History remembers Nero as the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. Conn Iggulden’s Nero Trilogy asks a more interesting question: how does a small boy, born into the most dangerous family in the Roman world, grow up to become its…
For thirty years, two branches of the same royal family tore England apart over a single crown. Conn Iggulden’s Wars of the Roses series turns that bloody, tangled family feud into four fast-moving novels, following the rise and fall of…
Gordianus the Finder makes his living asking questions that powerful Romans would rather not hear answered. Across Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series, he is hired by Cicero, threatened by Crassus, recruited by Pompey, and summoned by Julius Caesar, and…
The Courtney novels are one of the great family sagas in popular fiction. Across more than three centuries, from pirate-hunting privateers in the 1660s to safari hunters in the 1980s, Wilbur Smith follows one sprawling family through wars, gold rushes,…
Bernie Gunther is a Berlin detective who spends his career trying to stay honest in a country that no longer values honesty. He is a former homicide cop, a private eye, a reluctant SS officer, a prisoner of war, and…
Brother Cadfael is a Welsh monk with a past. Before he took his vows at Shrewsbury Abbey, he was a crusader, a sailor, and a soldier, and he brings everything he learned in the world to the quiet work of…
In May 1942, with the Second World War at its height, an alien invasion fleet arrives to conquer Earth. The invaders expected to find a planet of knights on horseback. Instead, they find tanks, radar, and a species a few…
A single alternate history novel can ask “what if?” A series has room to answer it. Over several books, a changed battle becomes a changed border, then a changed economy, then a generation of people who have never heard of…
No war in American history has inspired more “what if” fiction than the Civil War. The conflict turned on a lost set of orders, a hill nobody thought to defend, a diplomatic crisis over two envoys seized from a British…
Len Deighton spent six decades as one of Britain’s defining thriller writers, standing alongside John le Carré as one of the two authors who took the spy novel out of glamorous Bond territory and into a grubbier, more believable Cold…