Best Historical Fiction Books

A sequel to The Silence of the Girls, following Briseis and the Trojan women through the aftermath of the war's end as the Greeks are stranded on the beach, unable to sail home, and old wounds refuse to heal.

Athens, 1941. The German occupation begins, and with it the great famine in which hundreds of thousands of Greeks die. Themis, a young woman from a divided Athens family — some Communist, some right-wing, all suffering — lives through the occupation, the resistance, the civil war that follows, and the decades of political fracture that define 20th-century Greek history. Hislop's most politically complex novel, spanning sixty years of Greek history.

In sixteenth-century Europe, Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald are caught on opposing sides of the religious wars tearing apart England, France, and the Netherlands, as Protestant and Catholic factions fight for the soul of the continent.

A young Scottish woman goes to occupied France during World War II ostensibly to find her missing RAF boyfriend, but discovers more about herself and the French under occupation than she expected. The third volume of Faulks's loose French trilogy, following Birdsong.

The continuation of Cecilia Klein's story from The Tattooist of Auschwitz — after liberation, Cilka is convicted by the Soviets of collaboration and sent to a Siberian labour camp, where she must survive again.

The Cinderella story retold from the perspective of Iris, one of the stepsisters — set in seventeenth-century Haarlem among Dutch painters and tulip merchants, asking who is really the beautiful one and what beauty costs.

Set in Crete during the late 19th-century struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, the novel follows Captain Michalis — a man of elemental passions — as he leads his people in revolt.

A bored aristocrat escapes her London life for the Cornwall coast, where she discovers a French pirate ship hidden in a creek and falls in love with its captain — du Maurier's most overtly romantic novel and a study of the desire for freedom.

Harlem, 1960s: Ray Carney sells furniture by day and fences stolen goods on the side, telling himself he's only "slightly bent." Whitehead's crime novel is a departure from his recent literary fiction — a Harlem panorama that celebrates a world and an era while examining the costs of respectability.

Set in twelfth-century England during the aftermath of the Crusades, Ivanhoe follows the disinherited Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe as he jousts for honor, navigates treacherous Norman politics, and fights alongside a mysterious Black Knight revealed to be King Richard I.

Jo March, now married to Professor Bhaer, runs Plumfield School for boys, where she and her husband put their progressive educational ideals into practice with a diverse cast of boys each needing something different from school.

Jo Baker retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennet household's servants — particularly the housemaid Sarah — revealing the physical labor, social vulnerability, and hidden lives that sustained the genteel world Austen depicted.

In 1914, a Suffolk fishing village. Thomas Maggs, thirteen, befriends an artist named Mr Mac — the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who spent his final years painting in the Suffolk village of Walberswick.

Walt, a nine-year-old orphan on the streets of St. Louis in 1927, is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi who spends two years teaching him to levitate — and the novel follows Walt's career as a performer across the turbulent American decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Set in fifteenth-century Florence during the life of Savonarola, Eliot's most researched novel follows Romola, daughter of a blind scholar, whose Greek husband Tito Melema is one of fiction's most precisely observed depictions of moral deterioration by small increments.

The second All Souls novel — Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont timewalk to Elizabethan London, where Diana must learn witchcraft and retrieve the enchanted manuscript that holds the secrets of all creatures.

The nameless narrator of The Sympathizer arrives in 1980s Paris with his blood brother Bon, navigating the Vietnamese exile community, Algerian drug networks, and French intellectual life while still haunted by his double-consciousness and the interrogations he survived.

Two Australian sisters — Naomi and Sally Durance — both nurses, leave the family farm at the outbreak of World War I and serve at Gallipoli, on hospital ships, and on the Western Front, each carrying a secret from their last night at home.

Two timelines converge around the Montglane Service, a chess set once owned by Charlemagne whose pieces are said to grant limitless power — one story following a nun during the French Revolution, another a computer expert in the 1970s drawn into a deadly global game.

In early 20th-century Illinois, a man named John Ashley is convicted of murder and escapes, leaving his family behind. A multigenerational saga about two American families and the question of what it means to be a good person.

A fictional account of the Salem witch trials narrated by Sarah Carrier, daughter of Martha Carrier, one of the accused women hanged in 1692. Based on the author's own family history, the novel renders the hysteria and its human costs with precise, unflinching attention.

A novel in documents — letters, journals, and dispatches — reconstructing the final months of Julius Caesar's life, from his point of view and those of everyone around him.

Two brothers in Calcutta: one becomes a revolutionary, killed in the Naxalite uprising; the other escapes to America, inheriting his brother's widow and her grief. Lahiri's most ambitious novel spans continents and decades, tracing the long aftermath of a single act of political violence.

Sonia, a British woman, travels to Granada to learn flamenco after her relationship ends. Staying with family friends, she discovers letters and photographs that reveal the story of the Ramirez family during the Spanish Civil War — a story of love, betrayal, and the violence that divided Spain. Alternating between the present day and the 1930s, The Return is Hislop's portrait of Granada and the civil war's lasting trauma.