Most readers who love ancient history have been well served by Rome and Greece. Shelves groan with novels set in the Forum and on the slopes of the Acropolis. But the civilisations that came before, and the empires that rose beside them, have largely been left in the shadows. Babylon, Nineveh, Persepolis, Uruk: these are…

Pat Barker is one of the most important British novelists of the past half-century, and the Regeneration Trilogy stands as her most enduring achievement. Three novels set in the closing years of the First World War, combining real historical figures with invented characters, exploring shell shock, trauma, class, and the moral cost of sending broken…

Few detective series in Victorian fiction can match the emotional depth and psychological complexity of Anne Perry’s William Monk novels. Spanning 28 years and 24 books, this is a series that does something genuinely unusual: it turns the question of identity into a mystery that runs beneath every case the detective investigates. Monk begins with…

Simon Scarrow is one of Britain’s most prolific and consistently entertaining historical fiction authors, best known for the Eagles of the Empire series, which follows Roman soldiers Cato and Macro across 24 novels and counting. With over 4 million copies sold in English alone and Sunday Times No.1 bestseller status, he has built one of…

Elizabeth Chadwick’s William Marshal series brings to life one of the most extraordinary careers in medieval history. William Marshal rose from near-obscurity as the younger son of a minor lord to become the most powerful man in England: tournament champion, royal counsellor, Earl of Pembroke, and ultimately regent of the realm. The Archbishop of Canterbury…

Ellis Peters is the pen name of Edith Mary Pargeter, one of the most important figures in the history of historical crime fiction. Her Brother Cadfael Chronicles, set in and around a Benedictine abbey in twelfth-century Shrewsbury, are widely credited with creating the medieval mystery as a recognised genre. Without Cadfael, there would likely be…