Historical Fiction Books: 13 Novels Readers Keep Coming Back To
Historical fiction covers an enormous amount of ground, from medieval abbeys to the trenches of the Western Front. This list gathers thirteen novels that have earned their place through sales, awards, critical standing or sheer staying power on reading lists.
The order reflects how much interest each title draws from readers browsing our shop. Alongside that, we have looked at bestseller status, prizes and inclusion on major lists such as the BBC Big Read, the Modern Library 100 and Time's 100 Novels. Each entry explains what the book is about and what gives it its reputation, so you can decide which one to pick up next.
The Nightingale
Kristin Hannah's 2015 novel follows two estranged sisters in occupied France: Vianne, a schoolteacher forced to billet German officers in her home, and Isabelle, who joins the Resistance and devises a route to get downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. Hannah drew on accounts of the Belgian woman Andrée de Jongh, who did much the same work in real life. The book entered multiple bestseller lists on release and had sold more than 4.5 million copies in 45 languages by 2021.
The Pillars Of The Earth
Ken Follett had built his name on thrillers before this 1989 novel about the building of a cathedral in the fictional English town of Kingsbridge. It runs from the sinking of the White Ship to the murder of Thomas Becket, with the civil war known as the Anarchy at its centre, and traces the shift from Romanesque to Gothic architecture through the lives of masons, monks and scheming churchmen. It became Follett's best-selling work, placed 33rd on the BBC's Big Read in 2003, and was picked for Oprah's Book Club in 2007. Three sequels and a prequel followed between 2007 and 2023.
War And Peace
Tolstoy's epic of the Napoleonic Wars was published in full in 1869 after an earlier version appeared serially from 1865. Five aristocratic Russian families carry the story, among them the awkward illegitimate heir Pierre Bezukhov and the disillusioned Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, while Tolstoy breaks off at intervals to argue his own theories of history.
A Tale Of Two Cities
Dickens set his best-known historical novel in London and Paris either side of the French Revolution, following Doctor Manette after eighteen years in the Bastille, his daughter Lucie, and the strikingly similar-looking Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Its opening sentence is one of the most quoted in English. It is said to be among the best-selling novels of all time and was ranked 63rd on the BBC's Big Read in 2003.
The Name Of The Rose
Umberto Eco's 1980 debut is a murder mystery set in a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy in 1327, where the Franciscan William of Baskerville and his young assistant Adso investigate a series of deaths connected to a labyrinthine library. It folds semiotics, biblical scholarship and medieval history into the detective plot. The novel won the Strega Prize in 1981 and the Prix Médicis Étranger in 1982, ranked 14th on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, and has sold over 50 million copies.
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak's 2005 novel is narrated by Death and follows Liesel Meminger, a girl living with foster parents in Nazi Germany who steals books and learns to read with the help of her foster father Hans. When the Hubermanns hide a Jewish man named Max in their basement, Liesel trades stories with him. It has been translated into 63 languages, has sold over 17 million copies, and was filmed in 2013.
Blood Meridian
McCarthy's fifth novel, published in 1985, follows a Tennessee runaway known only as the Kid who falls in with the Glanton gang, a real group of scalp hunters who killed for bounty along the United States and Mexico border in 1849 and 1850. Looming over the book is Judge Holden, a huge, hairless, frighteningly learned man who delights in destruction. Reception was lukewarm at first, but Blood Meridian is now widely treated as McCarthy's masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels.
The Last Of The Mohicans
Cooper's 1826 romance is set in 1757 during the French and Indian War, around the siege of Fort William Henry. Colonel Munro's daughters Cora and Alice must be escorted through the forests near Lake George, guarded by the scout Natty Bumppo, known as Hawk-eye, and the Mohicans Chingachgook and Uncas, with the Huron scout Magua working against them. It is the second of the five Leatherstocking Tales and by far the best known, and it remains a fixture of school reading lists.
Master and Commander
The first of Patrick O'Brian's twenty Aubrey-Maturin novels opens in Minorca in 1800, where the newly promoted Jack Aubrey meets Stephen Maturin, a destitute physician and naturalist who becomes surgeon aboard the sloop HMS Sophie. Much of the naval action follows the real exploits of Lord Cochrane, including a battle modelled on his victory over a far larger Spanish frigate. Reviews were mixed in 1969 and American sales were slow, but British sales were steady enough for O'Brian to keep writing the series until his death in 2000.
As The Crow Flies
Jeffrey Archer's 1991 novel is a long-span story driven by ambition, family and class. Archer is best known for commercial fiction on this scale.
The Help
Kathryn Stockett's first novel is set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s and told by three women: the maids Aibileen and Minny, and Skeeter, a white graduate who decides to write a book about what domestic work in the South is really like. Stockett spent five years writing it and was turned down by 60 literary agents before finding representation. By August 2011 it had sold seven million copies and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
All Quiet On The Western Front
Remarque fought in the First World War, and his semi-autobiographical 1929 novel follows the German schoolboy Paul Bäumer, pushed into volunteering by a patriotic teacher and then ground down by trench warfare. The chapters on Paul's leave at home, where he finds he no longer belongs, are among the most quoted in war writing. It sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages within 18 months, was banned and burned in Nazi Germany, and has been filmed three times, with the 2022 German version winning four Academy Awards.
A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles's 2016 novel puts Count Alexander Rostov on trial before a Bolshevik tribunal and then under house arrest for life in Moscow's Hotel Metropol, where he is moved from a grand suite to the servants' quarters. Over the decades he builds a life from the hotel's staff and guests, including a chef, a seamstress, an actress and a nine-year-old girl named Nina. In 1938 he takes on the care of Nina's daughter Sofia, which changes the shape of his confinement entirely.
Any one of these works as a starting point, depending on whether you want the sweep of Tolstoy, the puzzle of Eco or the close focus of Remarque. Several run to sequels and series if you find an era you want to stay in.