All the Light We Cannot See cover
Historical Fiction All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

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

4.3 via Goodreads
Emotional War
The Book Thief cover
Historical Fiction The Book Thief

Markus Zusak

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

4.4 via Goodreads
Emotional War
Wolf Hall cover
Historical Fiction Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel

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

3.8 via Goodreads
Thought-Provoking Power & Ambition
The Pillars of the Earth cover
Historical Fiction The Pillars of the Earth

Ken Follett

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

4.3 via Goodreads
Action-Packed Power & Ambition
Pachinko cover
Historical Fiction Pachinko

Min Jin Lee

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

4.3 via Goodreads
Emotional Family
Lincoln in the Bardo cover
Historical Fiction Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders

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

3.8 via Goodreads
Emotional Loss & Grief
The Nightingale cover
Historical Fiction The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah

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

4.6 via Goodreads
Emotional War
Bring Up the Bodies cover
Historical Fiction Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel

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.

4.1 via Goodreads
Dark & Gritty Power & Ambition
The Alice Network cover
Historical Fiction The Alice Network

Kate Quinn

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

4.1 via Goodreads
Tense & Suspenseful Survival
The Tattooist of Auschwitz cover
Historical Fiction The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Heather Morris

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.

4.1 via Goodreads
Emotional Love
The Giver of Stars cover
Historical Fiction The Giver of Stars

Jojo Moyes

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

4.1 via Goodreads
Hopeful & Uplifting Friendship
Hamnet cover
Historical Fiction Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell

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

4.2 via Goodreads
Emotional Loss & Grief
Birdsong cover
Historical Fiction Birdsong

Sebastian Faulks

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

4.1 via Goodreads
Emotional Love
The Count of Monte Cristo cover
Historical Fiction The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

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

4.3 via Goodreads
Action-Packed Revenge
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society cover
Historical Fiction The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

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.

4.2 via Goodreads
Light & Fun Friendship
Girl with a Pearl Earring cover
Historical Fiction Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier

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

3.8 via Goodreads
Mysterious & Atmospheric Identity
Les Miserables cover
Historical Fiction Les Miserables

Victor Hugo

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.

4.2 via Goodreads
Action-Packed Redemption
Lonesome Dove cover
Historical Fiction Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry

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.

4.4 via Goodreads
Action-Packed Friendship
📚 No cover
Historical Fiction Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak

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.

4.1 via Goodreads
Emotional Love
📚 No cover
Historical Fiction The Mirror and the Light

Hilary Mantel

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.

4.3 via Goodreads
Thought-Provoking Power & Ambition
📚 No cover
Historical Fiction Brooklyn

Colm Toibin

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.

3.9 via Goodreads
Emotional Identity
📚 No cover
Historical Fiction The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough

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.

4.3 via Goodreads
Emotional Love
The House of the Spirits cover
Historical Fiction The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende

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.

4.2 via Goodreads
Emotional Family
World Without End cover
Historical Fiction World Without End

Ken Follett

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.

4.1 via Goodreads
Action-Packed Survival
The Buried Giant cover
Historical Fiction The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro

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.

3.7 via Goodreads
Mysterious & Atmospheric Love
📚 No cover
Historical Fiction Dissolution

C.J. Sansom

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.

3.9 via Goodreads
Tense & Suspenseful Power & Ambition
People of the Book cover
Historical Fiction People of the Book

Geraldine Brooks

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

3.9 via Goodreads
Emotional Identity
📚 No cover
Historical Fiction The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver

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.

4.3 via Goodreads
Thought-Provoking Family
Shogun cover
Historical Fiction Shogun

James Clavell

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.

4.5 via Goodreads
Action-Packed Power & Ambition
Life After Life cover
Historical Fiction Life After Life

Kate Atkinson

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.

4.1 via Goodreads
Mysterious & Atmospheric Identity
Rules of Civility cover
Historical Fiction Rules of Civility

Amor Towles

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.

3.9 via Goodreads
Light & Fun Identity
Cloud Cuckoo Land cover
Historical Fiction Cloud Cuckoo Land

Anthony Doerr

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.

4.1 via Goodreads
Thought-Provoking Survival
The Little Stranger cover
Historical Fiction The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters

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.

3.9 via Goodreads
Mysterious & Atmospheric Identity
📚 No cover
Historical Fiction The Zookeeper's Wife

Diane Ackerman

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.

4.0 via Goodreads
Emotional Survival
Kristin Lavransdatter cover
Historical Fiction Kristin Lavransdatter

Sigrid Undset

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.

4.3 via Goodreads
Emotional Love
The Mists of Avalon cover
Historical Fiction The Mists of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley

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.

4.1 via Goodreads
Action-Packed Power & Ambition