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…
If you love ancient Rome and want to explore it through the eyes of someone who actually lived there, rather than through the grand sweep of emperors and generals, Steven Saylor is your author. His Roma Sub Rosa series follows…
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…
If you have ever wished a novel could show you an entire civilisation from birth to the present day, Edward Rutherfurd writes exactly that. His books are enormous, ambitious, and unlike almost anything else in historical fiction. Each one takes…
Few Victorian mystery series have matched the staying power of Anne Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels. Thirty-two books spanning nearly four decades, all set in the fog-drenched streets and drawing rooms of late nineteenth-century London. This is a series…
Anne Perry spent more than four decades writing some of the most meticulously observed Victorian mysteries, building a body of work that tops 100 novels and making her one of the most prolific crime writers of the twentieth century. Her…
Colleen McCullough spent seventeen years and seven novels recreating the fall of the Roman Republic in one of the most ambitious works of historical fiction ever written. The Masters of Rome series is enormous in every sense: in scope, in…
Diana Gabaldon created one of the most remarkable phenomena in modern publishing when she sat down in 1988 with no intention of showing her writing to anyone. What began as a private experiment became Outlander, a genre-defying saga that has…