20 Best Military Historical Fiction Books, From Sparta to WW2

Military historical fiction puts you in the ranks. The best of it explains how a shield wall holds, why a column breaks, and what a soldier thinks about in the hour before the fighting starts. It also does something a history book rarely manages: it makes the cost of a campaign personal.

This list covers war on land, from the hoplites of ancient Greece to the desert patrols of the Second World War. Every numbered pick is a novel written from research, by an author looking back at a war they did not fight in. Novels by veterans writing about their own war are a different kind of book, and they have their own section near the end.

War at sea is not covered here. Sailors, frigates and fleet actions have a separate guide to the best naval historical fiction. The picks below are arranged by era, so you can go straight to the period you like or read the list as a short history of soldiering.

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What Counts as Military Historical Fiction

Three tests decided what made the list. The book has to be about soldiers and the business of soldiering: training, marching, supply, command and combat. It has to be set in a real war or campaign. And the military detail has to come from research and stand up to scrutiny.

That leaves out novels where a war is only the backdrop to a romance or a family saga. It also leaves out thrillers about spies and codebreakers, which you will find on the WW2 historical fiction list. Two of the picks below bend the first test slightly, and each entry says so.

Ancient Greece and Rome

The ancient world gave the genre its most durable subjects: the Spartan phalanx and the Roman legion. If you want more from this era once you finish these, the ancient world hub and the best ancient Rome historical fiction list go further.

1. Gates of Fire (1998)

Author: Steven Pressfield. Setting: Sparta and the pass of Thermopylae, 480 BC.

A badly wounded Greek is pulled from the dead at Thermopylae and brought before the Persian king, who wants to know what kind of men have just held up his army. The survivor is Xeones, a squire in Spartan service, and his answer is the story of his life. It runs from the destruction of his home city to the last morning in the pass.

Most of the book is about preparation, not battle. Pressfield shows how Spartans were trained, how the phalanx worked as a machine made of men, and how fear was managed. When the fighting comes, it is close, exhausting and frightening.

This is the novel that other military novels are measured against. According to Steven Pressfield’s own site, it has sat on the reading list of the Commandant of the US Marine Corps since 2002. The full run of his war novels is on the Steven Pressfield author page.

2. Killer of Men (2010)

Author: Christian Cameron. Setting: Plataea, Ionia and the Aegean during the Ionian Revolt, around 500 BC.

Arimnestos is the son of a bronzesmith in the small Greek city of Plataea. A battle and a betrayal leave him enslaved far from home, and what he learns in the years that follow is how to fight. He tells the story as an old man, and he is honest about how good he was at killing.

This is the first book of the Long War series, which follows the Persian Wars through Marathon and Salamis. Cameron is a former US Navy officer and a historical reenactor, and it shows in the practical detail. You learn what a bronze helmet does to your hearing and how tiring it is to hold a shield.

Read it after Gates of Fire if you want the wider war that Thermopylae was part of. More picks from this era are on the best ancient Greece historical fiction list.

3. The Eagle of the Ninth (1954)

Author: Rosemary Sutcliff. Setting: Roman Britain in the second century AD.

Marcus Flavius Aquila takes up his first command at a frontier fort in the south west of Britain. A wound ends his army career almost as soon as it starts. What he has left is a question: what happened to his father’s legion, the Ninth, which marched north years earlier and never came back?

Marcus goes beyond Hadrian’s Wall with Esca, a former slave, to find out and to bring back the legion’s lost eagle. The opening chapters contain one of the best short accounts of a fort under attack in the genre. The rest is a quest through hostile country, so this pick sits at the edge of the definition.

It was written for younger readers and is still read by adults seventy years on. The 2011 film The Eagle is based on it.

4. Under the Eagle (2000)

Author: Simon Scarrow. Setting: The Rhine frontier and the Roman invasion of Britain, AD 42 to 43.

Cato is a bookish young man raised in the imperial palace, sent to the Second Legion with a letter that makes him an optio (a centurion’s deputy) on his first day. Macro is the newly promoted centurion who has to turn him into a soldier. Neither is pleased with the arrangement.

The legion is on the German frontier when the book opens and is soon ordered to join the invasion of Britain under Emperor Claudius. Scarrow is good on the daily routine of the legions: drill, rations, pay and the politics of the officers’ tents. The battle scenes are fast and clear.

