Best Historical Fiction Books

The life of Jacob Frank (1726-1791), the most controversial figure in Jewish history: a charismatic false messiah who led his followers through Judaism, Islam, and finally Catholicism, crossing the borders of eighteenth-century Poland, Turkey, and Austria. Tokarczuk's National Book Award-winning magnum opus.

The Moskat family of Warsaw, from the late nineteenth century to 1939: the patriarch Reb Meshulam's descendants assimilate, secularize, intermarry, embrace Zionism, turn to communism, have affairs, go bankrupt—while Warsaw's Jewish world that contained them is being destroyed. Singer's most comprehensive novel, in the tradition of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic for thirty-one years, is assassinated in 1961. The novel weaves three narratives: Trujillo on his final day, the conspirators planning the ambush, and Urania Cabral returning to Santo Domingo forty years later to face what Trujillo did to her father—and to her. Vargas Llosa's most politically searing work.

Five years in the life of Henry James, 1895 to 1900 — following the public failure of his play Guy Domville, his retreat to Lamb House in Rye, and his composition of the late novels. His suppressed homosexuality, his relationships with his family, his aesthetic choices, and the specific quality of his loneliness.

Alternative history: Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election and signs a neutrality pact with Hitler. Told from the perspective of young Philip Roth's Jewish family in Newark as antisemitism becomes state-adjacent policy in America.

1890s Brazil: a messianic prophet leads the poor and desperate to the remote community of Canudos. The new Brazilian republic sends four military expeditions to destroy them. Based on the real Canudos War (documented by Euclides da Cunha), this is Vargas Llosa's most epic novel—a portrait of religious fervor, political incomprehension, and mass violence.

1845. A German explorer named Johann Ulrich Voss leads an expedition across the Australian continent that no European has crossed. In Sydney, he exchanges letters with a young woman, Laura Trevelyan, who comes to know him more truly than any member of his party. Based on the real explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, Voss is White's masterpiece—and Australia's greatest novel.

A dead-end alley in wartime Cairo is home to a cast of characters — a beautiful girl who dreams of escaping, a wise poet, a corrupt barber, a philosophical beggar — whose lives Mahfouz follows with the compassion and precision of a naturalist.

In a remote English village in 1491, a priest investigates the drowning of the richest man in the parish — the novel moves backwards through four days of Lent, arriving at the confessions that reveal what actually happened.

Ned Kelly, Australia's most famous outlaw, narrates his own life in a single long letter to his unborn daughter — from his impoverished Irish-Australian childhood through his years as a bushranger to the siege at Glenrowan and his capture in the iron armour he forged himself.

Late seventeenth-century Virginia, before race solidified into the defining hierarchy of American slavery. A small farm operated by a Dutch trader, his English wife, a Native American servant, and an enslaved African woman whose daughter Florens is given away as partial payment of a debt—an act the mother calls a mercy.

Mevlut Karataş comes to Istanbul from a village in central Anatolia at age twelve and spends the next four decades selling boza—a traditional fermented drink—on the city's streets at night. His life and Istanbul's transformation from 1969 to 2012 unfold together in Pamuk's most warmhearted and expansive novel.

German East Africa in the early twentieth century: Ilyas was taken as a child by German colonial troops and served them as an askari soldier. When he returns to his village, he discovers his sister Afiya has grown up in servitude. Their lives intersect with Hamza—another askari, damaged by his years in German service—and with the chaos of World War One in East Africa. Gurnah's most recent novel before the Nobel was awarded.

Portugal, 1711. A soldier with a missing hand and a woman who can see inside human bodies fall in love against the backdrop of the Inquisition, the building of the great Mafra Convent by King João V, and a mad priest's plan to build a flying machine powered by human wills. Saramago's most romantic novel.

A writer in rural China sends a series of letters to a Japanese playwright about his aunt—a village midwife and family planning enforcer under the one-child policy who delivered over ten thousand babies, then spent decades enforcing forced abortions and sterilizations. One of the most direct literary reckonings with China's one-child policy.

Toronto in the 1920s and 30s: immigrant workers build the bridges, waterworks, and tunnels of a city that will barely remember them. Patrick Lewis, a searcher who drifts between the city's construction projects and its underclass, is the novel's haunted centre.

A landlord executed in 1950 is reincarnated through a series of animals—donkey, ox, pig, dog, monkey—on the farm his family was forced to surrender during China's land reform, witnessing half a century of Chinese history from a uniquely non-human vantage point. Mo Yan considered this his finest novel.

18th-century Cartagena. A twelve-year-old marquesa bitten by a rabid dog is sent to a convent to be exorcised. A young priest is assigned to document her case and falls in love with her. Based on a real crypt García Márquez discovered as a journalist, this is his most compact late novel.

Oscar Hopkins, a devout Anglican clergyman from Devon, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an heiress who owns a glassworks in Sydney, share a compulsive gambling habit that brings them together and ultimately drives them to bet a glass church against each other's soul on an impossible voyage through the Australian interior.

In 1930s Shandong Province, a fierce and beautiful woman is taken in a palanquin to marry a leper she has never met, falls in love with her palanquin bearer, and helps lead resistance against the Japanese invasion — narrated by her grandson from a perspective that includes the dead and the supernatural.

An early nineteenth-century sailing ship crosses the equator. Edmund Talbot, a young aristocrat keeping a journal for his godfather's amusement, records the humiliation and death of the Reverend Colley—a man whose shame kills him as surely as disease. Golding's Booker Prize winner and the first of the To the Ends of the Earth trilogy.

The last journey of Simón Bolívar: dying of tuberculosis in 1830, stripped of power, his Gran Colombia already disintegrating, the Liberator travels by river toward an exile he will not survive. García Márquez's meditation on the cost of greatness and the loneliness of power.

Leo Auberg, a seventeen-year-old Romanian German, is deported to a Soviet labor camp in Ukraine in 1945. Based on the testimony of Müller's friend and collaborator Oscar Pastior, who survived five years in such a camp, The Hunger Angel follows Leo through five years of coal shoveling, starvation, and the psychological distortions of extreme deprivation.

Three moments in the life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich: waiting by the lift in Leningrad expecting arrest in 1936; meeting NKVD officer Vsevolod Power in Washington in 1949; accepting the chairmanship of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1960. A meditation on what art costs when the state controls your life.