Complete reading orders for popular historical fiction series.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
The Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series is the longest work of Anne Perry: 32 Victorian mysteries published between 1979 and 2016, all set in London in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. He is a policeman and a…
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…
Simon Scarrow‘s Eagles of the Empire is one of the longest-running Roman military series in print. It follows two soldiers, the veteran Centurion Macro and the young recruit Cato, from the invasion of Britain under Claudius to the dangerous Rome…
Henry VIII’s six wives are among the most famous women in English history, yet their stories are usually told as chapters in his. In the Six Tudor Queens series, historian Alison Weir turns that around: six novels, one for each…