Alternate history asks the most irresistible question in fiction: what if? What if the Allies had lost the Second World War? What if the Confederacy had won at Gettysburg? What if one election, one battle or one lost set of orders had gone the other way?
The best alternate history novels are not escapism. They are serious examinations of history’s hinge points, the moments when our world could have become unrecognizable. History is the subject, and the speculation is the storytelling device.
This guide covers twelve of the finest alternate history novels, from the classics that founded the genre to modern prize winners. It is the main list in our alternate history section, and it points to narrower lists and reading orders along the way.
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What Makes Great Alternate History?
Not all alternate history is created equal. The genre stretches from rigorous counterfactual fiction to fantasy with a historical coat of paint, and readers deserve to know which is which.
The books on this list share a few qualities. They choose a point of divergence rooted in real history. They follow the consequences of that change with discipline. And their speculation tells you something true about the actual past.
We draw the line at pure fantasy. If magic is the main event and history is decoration, the book belongs on a different list. Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels earn their place because they are about the Napoleonic Wars, with dragons treated as one more arm of the military.
A few famous books sit right on that border. Rather than leave them out, we have put them in their own section below, called Close Cousins. If you want the full background on where the line falls, read our guide to historical fiction vs alternate history.
Quick Picks
| If you want | Start with |
|---|---|
| The genre’s founding classic | The Man in the High Castle |
| A page-turning thriller | Fatherland |
| A Civil War story | The Guns of the South |
| Literary fiction | The Plot Against America |
| A long series to settle into | His Majesty’s Dragon or How Few Remain |
| A British setting | SS-GB or Dominion |
The Best Alternate History Books
1. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962)
Setting: San Francisco and the Rocky Mountain States, 1962, fifteen years after an Axis victory
The novel that defined the genre. In Dick’s world, Franklin Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933, America stayed isolationist, and the war ended in 1947 with an Axis victory. The former United States is split between a Japanese-run Pacific coast, a Nazi-ruled east, and a neutral buffer zone in the Rockies.
The story follows several ordinary people in this diminished country. There is a dealer in antique Americana, a craftsman hiding his Jewish identity, a Japanese trade official troubled by questions of duty, and a judo instructor who becomes fascinated by a banned novel.
That novel within the novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, imagines a world in which the Allies won, though not quite the world we know. This layering gives the book its depth. Dick is asking whether history has any fixed truth at all.
The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963 and was adapted into an Amazon series that began in 2015. For the rest of his work, see our Philip K. Dick author guide.
2. Fatherland by Robert Harris (1992)
Setting: Berlin, April 1964, in a Europe dominated by a victorious Nazi Germany
Harris’s first novel takes a similar premise to Dick’s and turns it into a taut detective thriller. Germany has won the war, Berlin is preparing for Hitler’s seventy-fifth birthday, and an American president is about to arrive on a state visit.
Xavier March, a detective in the criminal police, is called to a body found in the Havel outside Berlin. What looks like a routine case draws him toward a secret that the Gestapo wants buried.
Harris is meticulous about his invented world. The occupied Europe he builds is chillingly coherent, and the thriller mechanics carry real moral weight. March is a decent man inside a monstrous system, slowly learning what his country has done.
HBO filmed the novel in 1994 with Rutger Hauer as March. Harris went on to write the Cicero Trilogy and much else, all of which is covered on our Robert Harris author page.
3. The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove (1992)
Setting: Virginia and the American South, from January 1864
Turtledove is often called the master of alternate history, and this is his best-known single novel. The premise is audacious: in the winter of 1864, strangers arrive at Robert E. Lee’s headquarters offering a rifle unlike anything the Army of Northern Virginia has seen, the AK-47.
The strangers are time travelers, white supremacists from South Africa in 2014, and they want a Confederate victory for reasons of their own. What makes the book more than a clever gimmick is its portrait of Lee, who grows steadily more uneasy about his benefactors and their beliefs.
Turtledove holds a doctorate in Byzantine history and brings a scholar’s care to camp life and battle. The novel won the John Esten Cooke Award for Southern Fiction in 1993. It is a standalone, so it is an easy first Turtledove to read.
For more in this vein, see our list of the best alternate history Civil War books and the Harry Turtledove author page.
