Best Historical Fiction Books

The Joad family, driven from their Oklahoma farm by the Dust Bowl, joins the great migration west to California — and finds exploitation, hunger, and community in equal measure.

An English navigator is shipwrecked in feudal Japan in 1600 and drawn into the deadly rivalry between samurai lords competing for supreme power. One of the great historical novels of the twentieth century.

A young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever but is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets — until she finds a man who remembers her.

Colin Bridgerton discovers that Penelope Featherington — the wallflower he has known for years, and the anonymous Lady Whistledown — has secretly loved him for a decade.

A dazzling novel about a reclusive Hollywood icon who finally tells her full, scandalous life story to an unknown young journalist.

Soviet submarine captain Marko Ramius attempts to defect to the United States with his entire crew and the USSR's most advanced nuclear submarine — and CIA analyst Jack Ryan must convince a skeptical Navy the defection is real before both superpowers open fire.

Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, escapes on a literal underground railroad — a secret network of actual trains and tunnels — and is hunted across an alternate-history antebellum America. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

Thomas Cromwell rises from a blacksmith's son to become Henry VIII's chief minister, navigating court intrigue, the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, and the king's desire for Anne Boleyn. Winner of the Man Booker Prize.

Tolstoy's vast panorama of Russian society during Napoleon's invasion, following five aristocratic families across fifteen years of war, love, loss, and transformation.

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece about a former slave haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — and the legacy of slavery on the body, memory, and soul.

The final volume: Elena and Lila return to Naples in middle age, their friendship tested by a final, devastating loss as the neighbourhood that made them both begins to dissolve.

Based on the real Dozier School for Boys in Florida, two Black teenagers — Elwood Curtis and Turner — navigate brutal abuse at the Nickel Academy in 1960s Jim Crow America. Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest for life in Moscow's Metropol Hotel — and over three decades, he discovers that one can build an extraordinary existence within any set of constraints.

Two Afghan women from different generations are bound together by the brutal circumstances of their marriages and the friendship that becomes their only source of survival.

The epic story of Jean Valjean — ex-convict transformed by grace into a man of extraordinary goodness — pursued across decades by the implacable Inspector Javert.

A blind French girl and a German orphan boy, connected by a radio broadcast, move toward each other across the chaos of occupied France in the final days of World War II.

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana begin lineages that diverge across two continents and three hundred years, one through slavery in America, one through colonial and postcolonial Ghana.

Following four generations of a Korean family from Japanese-occupied Korea to Osaka's Korean minority community, Pachinko is an epic about survival, identity, and the persistence of discrimination.

Set in Nazi Germany, a young girl's love of words and storytelling sustains her through air raids, poverty, and death — narrated by Death itself.

A multigenerational saga spanning seventy years of a South Indian Christian family whose members drown in every generation, told against the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial India.

Two French sisters take radically different paths through the Nazi occupation of France, one hiding Jews in her home, one becoming a resistance fighter guiding Allied pilots to safety.

In postwar Barcelona, a young boy discovers a mysterious novel by a nearly forgotten author, and his obsession with the book's creator leads him deep into a dark labyrinth of secrets, loves, and betrayals.

Frances 'Frankie' McGrath enlists as an army nurse in Vietnam after her brother deploys — and returns to an America that doesn't acknowledge what women did or suffered in the war.

Based on the true story of Hunter's own family, a Polish Jewish family scatters across four continents during World War II, each member fighting for survival along a different path.