Sebastian Faulks is one of Britain’s most celebrated literary novelists, best known for writing historical fiction that transforms the horrors of war into profoundly human stories. His 1993 novel Birdsong has sold more than three million copies worldwide and is…
Rome and Greece fill most of the ancient history shelf. The civilisations that came before them, and the empires that rose beside them, get far less attention. Yet Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh and Persepolis shaped the whole ancient world, and the…
Pat Barker is the author of the Regeneration Trilogy, three novels about shell-shocked officers and the doctor who treats them, which are among the most admired books ever written about the First World War. The last of them, The Ghost…
The William Monk series by Anne Perry runs to 24 novels, published between 1990 and 2018. It begins with a detective who wakes after an accident with no memory of his own life, and it follows him through Victorian London…
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…
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,…
Ellis Peters is the pen name of Edith Pargeter, the Shropshire writer who created Brother Cadfael, the Benedictine monk who solves murders in 12th-century Shrewsbury. The twenty Cadfael novels are often credited with popularising the historical mystery as a genre,…
Philip Kerr wrote one of the most morally complex and brilliantly sustained historical detective series of the last century. His fourteen Bernie Gunther novels follow a sardonic Berlin private investigator through the darkest decades of the twentieth century, from Weimar…
Steven Saylor has spent more than thirty years bringing ancient Rome to life, one murder at a time. His detective, Gordianus the Finder, walks the streets of the late Republic while Cicero, Caesar and Pompey fight over its future, and…
Few writers have left a mark on English fiction as deep or as lasting as Daphne du Maurier. Her novels are atmospheric, psychologically unsettling, and utterly gripping, mixing gothic suspense with rich historical settings and an uncanny feeling that something…