Best Historical Fiction Books

A high school teacher travels back to 1958 through a time portal with a mission to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A story of love, sacrifice, and revolution set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, moving between London and Paris on the eve of the Terror.

A reimagining of the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet and its impact on the women of his household, told through Agnes (Anne Hathaway) and the loss that may have inspired Hamlet.

A retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man, revealing what Twain's classic looks like when its silent center finally speaks.

A Black woman in 1970s California is repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland, where she must keep a white slaveholder alive to ensure her own existence.

A brilliant chemist in 1960s California is sidelined by sexism and single motherhood until she accidentally becomes the host of a cooking show — and treats it as applied chemistry and women's liberation.

Four generations of the Trueba family navigate love, power, magic, and political upheaval in an unnamed Latin American country, culminating in the military coup that destroys what they have built.

A privileged Afghan boy's act of betrayal against his loyal servant's son haunts him across decades and continents, from Kabul to California and back.

Set in twelfth-century England, the novel follows the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge over decades of civil war, religious conflict, and human ambition.

Stephen Wraysford's doomed love affair in pre-war France is followed by his experiences in the trenches of the Somme — and, decades later, by his granddaughter's attempt to understand what he survived.

Based on the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, Human Acts traces the aftermath of a massacre through the perspectives of the living, the dead, and those caught between.

Elena Greco narrates her lifelong friendship with the brilliant, volatile Lila Cerullo, beginning in their postwar Naples neighborhood and following both girls through childhood and into their teenage years.

In 1945, a British combat nurse is mysteriously transported to eighteenth-century Scotland, where she becomes entangled with the Jacobite rising and a Highland warrior named Jamie Fraser.

Two women separated by thirty years — a WWI spy and a postwar American girl — are connected by the real-life Alice Network, a ring of female spies embedded in German-occupied France.

A Texas farm woman faces an impossible choice during the Great Depression's Dust Bowl: stay on the land that is killing them or take her children to California's labor camps.

In 1974, a Vietnam vet moves his family to remote Alaska wilderness, where the land's magnificent isolation amplifies his PTSD and the family's survival depends on his wife and daughter's strength.

Patroclus, the unassuming son of a minor Greek king, tells the story of his life alongside Achilles — the most beautiful and most doomed of Greek heroes — and the love between them.

The second Neapolitan novel follows Lila into her disastrous marriage and Elena through her university entrance exams and early years of higher education, as their friendship navigates the widening gap of their diverging lives.

Anthony Bridgerton, London's most notorious rake, decides to marry for convenience — but falls helplessly in love with his intended's sharp-tongued, fiercely protective sister, Kate Sharma.

A Chinese orphan is brought to Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation in 1830s England, where the silver-working magic that powers the British Empire depends on the loss inherent in translation.

When the US government launches a covert military operation against Colombian drug cartels, Deputy National Security Advisor Jack Ryan uncovers a political conspiracy to disavow the soldiers involved — leaving them to die in the jungle rather than admit the mission existed.

When the Pope dies suddenly, the College of Cardinals gathers in the Sistine Chapel to elect his successor. Behind the locked doors of the Vatican, Dean of the College Cardinal Lomeli presides over a conclave of intrigue, ambition, and hidden sin — where faith and politics are indistinguishable.

A fictional oral history of one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s, told through interviews with band members years after their legendary breakup.

An eighteenth-century Paris parfumeur with an extraordinary sense of smell and no odor of his own commits a series of murders to create the world's most perfect perfume.