Recommended Historical Fiction
Top 10 Recommended Historical Fiction
: Shōgun, The Last of the Mohicans, The Three Musketeers, Lonesome Dove, War and Peace, I, Claudius, Master and Commander, Ivanhoe, Hawaii, Johnny Tremain
| Author | James Clavell |
| ISBN | 0440178002 |
So sorry, I am not worthy of the honor of reviewing this novel. If however, my Lord insists it, then I shall endeavor to offer up some humble thoughts regarding its mighty, even epic narrative. Neh? The scope is so vast, the characters and settings are so many, the head is liable to spin at times, so sorry....
| Author | James Fenimore Cooper |
| ISBN | 0553213296 |
The wild rush of action in this classic frontier adventure story has made The Last of the Mohicans the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Deep in the forests of upper New York State, the brave woodsman Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and his loyal Mohican friends Chingachgook...
Alexandre Dumas’s most famous tale— and possibly the most famous historical novel of all time— in a handsome hardcover volume.
This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines,...
A love story, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier, Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize— winning classic, Lonesome Dove, the third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy, is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.
Journey to the dusty little Texas...
| Author | Leo Tolstoy |
| ISBN | 0192833987 |
In Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, `a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, `of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their...
Into the 'autobiography' of Clau-Clau-Claudius, the pitiful stammerer who was destined to become Emperor in spite of himself, Graves packs the everlasting intrigues, the depravity, the bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, soon to culminate in the deified insanity...
| Author | Patrick O'Brian |
| ISBN | 0393307050 |
As the Royal Navy takes part in the wars against Napoleonic France, young Jack Aubrey receives his first command, the small, old, and slow HMS Sophie. Accompanied by his eccentric new friend, the physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin, Aubrey does battle with the naval hierarchy, with his own tendency...
| Author | Walter Scott |
| ISBN | 0140436588 |
For this novel, Scott moved far away from the setting of his own turbulent time. He went back to the late 12th century, and to England rather than the Scottish settings of all his previous novels. He connected his writing Ivanhoe with his concerns about contemporary events.
Scott drew together the...
| Author | James A. Michener |
| ISBN | 0375760377 |
An alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author James A. Michener brings Hawaii’s epic history vividly to life in a classic saga that has captivated readers since its initial publication in 1959. As the volcanic Hawaiian Islands sprout from...
| Author | Esther Forbes |
| ISBN | 0440442508 |
Probably the greatest book ever written, by both man and child, woman and other writing entity, Johnny Tremain tells the story of a young genius who becomes a silversmith and burns the crappin' hell out of his hand. He's always embarrassed by his sort of melty hand and keeps it in his pockets or in his mother's...
| Author | T.H. White |
| ISBN | 0441627404 |
This book terrified me, on many levels. It's 667 pages long, to begin with. It's been a while since I read a serious chunkster like that (besides Harry Potter, which somehow in my mind doesn't really count...).
Besides that, I am just not a fan of "Authur" stories, despite my deep love of the Disney...
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
| Author | Patrick Süskind |
| ISBN | 0140120831 |
An acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder.
In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste...
The Prince and the Pauper
| Author | Mark Twain |
| ISBN | 0451528352 |
This treasured historical satire, played out in two very different socioeconomic worlds of 16th-century England, centers around the lives of two boys born in London on the same day: Edward, Prince of Wales and Tom Canty, a street beggar. During a chance encounter, the two realize they are identical...
| Author | Marion Zimmer Bradley |
In 2007 I joined Goodreads and wrote reviews of some of the books that had most transformed me as a reader. I have since, over the years, taken an absurd amount of geek pride that my review of this book is (I think) the most popular one. And for everyone writing "GET OVER YOURSELF" in the comments, as a response...
| Author | James A. Michener |
| ISBN | 0375760385 |
In the grand storytelling style that is his signature, James Michener sweeps us back through time to the very beginnings of the Jewish faith, thousands of years ago. Through the predecessors of four modern men and women, we experience the entire colorful history of the Jews, including the life of the...
| Author | C.J. Sansom |
| ISBN | 0330411969 |
”’This is not Thomas More’s Utopia, a nation of innocent savages waiting only for God’s word to complete their happiness. This is a violent realm, stewed in the corruption of a decadent church.’