4. SS-GB by Len Deighton (1978)
Setting: London, November 1941, nine months after a successful German invasion
Published fourteen years before Fatherland, Deighton’s novel imagines a Britain that surrendered after a German landing. London is occupied. Churchill has been executed. King George VI is a prisoner in the Tower of London.
Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer of Scotland Yard now reports to a German superior. A murder case that looks straightforward leads him toward atomic research and into the rivalry between the SS and the German army.
SS-GB is a tight, cold book. Deighton is particularly good on the texture of occupation, the way ordinary life continues through small daily compromises. Archer is a credible and compromised hero whose awakening gives the novel its moral center.
The BBC adapted SS-GB as a five-part drama in 2017. Our Len Deighton author page covers his complete work, including the spy novels.
5. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)
Setting: Newark, New Jersey, 1940 to 1942, after Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency
Roth imagines the celebrity aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh winning the 1940 election, reaching an understanding with Hitler, and keeping America out of the war. The story is told by a young Philip Roth, a boy in a Jewish family in Newark, watching his country change.
Roth is not interested in grand geopolitics. He is interested in what it feels like to be afraid in your own country, to watch trusted institutions fail, and to see a community fracture under pressure. The Lindbergh presidency is the backdrop, and the Roth family is the story.
The novel won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and HBO turned it into a six-part miniseries in 2020. Readers who come to the genre from literary fiction will find it the most natural way in.
6. Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore (1953)
Setting: A poor and backward United States in the 1930s and 1940s, generations after a Confederate victory at Gettysburg
One of the earliest serious alternate history novels, and still one of the most ingenious. In Moore’s world, the South won at Gettysburg and went on to become a wealthy power, while the remaining United States sank into poverty and stagnation.
The narrator, Hodge Backmaker, is a bookish young man born in 1921 who wants nothing more than to become a historian. His search for an education leads him to Haggershaven, a community of scholars in rural Pennsylvania, and to a chance to study the war that shaped his world more closely than any historian before him.
The book is short, strange, and quietly devastating. It is often cited as an influence on The Man in the High Castle, and reading the two together shows how the genre found its conventions.
7. His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (2006)
Setting: Britain and the seas around it, 1805, in a Napoleonic War fought with dragons
The first Temeraire novel is the easiest way for readers who love naval and military historical fiction to enter alternate history. Novik’s premise is that dragons have always existed and serve as an aerial corps, used much as cavalry or ships of the line.
Naval captain Will Laurence captures a French frigate carrying a rare dragon egg. When it hatches, he finds himself bound to the young dragon Temeraire and pulled out of the Navy as Britain braces for invasion.
The period detail is thorough, and the military history is never sacrificed to the conceit. This is a novel about duty and loyalty, published in the UK simply as Temeraire. The series runs to nine books, set out in our Temeraire series reading order.
See also the Naomi Novik author page and, for the real war behind the story, our Napoleonic Wars guide.
8. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (2007)
Setting: Sitka, Alaska, in a present day where a Jewish homeland was established there during the Second World War
Chabon’s novel is a noir detective story. Meyer Landsman, a homicide detective with a drinking problem, investigates a murder in the cheap hotel where he lives. Meanwhile, the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to Alaskan control after sixty years.
The historical pivot is one of the most intriguing in the genre. Around 1940, the United States Interior Department under Harold Ickes really did float a plan, the Slattery Report, to settle European Jewish refugees in Alaska. In Chabon’s world, the plan went ahead, and the state of Israel did not survive 1948.
The resulting world is fully realized, melancholy, and alive with Yiddish slang. The novel won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Sidewise Awards. It asks more of the reader than most books here, and rewards the effort.
9. Dominion by C.J. Sansom (2012)
Setting: Britain, 1952, twelve years after the government made peace with Nazi Germany
Sansom is best known for his Tudor mysteries, and Dominion is his one alternate history. The divergence is a single meeting in May 1940: Lord Halifax becomes Prime Minister in place of Winston Churchill, and Britain comes to terms with Hitler.
Twelve years on, Britain is a tired satellite of the Reich, and an aging Churchill leads the Resistance. Civil servant David Fitzgerald, who spies for that Resistance, is asked to help rescue an old university friend. Frank Muncaster is a scientist held in a Birmingham mental hospital, and he knows a secret that the Germans badly want.