This is the start of a series that now runs to more than twenty novels. The order is set out in the Eagles of the Empire guide, and the Simon Scarrow page covers his other series.

5. Wounds of Honour (2009)

Author: Anthony Riches. Setting: Hadrian’s Wall, northern Britain, AD 182.

Marcus Valerius Aquila arrives in Britain expecting a posting and finds he is a wanted man. His family in Rome has been condemned for treason under the emperor Commodus. To stay alive he takes a false name and joins an auxiliary cohort of Tungrians on Hadrian’s Wall as a centurion.

He has to win over hard men who distrust him, while the tribes north of the Wall gather for a rising. Riches writes about auxiliaries, the non-citizen troops who did much of Rome’s frontier fighting, and that sets the book apart from the many legionary novels.

It is the first of the Empire series, which later follows Marcus across the Roman world. The tone is rough and soldierly, with plenty of barrack-room humour. If you liked Scarrow, this is the natural next step.

6. The Forgotten Legion (2008)

Author: Ben Kane. Setting: Rome and the Parthian frontier, leading up to the battle of Carrhae, 53 BC.

Four people at the bottom of Roman society are followed here: the slave twins Romulus and Fabiola, the Gaulish gladiator Brennus, and Tarquinius, an Etruscan soothsayer and soldier. Three of them end up in the army that Crassus leads east against Parthia.

Carrhae was one of Rome’s worst defeats, and Kane builds the first book of his trilogy around it. He shows the campaign from the ranks: the heat, the thirst and the horse archers who would not come close enough to be fought.

Kane’s later Eagles of Rome trilogy covers another Roman disaster, in the German forests. Both are described on the Ben Kane author page.

The Middle Ages

Medieval warfare runs from the shield walls of the Dark Ages to the longbows of the Hundred Years’ War. For a wider selection, see the medieval Europe hub and the best medieval historical fiction list.

7. The Winter King (1995)

Author: Bernard Cornwell. Setting: Britain in the late fifth century, after the Romans have gone.

Derfel Cadarn is an old monk writing down what he remembers of his youth, when he was a spearman in the service of Arthur. This Arthur is not a king. He is a warlord trying to hold the British kingdoms together long enough to stop the Saxons.

Cornwell strips the legend down to what a Dark Age war might have looked like: small armies, shield walls, oaths and mud. Magic exists only as far as people believe in it. The battle scenes are told by a man who stood in the front rank.

It is the first of three novels, set out in the Warlord Chronicles reading order. A television adaptation was first shown in 2023. For other versions of the legend, see the best Arthurian historical fiction list.

8. The Last Kingdom (2004)

Author: Bernard Cornwell. Setting: Northumbria and Wessex, 866 to 877.

Uhtred is the son of a Northumbrian lord. As a boy he is captured by the Danes who have invaded his homeland and is raised among them. He grows up loving the people who took him, and then has to decide where he stands when they turn on Wessex, the last English kingdom left.

The shield wall is the centre of this book. Cornwell describes it as a shoving, stabbing crush where the short blade matters more than the long sword, and where a man’s nerve is tested before anything else. Alfred the Great appears as a clever, sickly, pious king whom Uhtred does not much like.

There are thirteen novels in all, listed in The Last Kingdom reading order. The television series ran from 2015 to 2022. More Norse and Danish picks are on the best Viking historical fiction list.

9. Wolf of the Plains (2007)

Author: Conn Iggulden. Setting: The Mongolian steppe in the twelfth century.

Temujin is the son of a khan. When his father dies, the tribe abandons the family on the open plain to starve. The boy who survives that winter will become Genghis Khan, and this novel is about how he gathered his first followers.

Iggulden writes the steppe as a place where war is a way of life. Boys ride before they walk, the bow decides everything, and loyalty is the only wealth. The raids and tribal battles are small in scale here and grow through the series.

In the United States the book is sold as Genghis: Birth of an Empire. It opens the five-book series set out in the Conqueror series reading order. The Conn Iggulden page covers the rest of his work.

10. Azincourt (2008)

Author: Bernard Cornwell. Setting: England and northern France, ending at Agincourt in 1415.

Nicholas Hook is a forester and an archer with a family feud and a talent for trouble. Outlawed at home, he goes to France as a hired bowman and survives the sack of Soissons. He then joins the army that Henry V takes across the Channel.

