Curated lists of the best historical fiction books by theme, period, and genre.
Every historical novel is a kind of time machine. Time travel novels simply make it literal: they take a modern person, drop them into the past and let us see it through their astonished eyes. The best of them are…
For almost sixty years, the Jacobites fought to put the exiled Stuart kings back on the British throne. Their story has everything a novelist could want: a lost cause, a romantic prince, Highland clans, spies, divided families and a final,…
Scotland has given historical fiction more than its share of great stories. It gave the genre itself a start: Walter Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814, is often called the first historical novel. Since then, writers have returned again and again…
The Greek myths were never meant to stay still. Homer, Aeschylus and Euripides each told the old stories their own way, and modern novelists are doing the same thing: taking the Trojan War, the wanderings of Odysseus and the curse…
Ancient Greece gives novelists almost everything they could ask for: a war that lasted ten years over one city, three hundred Spartans in a mountain pass, a democracy that argued itself into ruin, and a young king who reached India…
Naval historical fiction puts a few hundred people inside a wooden hull, sends them thousands of miles from help, and then adds an enemy. The best of it does far more than describe battles. It shows how a ship worked…
Military historical fiction puts you in the ranks. The best of it explains how a shield wall holds, why a column breaks, and what a soldier thinks about in the hour before the fighting starts. It also does something a…
A good historical mystery gives you two books for the price of one. There is the puzzle, with its body, its suspects and its clever detective. And there is the world around it: a medieval abbey, a Roman back street,…
No dynasty has fed historical fiction like the Tudors. In just 118 years, from Bosworth Field in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, England got six wives, two child monarchs, a break with Rome, a nine-day queen,…
No story in the English language has inspired more retellings than the legend of King Arthur. From the earliest Welsh poems to the most recent bestseller, writers have returned again and again to post-Roman Britain, to a warlord king holding…