‘I know.’
‘The papists will use every means to present us from building...
| Author | Bernard Cornwell |
| ISBN | 0007271212 |
Agincourt is one of the epic battles of history. It was fought by two badly matched armies that met in atrocious conditions on St Crispin's Day 1415, and resulted in an extraordinary victory that was celebrated in England long before Shakespeare immortalised it in Henry V. It has always been held to be...
| Author | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| ISBN | 0439295785 |
Tricked by the uncle who has stolen his inheritance, young David Balfour is kidnapped and bound for America. Or at least that was the plan, until the ship runs into trouble and David is rescued by Alan Breck Stewart, fugitive Jacobite and, by his own admission, a ‘bonny fighter’. Balfour, a canny...
| Author | E.L. Doctorow |
| ISBN | 0812978188 |
Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One...
| Author | Jean M. Auel |
| ISBN | 0553381644 |
Once again Jean M. Auel opens the door of a time long past to reveal an age of wonder and danger at the dawn of the modern human race. With all the consummate storytelling artistry and vivid authenticity she brought to The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequel, The Valley of Horses, Jean M. Auel continues the...
| Author | Jean M. Auel |
| ISBN | 0553381660 |
This unforgettable odyssey into the distant past carries us back to the awesome mysteries of the exotic, primeval world of The Clan of the Cave Bear, and to Ayla, now grown into a beautiful and courageous young woman.
Cruelly cast out by the new leader of the ancient Clan that adopted her as a child,...
Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
One of the two best standalone books that I’ve ever read; this is truly historical fiction at its finest.
Lancelot by Giles Kristian was an amazing standalone and now, I’ve found Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. I’m starting to feel that historical fiction is the right genre to visit...
| Author | A.S. Byatt |
| ISBN | 0679735909 |
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from...
George Eliot's tale of a solitary miser gradually redeemed by the joy of fatherhood, Silas Marner is edited with an introduction and notes by David Carroll in Penguin Classics.
Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner...
The French Lieutenant's Woman
| Author | John Fowles |
| ISBN | 0099478331 |
The scene is the village of Lyme Regis on Dorset's Lyme Bay..."the largest bite from the underside of England's out-stretched southwestern leg." The major characters in the love-intrigue triangle are Charles Smithson, 32, a gentleman of independent means & vaguely scientific bent; his fiancée,...
| Author | Sigrid Undset |
| ISBN | 0143039164 |
In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political...
Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina
| Author | Robert Graves |
| ISBN | 0679725733 |
Miracles do happen ask Claudius the unread historian the idiot, the clown, as his family perceives him, the people also yet becomes Emperor ( one of the best too) of the Roman Empire... These events unfold with the assassination of his mad nephew Caligula, the Praetorian Guard needs a ruler or else they...
Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0380018179 (ISBN13: 9780380018178)
The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early part of this century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station...
| Author | Geraldine Brooks |
| ISBN | 0142001430 |
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition....
| Author | Henryk Sienkiewicz |
| ISBN | 0781805503 |
Rome during the reign of Nero was a glorious place for the emperor and his court; there were grand feasts, tournaments for poets, and exciting games and circuses filling the days and nights. The pageantry and pretentious displays of excess were sufficient to cloy the senses of participants as well as...
| Author | Philippa Gregory |
| ISBN | 0743272501 |
Three Women Who Share One Fate: The Boleyn Inheritance
Anne of Cleves
She runs from her tiny country, her hateful mother, and her abusive brother to a throne whose last three occupants are dead. King Henry VIII, her new husband, instantly dislikes her. Without friends, family, or even...
| Author | Thornton Wilder |
| ISBN | 0060088877 |
This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into...