The siege of Harfleur fills the middle of the book, with its mines, guns and dysentery. Then comes the long march and the battle itself, told from the archers’ stakes. Cornwell explains what a war bow took to draw and what it did to armoured men in a muddy field.

In the United States the title is Agincourt. It stands alone, so it is a good first Cornwell if a long series seems too much. His other archer novels are in the Grail Quest series reading order.

Sieges and Gunpowder: The Sixteenth Century

11. The Religion (2006)

Author: Tim Willocks. Setting: Sicily and Malta during the Great Siege of 1565.

Mattias Tannhauser was taken as a boy and raised as a soldier of the Ottoman sultan. Now he is an arms dealer in Messina with no wish to fight for anyone. A countess looking for her lost son, and the scheming of the Knights of St John, draw him to Malta just as the Ottoman fleet arrives.

The Knights called their order “the Religion”, and the siege was one of the most savage of the century. Willocks does not look away from any of it. The fighting for the forts around the Grand Harbour is described in long, brutal, vivid passages.

This is the most violent book on the list and one of the most ambitious. Willocks gives time to both sides and to the surgeons as well as the swordsmen. A sequel, The Twelve Children of Paris, followed in 2013.

The Age of Napoleon and Empire

Muskets, squares and cavalry charges make this the classic era of the genre. The Napoleonic Wars hub has more from the period, on land and at sea.

12. Sharpe’s Eagle (1981)

Author: Bernard Cornwell. Setting: Spain during the Talavera campaign, July 1809.

Richard Sharpe is an officer who came up from the ranks, which makes him an outsider in Wellington’s army. He and his riflemen are attached to the South Essex, a raw regiment under an incompetent colonel. When the regiment is disgraced, Sharpe sets out to restore its honour by taking a French eagle in battle.

This was the first Sharpe novel Cornwell published, and all the series’ strengths are already here. The reader learns how a musket is loaded, how a line beats a column and why the rifle mattered. The battle of Talavera is laid out clearly.

You can begin here or with Sharpe’s Tiger (1997), which comes first in the story. The Sharpe series reading order explains both routes, and Bernard Cornwell’s own site has his notes on the books.

13. War and Peace (1869)

Author: Leo Tolstoy. Setting: Russia and central Europe, 1805 to 1812.

Tolstoy follows several aristocratic Russian families through the wars against Napoleon. Prince Andrei goes to war looking for glory, Nikolai Rostov joins the hussars, and Pierre Bezukhov wanders onto the field of Borodino as a civilian. Around them are the generals, real and invented.

Tolstoy was born in 1828, years after these events. He had served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War, so he knew what battle was like, but the wars of 1805 and 1812 he built from memoirs, histories and letters. That makes it historical fiction by any definition.

The battle chapters are extraordinary. Austerlitz is seen through smoke and confusion, and Borodino as something no commander controls. If the length worries you, know that the war sections move quickly.

14. Flashman (1969)

Author: George MacDonald Fraser. Setting: Britain, India and Afghanistan, 1839 to 1842.

Harry Flashman is the bully from the Victorian school story Tom Brown’s School Days, grown up and commissioned into a fashionable cavalry regiment. He is a coward, a liar and a cheat, and he knows it. Posted to Afghanistan, he finds himself in the middle of the First Anglo-Afghan War and the retreat from Kabul.

The joke is that Flashman keeps being mistaken for a hero. The serious point is that Fraser’s history is exact, with footnotes to prove it. The retreat from Kabul, one of the worst disasters in British military history, is told with real force.

Flashman’s attitudes are those of a Victorian scoundrel, and the book makes no apology for him. There are twelve books in all, covered in the Flashman Papers reading order and on the George MacDonald Fraser page.

The American Civil War

15. The Killer Angels (1974)

Author: Michael Shaara. Setting: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 29 June to 3 July 1863.

Shaara tells the battle of Gettysburg through the men who commanded it. On the Confederate side are Robert E. Lee and his doubting subordinate James Longstreet. On the Union side are the cavalryman John Buford and Joshua Chamberlain, a college professor leading a regiment from Maine.

Each chapter stays inside one man’s head, so you see every decision as it looked at the time, with partial information and no hindsight. The maps help, and the pace never drops. The defence of Little Round Top is among the best battle writing in American fiction.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. It was filmed in 1993 as Gettysburg.

16. The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Author: Stephen Crane. Setting: An unnamed Civil War battle, usually identified with Chancellorsville, 1863.

