Harry Turtledove is the undisputed master of alternate history fiction, a historian-turned-novelist who has spent four decades asking one deceptively simple question: what if history had gone differently? Dubbed “The Master of Alternate History” by Publishers Weekly, he has built…
Alternate history asks the most irresistible question in fiction: what if? What if the Allies had lost World War II? What if the Confederacy had won at Gettysburg? What if a single assassination, a single battle, a single decision had…
There is a reasonable argument that George MacDonald Fraser wrote the greatest comic historical fiction series in the English language. The Flashman Papers, twelve novels and one short story collection published between 1969 and 2005, follow the fictional Victorian soldier…
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…