The Medicus series by Ruth Downie follows Gaius Petreius Ruso, a Roman army doctor who would much rather be treating patients than solving murders, and Tilla, the sharp, independent Briton who becomes his partner in both. Set mostly in Roman…
The Lord John series by Diana Gabaldon is the Outlander spin-off that most readers discover by accident, and then wish they had found sooner. It follows Lord John Grey, the English soldier, nobleman and secret gay man who first meets…
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…
Jennifer Saint takes the women that Greek mythology pushed to the edges of its stories and puts them at the centre. Ariadne, Elektra, Atalanta, Hera and Aphrodite have all been given their own novels, and four of them became Sunday…
On 11 June 2026, at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Alice Jolly was named the winner of the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for The Matchbox Girl, a novel narrated by a silent girl who becomes a…
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…