Henry Fleming is a young private in a New York regiment who has dreamed of glory and has not yet seen a fight. The novel covers his first two days in battle. Its one subject is fear: whether he will run, and what he will think of himself afterwards.

A book from 1895 might look like a wartime account, but it is not. Crane was born in 1871, six years after the war ended, and had seen no fighting when he wrote it. He worked from published accounts and is thought to have talked to veterans, so the novel is research and imagination, which is what qualifies it for this list.

It is short, and its picture of battle as noise and confusion shaped much of the war writing that came after.

17. Cold Mountain (1997)

Author: Charles Frazier. Setting: North Carolina in the last year of the Civil War.

Inman is a Confederate soldier recovering from a neck wound in a military hospital. He has had enough of the war. One night he walks out and starts for home in the mountains, hundreds of miles away, with the Home Guard hunting deserters along every road.

The second strand follows Ada, the woman he hopes is waiting, as she learns to run a farm with no idea how. This is the other pick that bends the definition, since most of the book takes place away from the battlefield. It earns its place as a study of what years of fighting do to a soldier, and for Inman’s memories of the battles he came through.

Frazier based Inman loosely on a relative from his own family history. The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1997 and was filmed in 2003.

If you want the war with its outcome changed, the best alternate history Civil War novels list is the place to look.

The World Wars

The numbered picks here are by authors born after the wars they describe. The World War I hub and the World War II hub cover both conflicts more broadly.

18. Birdsong (1993)

Author: Sebastian Faulks. Setting: Amiens in 1910, the Western Front from 1916 to 1918, and England in the 1970s.

Stephen Wraysford comes to Amiens as a young man on business and begins an affair that changes his life. Six years later he is back in the same part of France as an infantry officer. A later strand follows his granddaughter as she tries to find out who he was.

The war chapters are the reason the book is here. Faulks writes about the first day of the Somme with a slow, terrible patience. He also gives a great deal of space to the tunnellers, the miners who fought a war of their own beneath no man’s land.

A BBC adaptation followed in 2012. The Sebastian Faulks page covers his other war novels, including Charlotte Gray.

19. Regeneration (1991)

Author: Pat Barker. Setting: Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, 1917.

The poet and decorated officer Siegfried Sassoon has published a protest against the continuation of the war. To avoid a court martial, the army sends him to a hospital for shell-shocked officers. There he is treated by Dr W. H. R. Rivers, whose job is to make men well enough to go back.

There is almost no combat on the page. The war is present in what it has done to the patients, who include the young Wilfred Owen and Barker’s invented officer Billy Prior. It belongs on a military list because it asks the hardest question the genre has: what duty means when you no longer believe in the war.

Two more novels follow, and the third, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995. The Pat Barker page has the full trilogy.

20. Killing Rommel (2008)

Author: Steven Pressfield. Setting: The Western Desert of North Africa, 1942 to 1943.

A young British tank officer is attached to the Long Range Desert Group, the unit that drove far behind enemy lines in stripped-down trucks. The patrol’s task is in the title: find Erwin Rommel and kill him. The story is presented as the officer’s memoir, written long afterwards.

Pressfield brings the same care to trucks and sand that he gave to shields and spears. Navigation, fuel, water and mechanical repair matter as much as gunfire. The desert war also had a code of conduct between enemies that the book takes seriously.

It is shorter and quieter than his ancient novels, and a good choice if you want a Second World War story about a small unit. More from this war is on the best WW2 historical fiction list.

Honourable Mentions

These came close, and several are the next thing to read after a pick above.

The Afghan Campaign (2006) by Steven Pressfield. A young Macedonian infantryman joins Alexander’s army for the invasion of what is now Afghanistan. It is a grim, modern-feeling account of a war against an enemy who will not fight in the open.
Tides of War (2000) by Steven Pressfield. The Peloponnesian War and the career of Alcibiades, the brilliant and faithless Athenian general, told by a man who served under him.
The Virtues of War (2004) by Steven Pressfield. Alexander the Great narrates his own campaigns. It is the best of these books for understanding command.
The Gates of Athens (2020) by Conn Iggulden. The Persian Wars from the Athenian side, beginning at Marathon.
The Gates of Rome (2003) by Conn Iggulden. The boyhood and early soldiering of Julius Caesar, and the first book in the Emperor series reading order.
Eagles at War (2015) by Ben Kane. The destruction of three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, seen from both the Roman and the German side.
Harlequin (2000) by Bernard Cornwell. An English archer in the opening years of the Hundred Years’ War, ending at Crecy in 1346. The US title is The Archer’s Tale.
The Fort (2010) by Bernard Cornwell. The Penobscot Expedition of 1779, a little-known episode of the American Revolutionary War, told from both sides.
Young Bloods (2006) by Simon Scarrow. The parallel early lives of Napoleon Bonaparte and Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, in the first of four novels.
Gods and Generals (1996) by Jeff Shaara. Michael Shaara’s son wrote this prequel to The Killer Angels. It follows Lee, Jackson, Hancock and Chamberlain from 1858 to the eve of Gettysburg.

