during the winter of 1918-1919, when the city changed hands multiple times between the Bolsheviks, the German-backed Hetmanate, and Petliura's forces. Bulgakov's first novel is the closest to autobiography — the family is his own, and the account of a cultivated Russian family facing the dissolution of their world is rendered with a warmth and grief the later work deliberately suppresses.

Lucy Snowe, a young Englishwoman of obscure circumstances, travels alone to the fictional city of Villette in Belgium, where she takes a teaching position at a girls' school and navigates love, professional ambition, and a psychological interior life of extraordinary intensity.

A Regency Cinderella: Benedict Bridgerton dances with a mysterious masked woman at a masquerade ball and cannot forget her — but Sophie Beckett is a servant who knows their worlds can never meet.

In a small Turkish village in Anatolia, Christians and Muslims have lived together for centuries — until WWI, Gallipoli, the Greek-Turkish War, and the population exchanges of the 1920s destroy everything. A companion in scope and grief to Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Peter Blood, an Irish physician unjustly condemned for treason after the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, is transported to Barbados as a slave and ultimately escapes to become the Caribbean's most celebrated — and principled — pirate captain.

Eliza Sommers, a young Chilean woman, follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 and, dressed as a man, makes her way across a country shaped by greed, violence, and the collision of races and cultures. Allende's most adventurous novel in structure — a picaresque across two continents.

John Tyree is a soldier on leave when he meets Savannah Curtis during a summer on the Carolina coast. Their brief romance deepens through years of letters — until the world changes and the letters stop coming. A love story about what happens when duty and desire pull in opposite directions.

Set against the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the ensuing Civil War, Doctor Zhivago follows the poet-physician Yuri Zhivago and his consuming love for Larissa Antipova across years of revolution, separation, and survival in a Russia being remade against its own will.

The goddess Hera narrates the years Penelope spent waiting in Ithaca for Odysseus's return, watching a queen manage suitors, politics, and survival with fierce intelligence while the world assumes she is merely waiting.