It is a long and deeply serious book, heavy with smog, fear, and moral compromise. It won the Sidewise Award, and Shardlake readers will recognize the patient pacing at once.
Read our C.J. Sansom author page and the Shardlake series reading order. For more books on this theme, see the best alternate history WWII books.
10. The Alteration by Kingsley Amis (1976)
Setting: England, 1976, in a world where the Reformation never happened
Amis takes one of the biggest divergences on this list. Martin Luther made his peace with Rome, England never broke with the Church, and four and a half centuries later, a Catholic Europe had little science and no notion of personal freedom.
Hubert Anvil is a ten-year-old chorister with the finest voice of his generation. The Church authorities decide that such a voice is too precious to lose to adolescence, and the title tells you what they intend.
The novel is short, sharp, and very dark, and it won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1977. Amis also has fun with the genre itself: in Hubert’s world, a writer named Philip K. Dick has written a forbidden novel imagining that the Reformation did take place.
11. Farthing by Jo Walton (2006)
Setting: An English country house, 1949, in a Britain that made peace with Hitler
Walton starts with the coziest form in English fiction, the country-house murder, and sets it in a Britain that had settled with Germany. A prominent politician is found dead during a weekend party at Farthing House, and Inspector Peter Carmichael of Scotland Yard is sent to investigate.
The story alternates between Carmichael and Lucy Kahn, a daughter of the house who has scandalized her family by marrying a Jewish man. Her husband is the obvious person to blame, which is exactly what worries her.
The mystery is satisfying, but the real subject is how quietly a free country can slide. Farthing opens the Small Change trilogy, continued in Ha’penny (2007) and Half a Crown (2008).
12. How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove (1997)
Setting: North America, 1881, a generation after the Confederacy won its independence
Where The Guns of the South uses time travel, How Few Remain turns on a purely historical accident. In 1862, a copy of Lee’s Special Order 191 was lost and found by Union soldiers. In Turtledove’s version, the orders are recovered, and the South wins the war that autumn.
The novel opens two decades later, when the Confederacy’s purchase of two Mexican provinces gives Washington a reason to fight again. The cast is drawn from real history, including Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Clemens, George Custer, and a young Theodore Roosevelt.
It won the Sidewise Award in 1997 and works well on its own. It is also the first of eleven books in our Southern Victory series reading order. More long sagas are on our list of the best alternate history series.
Close Cousins: Not Quite Alternate History
These three books are often shelved with alternate history, and readers of the genre tend to love them. Strictly speaking, each one does something slightly different, so we list them separately.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016). Cora escapes a Georgia plantation on an Underground Railroad that is a real railway, with tunnels, stations, and conductors. Each state she reaches shows a different face of American racism. The book is closer to allegory than to a worked-out counterfactual, but it uses the genre’s central trick to look at the real past with new clarity. It won the National Book Award in 2016, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017, and Barry Jenkins adapted it for Amazon in 2021.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004). A fantasy novel, but one so thoroughly grounded in Regency England and the Napoleonic Wars that it reads like history with footnotes. Two magicians revive English magic and are soon put to work against Napoleon. It won the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award in 2005, and the BBC adapted it into seven parts in 2015.
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935). Written as a warning about the near future, not as a look back, so it is not alternate history in the strict sense. A populist senator wins the presidency and builds a dictatorship, and a small-town newspaper editor finds himself in opposition. Read today, it feels like a counterfactual 1930s.
Honourable Mentions
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990). A founding steampunk novel set in London in 1855, where Charles Babbage’s mechanical computers work, and the information age arrives a century early. Dense but influential.
Hitler Victorious edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg (1986). An anthology of eleven stories about a German victory, with contributions from David Brin, Greg Bear, C.M. Kornbluth, and Keith Roberts, among others. A good survey of how many ways writers have approached the same question.
Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters (2016). A thriller set in a present-day America where the Civil War never happened, and slavery remains legal in four states. It features on our Civil War list.
