There is no other character in historical fiction quite like Harry Flashman. A coward, a liar, a bully, and a shameless self-promoter, he is also one of the most entertaining narrators in the entire genre. Over the course of twelve…
Alice Winn announced herself as one of the most exciting new voices in historical fiction with her debut novel In Memoriam, published in 2023. The book, a devastating love story set in the trenches of World War I, won the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…