Complete reading orders for popular historical fiction series.
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…
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…
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,…
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…