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…
Dorothy Dunnett wrote some of the most demanding and most rewarding historical fiction of the twentieth century. Her two great sequences follow brilliant, secretive men across Renaissance Europe, from the Scottish Borders to Constantinople, Timbuktu, and Moscow, and they have…
Philip K. Dick wrote one of the founding novels of alternate history, a book that asked what daily life in America would look like if the Axis had won the Second World War. He also wrote more than forty other…
For a little over twenty years, from the first campaigns of Revolutionary France in 1792 to the field of Waterloo in 1815, Europe was almost constantly at war. Armies marched from Lisbon to Moscow. Fleets fought from the Nile to…
In 1783 a young army officer rides home to Cornwall from the war in America. His father is dead, his house is falling down, and the woman he hoped to marry is engaged to someone else. That is the opening…
Horatio Hornblower is the officer every other fictional sea captain is measured against. Created by C.S. Forester in 1937, he rises from seasick midshipman to admiral across eleven novels set during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The series…
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,…
Colleen McCullough wrote two of the most ambitious historical novels of the twentieth century and then kept going. The Thorn Birds turned a sheep station in New South Wales into one of the most widely read family sagas ever written,…
In AD 9, three Roman legions marched into the forests of Germania and were destroyed. Their eagle standards, the most sacred symbols a legion possessed, were taken by the tribes. It was one of the worst defeats in Roman history,…