The best historical fiction books

Two sisters in occupied France choose very different paths of resistance -- and both will be tested beyond anything they imagined.

An English navigator shipwrecked in feudal Japan in 1600 becomes entangled in a war between samurai lords and falls in love with a world utterly unlike his own.

Narrated by Death, it's the story of a girl who steals books in Nazi Germany and shares their words with those around her.

Two retired Texas Rangers lead a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana -- a thousand miles through a country that rewards endurance and punishes haste.

In 1965, Frances McGrath hears that women can be heroes too and follows her brother to Vietnam as an Army nurse. Coming home is harder than anything she faced there.

A blind French girl and a German soldier's paths converge in occupied France -- a Pulitzer-winning story of beauty amid war.

The building of a cathedral in 12th-century England becomes the backdrop for a sweeping story of ambition, faith, and betrayal.

Four generations of a Korean family in Japan -- a vast, tender epic about sacrifice, identity, and the cost of belonging.

A man wrongly imprisoned for years escapes, acquires immense wealth, and returns as a mysterious stranger to exact precise and intricate revenge.

The final years of Thomas Cromwell -- at the absolute height of his power and one step from the scaffold -- in the most dazzling historical trilogy ever written.

Three generations of the Cleary family build their lives on an Australian sheep station -- and the women keep falling for men they can never fully have.

A Baptist preacher drags his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959 -- and the country's transformation destroys and remakes his family in equal measure.

A headstrong Norwegian woman in the fourteenth century falls in love against her father's wishes -- and spends the rest of her life reckoning with what that choice cost.

A young German soldier describes the First World War from the inside -- not as heroism but as systematic destruction of everything that makes a person human.

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana and their descendants across seven generations -- one line sold into slavery, one living in Ghana through colonialism and independence.

Scarlett O'Hara survives the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the destruction of everything she knew -- through stubbornness, resourcefulness, and a refusal to accept that it is over.

A young Marine lieutenant leads his platoon through the jungle hills of Vietnam, where the greatest danger is not always the enemy.

A clergyman's daughter moves from the soft South to an industrial northern mill town and finds her prejudices about class, trade, and a difficult man slowly dismantled.

Three characters navigate the Nigeria-Biafra war of the late 1960s: an Igbo professor and his twin sister, and the English man caught in their orbit as the country tears itself apart.

A story of devastating loss set in Elizabethan England, exploring the grief at the heart of Shakespeare's most famous play.

An author discovers the story of a reading club formed under German occupation on a small island and becomes entangled in the lives of its members.

Jean Valjean, released after nineteen years in prison for stealing bread, resolves to become a good man -- while a relentless inspector pursues him across decades of revolutionary France.

Four generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed South American country, where clairvoyance is as ordinary as political violence and love survives everything except itself.

A Saxon boy captured by Vikings grows up to fight for both sides, uncertain which he is -- and finds himself at the center of Alfred the Great's struggle to hold England together.

Five Russian aristocratic families navigate the Napoleonic Wars, and Tolstoy uses their lives to argue about history, fate, and what any of us can actually know about why things happen.

A captured British spy in Nazi-occupied France is writing down everything she knows -- but what she is writing is not what she appears to be writing.

Thomas Cromwell has made one queen -- now Henry VIII needs him to unmake her. The sequel to Wolf Hall tightens its grip with every page.

A pregnant socialite and a haunted former spy team up across decades to find a woman who vanished during the war.

In the darkest place on earth, the man tasked with tattooing prisoners falls in love with the woman whose number he inks onto her arm.

Five women deliver books on horseback through Depression-era Kentucky -- and discover that the most dangerous thing in Appalachia is a woman with ideas.

A love affair in pre-war France and the trenches of the First World War, spanning decades and generations.

A Russian doctor and poet is swept through revolution, civil war, and exile, sustained only by a love affair that the twentieth century conspires to destroy.

Two centuries after The Pillars of the Earth, four children witness a secret murder in a Kingsbridge forest -- and the consequences pursue them across a lifetime and a plague.

Ursula Todd is born in 1910, dies, and is born again -- living her life over repeatedly until she can get it right, though she cannot remember why.

A lost ancient text links five characters across three timelines -- medieval Constantinople, twenty-first-century Idaho, a generation ship to the stars -- all reading the same story.

The Arthurian legend retold through the eyes of its women -- Morgaine, Gwenhwyfar, the Lady of the Lake -- as the old ways of the Goddess give way to Christianity.

D'Artagnan arrives in Paris with nothing but a horse and outsized ambition, and within weeks is fighting duels alongside the most famous swordsmen in France.

Two boys at a brutal Florida reform school in the 1960s try to survive in different ways -- and the novel holds its most devastating information until the final pages.

After the Nazis bomb the Warsaw Zoo, the zookeeper and his wife hide 300 Jews in the empty animal cages -- one of the most extraordinary rescue operations of World War II.

Two novellas about France under Nazi occupation -- written while Nemirovsky herself was in hiding, before she was deported and killed. The manuscript was not published for sixty years.

A young Irish woman emigrates to Brooklyn in the 1950s, begins to build a new life, and is then pulled home -- where she must choose which version of herself to become.

A hunchbacked lawyer is sent to a remote monastery to investigate a murder at the height of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries -- and uncovers secrets far darker than politics.

A book conservator examines an illuminated haggadah from Sarajevo and discovers, in the traces left in its binding, five centuries of survival against persecution.

A secretary from Queens with impeccable taste navigates 1938 Manhattan society, where everyone is rewriting their own origins and some do it better than others.

A country doctor becomes obsessed with a crumbling post-war English manor house and its declining family -- and something in the house begins responding to his obsession.

Thomas Cromwell rises from obscurity to become Henry VIII's most trusted -- and feared -- advisor. Tense, brilliant, and immediate.

The night Lincoln visits his young son's grave -- told through a cacophony of ghosts caught between worlds.

A young Dutch servant girl becomes the muse of painter Johannes Vermeer, sitting at the centre of a beautiful and dangerous obsession.

A Japanese-American family is sent to an internment camp in 1942 -- told in five spare chapters from five different perspectives.

A young enslaved man with a photographic memory and a mysterious power he cannot understand becomes part of the Underground Railroad.

An elderly couple in post-Arthurian Britain set out on a journey through a landscape where everyone has forgotten something enormous -- and love may depend on keeping it forgotten.