Philip Kerr wrote one of the most morally complex and brilliantly sustained historical detective series of the last century. His fourteen Bernie Gunther novels follow a sardonic Berlin private investigator through the darkest decades of the twentieth century, from Weimar…
Steven Saylor has spent more than thirty years bringing ancient Rome to life, one murder at a time. His detective, Gordianus the Finder, walks the streets of the late Republic while Cicero, Caesar and Pompey fight over its future, and…
Few writers have left a mark on English fiction as deep or as lasting as Daphne du Maurier. Her novels are atmospheric, psychologically unsettling, and utterly gripping, mixing gothic suspense with rich historical settings and an uncanny feeling that something…
If you have ever wished a novel could show you an entire civilisation from birth to the present day, Edward Rutherfurd writes exactly that. His books are enormous, ambitious, and unlike almost anything else in historical fiction. Each one takes…
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…
Anne Perry wrote more than 100 books in a career that ran from 1979 to her death in 2023, and most of them are set in the gaslit streets of Victorian London. Her two long series, one following Inspector Thomas…
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…
Diana Gabaldon wrote Outlander for practice, to learn how a novel works, and ended up creating one of the best-loved series in modern historical fiction. Her books mix history, romance, adventure and time travel in a way that no publisher’s…
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…
The First World War lasted four years and broke a continent that had believed itself civilized. It was a war of mud and wire, of poetry and shell shock, of empires collapsing and a modern world taking shape in the…