In the Balance by Harry Turtledove (1994). The Second World War is interrupted in 1942 by an alien invasion, and enemies have to become allies. It is the most science fiction book on this page, and it opens the eight-book saga covered in our Worldwar series reading order.
Where to Start: Alternate History by Reader Type
If you love WWII historical fiction: Start with Fatherland. It combines a familiar period with a thriller plot that keeps the pages turning. Our list of the best WWII historical fiction covers the realities of the war.
If you love literary fiction: Start with The Plot Against America or, from the Close Cousins section, The Underground Railroad. Both work for readers who rarely touch genre fiction.
If you love military historical fiction: Start with The Guns of the South or His Majesty’s Dragon. Both center on warfare, backed by deep research.
If you want the classic: Start with The Man in the High Castle. It is shorter than most books on this list and remains the genre’s most important work.
If you love British historical fiction: Start with SS-GB, Dominion or Farthing. All three are rooted in British history and sensibility.
If you love mysteries: Start with Farthing or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Both are detective stories first.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is alternate history fiction?
Alternate history fiction imagines what the world might look like if a specific historical event had unfolded differently. A key battle is lost, a leader dies or survives, a technology arrives earlier or later than it did. The story follows the consequences of that change. The best alternate history novels use these invented timelines to show something true about actual history.
What is the difference between alternate history and historical fiction?
Historical fiction is set within actual history, with real events as the backdrop and real figures sometimes appearing as characters. Alternate history departs from real events at a specific point and imagines a different world. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick is alternate history. The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell is historical fiction.
Is alternate history the same as science fiction?
Alternate history is often shelved with science fiction, but it does not need any scientific element beyond the initial change. Fatherland, The Plot Against America and Dominion contain no science fiction at all. The genre sits where historical fiction and speculative fiction meet, and readers of both tend to find their way into it.
Where does alternate history end and fantasy begin?
It is a grey area. The books on this list treat history as the primary subject and use speculation as a storytelling device. When the speculative element overwhelms the history, the book moves toward fantasy. The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik counts as alternate history because the Napoleonic Wars drive the story and the dragons are a military and political factor.
What is the best alternate history novel for someone new to the genre?
Fatherland by Robert Harris is the most accessible starting point. It reads as a thriller, the invented world is clearly explained, and the setting will be familiar to most historical fiction readers. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick is the place to start if you want the genre’s most important novel.
Is The Man in the High Castle TV series faithful to the book?
The Amazon series uses the same premise and several of the same characters, but its plot departs a long way from the novel. The book is more philosophical and far less action-driven than the series. Both are worth your time, but they are quite different works.
Are there alternate history novels set outside World War II?
Yes, though the Second World War and the American Civil War dominate the genre. Bring the Jubilee and The Guns of the South deal with the Civil War. The Temeraire series covers the Napoleonic Wars. The Alteration imagines a world without the Reformation. The genre can work with any period where a believable turning point exists.
What is the Sidewise Award?
The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History recognise the best long-form and short-form alternate history published each year. Winners include How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon and Dominion by C.J. Sansom. The award is a useful guide for readers looking for the genre’s most acclaimed work.
Final Thoughts
Alternate history works because it sends you back to the real thing. Finish Fatherland or Dominion and you will want to know how close 1940 really came. Finish How Few Remain and you will look up Special Order 191.
Start with whichever premise you cannot stop thinking about. The past is fixed, but these twelve novels make it feel, for a few hundred pages, as if it might still go another way. Past winners of the Sidewise Awards are a good place to look once you have finished this list.
Related Reading on Historical Shelf
- Alternate History Fiction: Complete Guide
- Best Alternate History WWII Books
- Best Alternate History Civil War Books
- Best Alternate History Series
- Southern Victory Series Reading Order
- Worldwar Series Reading Order
- Temeraire Series Reading Order
- Philip K. Dick: Complete Guide to Books and Series
- Harry Turtledove: Complete Guide to Books and Series
- Naomi Novik: Complete Guide to Books and Series
- Len Deighton: Complete Guide to Books and Series
- Robert Harris: Complete Guide to Books and Series
- C.J. Sansom: Complete Guide to Books and Series
- Historical Fiction vs Alternate History
- World War II Historical Fiction: Time Period Guide
- Explore Historical Fiction by Time Period