Written by Those Who Were There

The books in this section are not historical fiction by this site’s definition. Their authors wrote from their own service, not from research into a war before their time. They are classics of war writing and belong on the same shelf, so they are listed separately here.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque. A class of German schoolboys volunteers for the trenches. Remarque was a veteran of the Western Front, and the book was published in Germany a decade after the armistice.
Her Privates We (1930) by Frederic Manning. Ordinary British infantrymen on the Somme in 1916, written by a man who served there as a private. It first appeared in a fuller text in 1929 as The Middle Parts of Fortune.
A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway. An American ambulance officer on the Italian front, drawn from Hemingway’s own time with the ambulance service in Italy.
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller. A bomber squadron in the Mediterranean and the logic that keeps its men flying. Heller flew combat missions as a bombardier.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut. An American prisoner of war lives through the bombing of Dresden, as Vonnegut himself did in 1945.

How to Choose Your First Book

If you want one book that shows what the genre can do, start with Gates of Fire. If you want a long series to settle into, choose between Sharpe’s Eagle, The Last Kingdom and Under the Eagle, depending on whether you prefer muskets, shield walls or legions.

For a single battle told with complete clarity, read The Killer Angels. For the experience of the ordinary soldier, The Red Badge of Courage is short, and Birdsong is long and devastating. If you would like to laugh, the answer is Flashman.

Readers who like to stay with one set of characters for years will find more options on the best historical fiction series list.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is military historical fiction?

Military historical fiction is a novel set in a real war or campaign of the past, with soldiers and the conduct of war as its main subject. The best examples are closely researched, so the weapons, tactics, ranks and battles match the historical record. The author invents characters and conversations, but not the war itself.

What is the best military historical fiction book to start with?

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield is the best single starting point. It tells the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae in one volume and needs no background knowledge. If you would prefer a series, Sharpe’s Eagle by Bernard Cornwell and Under the Eagle by Simon Scarrow are both easy places to begin.

Who are the best authors of military historical fiction?

Bernard Cornwell is the best known, with the Sharpe novels, The Last Kingdom and several standalone battle books. Steven Pressfield is the leading name for ancient Greece. Simon Scarrow, Ben Kane and Anthony Riches write about the Roman army, Conn Iggulden about Rome and the Mongols, and Michael Shaara about the American Civil War.

How accurate is military historical fiction?

The best authors are accurate on what can be checked: dates, battles, equipment, tactics and the names of commanders. They invent the central characters and fill gaps where the sources are silent. Many, including Bernard Cornwell and George MacDonald Fraser, add a historical note or footnotes explaining what was changed.

Is All Quiet on the Western Front historical fiction?

Not by the usual definition. Erich Maria Remarque was a veteran of the First World War and wrote from his own experience about ten years later, so the book is a war novel by a participant. Historical fiction is normally written from research by an author who did not live through the events. The same applies to A Farewell to Arms and Catch-22.

Is The Red Badge of Courage based on Stephen Crane’s own experience?

No. Stephen Crane was born in 1871, six years after the American Civil War ended, and had never seen a battle when the novel was published in 1895. He relied on published accounts and his imagination. That is why it counts as historical fiction, even though it reads like a soldier’s own story.

What is the difference between military fiction and military historical fiction?

Military fiction covers any novel about armed forces, including stories set in the present day or the future. Military historical fiction is set in a real war of the past and is written from research. A thriller about a modern special forces unit is military fiction, while a novel about Waterloo is military historical fiction.

Does military historical fiction include naval novels?

Naval fiction is usually treated as a genre of its own, with its own readers and its own classics, such as the Aubrey and Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian. This list covers war on land only. Novels about warships, sea battles and life below decks are covered in a separate guide to naval historical fiction.