Best Historical Fiction Books

Framed as a story Alex Cross wrote about his own family's past, this historical novel follows Ben Corbett, a Washington lawyer sent by President Roosevelt to investigate a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan terror in 1906 Mississippi — where he confronts lynching, injustice, and a town's buried conscience.

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.

Jonathan Safran Foer's acclaimed debut. A young American named Jonathan travels to Ukraine to find the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis, guided by a hilariously mistranslating young guide named Alex — a novel that braids comedy, history, and the weight of the Holocaust.

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.

Augusto Roa Bastos's monumental 'dictator novel,' reimagining the rule of Paraguay's Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. A dazzling, fragmentary, polyphonic meditation on absolute power, history, and language itself, it is a landmark of Latin American literature and one of the great novels of tyranny.

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.

Sebastian Faulks's evocative novel of America in 1960. Mary van der Linden, the English wife of a British diplomat in Washington, falls into a consuming affair with a war-haunted American journalist, against a backdrop of the Kennedy–Nixon election, jazz, and the anxieties of the Cold War.

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.