Editors Reads

Best Historical Fiction Books

281 expert-reviewed books — page 12 of 12

The Sunrise book cover

The Sunrise

by Victoria Hislop

4.0

Famagusta, Cyprus, 1972. The Sunrise hotel is the most glamorous in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Georgious and Özkan families are its heart — one Greek Cypriot, one Turkish Cypriot, bound by friendship across the island's division. Then 1974 arrives: the Turkish invasion, the occupation of northern Cyprus, and the abandonment of Famagusta — a ghost city still frozen in that summer. Hislop's most politically charged novel.

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The Utopia Avenue book cover

The Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

4.0

A fictional British rock band in 1967 London — Utopia Avenue — rises from Soho to the Royal Albert Hall and across America, with chapter-length songs as the structural unit and the actual music scene of 1967 as the setting.

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Troy book cover

Troy

by Stephen Fry

4.0

Stephen Fry retells the complete story of the Trojan War, from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the Judgment of Paris through the fall of Troy and the fates of its heroes, with characteristic wit and erudition.

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Anil's Ghost book cover

Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

3.9

Sri Lanka in the 1980s civil war: Anil Tissera, a forensic anthropologist sent by a human rights organization, works with archaeologist Sarath Diyasena to identify the victims of atrocity. Ondaatje's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel explores testimony, identity, and what it means to bear witness.

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Jo's Boys book cover

Jo's Boys

by Louisa May Alcott

3.9

The boys of Plumfield are now young adults, facing real-world choices about career, marriage, and moral character, while Jo March has become a famous author and must cope with the peculiar burdens of literary celebrity.

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One August Night book cover

One August Night

by Victoria Hislop

3.9

The sequel to The Island, set fifty years after the events of the original novel. The island of Spinalonga has been empty since the leper colony was closed; the families of Plaka on the Cretan shore have rebuilt their lives. But one August night, a violent act resurfaces history and forces the characters — and their descendants — to confront what was never fully resolved. A companion piece to Hislop's most famous novel.

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Orlando book cover

Orlando

by Virginia Woolf

3.9

Orlando lives for centuries, transforming from an Elizabethan nobleman into a woman in the eighteenth century, and waking finally in 1928. Woolf's joyful fantasy — a love letter to Vita Sackville-West — is her most accessible novel and an enduring meditation on gender, identity, and literary tradition.

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Pirate Latitudes book cover

Pirate Latitudes

by Michael Crichton

3.9

Jamaica, 1665: privateer Captain Edward Hunter assembles a crew to raid the heavily fortified Spanish galleon El Trinidad, moored at Matanceros under the guns of a famously cruel Spanish commander. Published posthumously from a completed manuscript found on Crichton's computer after his death.

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The Book of Life book cover

The Book of Life

by Deborah Harkness

3.9

The conclusion of the All Souls trilogy — Diana and Matthew return to the present, the mysteries of Ashmole 782 are resolved, and the conflict between creatures and the Congregation reaches its conclusion.

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The Children's Book book cover

The Children's Book

by A.S. Byatt

3.9

A vast Edwardian panorama following several interconnected families from the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1890s through the catastrophe of the First World War, centred on Olive Wellwood, a writer of fairy tales for children who uses her stories to contain what she cannot say to her family directly.

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The Painter of Souls book cover

The Painter of Souls

by Ildefonso Falcones

3.9

In 18th-century Barcelona, an illegitimate child named Miquel Puig becomes a master painter of religious art — navigating the guilds, the Church, and his own turbulent loves in a city of contradictions.

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The Sea House book cover

The Sea House

by Esther Freud

3.9

Two stories separated by fifty years interweave in a Suffolk village: a contemporary woman researching an architect's life, and the architect's story itself — a portrait of a German-Jewish émigré and the house he built on the English coast.

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Timeline book cover

Timeline

by Michael Crichton

3.9

A group of history students and their professor are sent back to fourteenth-century France using quantum technology — arriving in the middle of the Hundred Years' War. They have six hours to find their missing colleague and return to the present. Crichton applies his techno-thriller formula to medieval history.

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Labyrinth book cover

Labyrinth

by Kate Mosse

3.8

In 2005, a young archaeologist discovers two skeletons and an ancient ring near Carcassonne; in 1209, a young woman becomes the guardian of three books containing the secret of the Holy Grail during the brutal Cathar Crusade — two women separated by eight centuries but bound by the same ancient mystery.

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Valperga book cover

Valperga

by Mary Shelley

3.8

Set in fourteenth-century Italy, Valperga follows the rise of the condottiere Castruccio Castracani — a real historical figure — from boyhood idealism to tyrannical power, through the eyes of Euthanasia, the remarkable Countess of Valperga, who loves him and watches him be destroyed by ambition.

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The Woman of Andros book cover

The Woman of Andros

by Thornton Wilder

3.7

Set on a small Greek island before the birth of Christ, the novel follows a courtesan named Chrysis whose philosophical wisdom shapes all those around her, and a young man who loves her.

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The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck book cover
3.6

A historical novel about Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York — the younger of the two Princes in the Tower — and whose attempt to claim the English throne from Henry VII ended in defeat and execution. Shelley treats Warbeck as a genuine prince, making the novel a sustained meditation on legitimacy, loyalty, and the human cost of failed causes.

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