River God is one of the best-loved historical novels of the last half century, and it launched a series that now runs to ten books. Wilbur Smith’s Egyptian novels follow Taita, a brilliant slave, healer, engineer, strategist and, eventually, a…

The Ballantyne novels are Wilbur Smith’s other great family saga. Where the Courtneys belong to the Cape and the diamond fields of South Africa, the Ballantynes push north, into the lands between the Limpopo and the Zambezi that would become…

History remembers Nero as the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. Conn Iggulden’s Nero Trilogy asks a more interesting question: how does a small boy, born into the most dangerous family in the Roman world, grow up to become its…

For thirty years, two branches of the same royal family tore England apart over a single crown. Conn Iggulden’s Wars of the Roses series turns that bloody, tangled family feud into four fast-moving novels, following the rise and fall of…

Gordianus the Finder makes his living asking questions that powerful Romans would rather not hear answered. Across Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series, he is hired by Cicero, threatened by Crassus, recruited by Pompey, and summoned by Julius Caesar, and…

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…