H istorical fictionHilary Mantel (1952-2022), author of the Wolf Hall her Reith Lectures to the subject. “Some readers are deeply suspicious of historical fiction. They say that by its nature it’s misleading,” she said. “History, and science too, help us put our small lives in context but if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.”
Two of the Wolf Hall books won the UK’s more prestigious literary prize, the Booker Prize , but they also appealed to Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of a 500+ page biography of Cromwell . In the introduction he writes, “To call them ‘historical novels’ does them an injustice; they are novels which happen to be set in the sixteenth century, and with a profound knowledge of how that era functioned.”
Below, we’ve listed all the historical fiction that’s been recommended by historians (or other experts) as shedding light on their area of expertise.
“Manda Scott wrote several novels about Boudica, following her life story. We tend to over-rationalise the events of the distant past. Manda Scott very much thinks about Boudica as somebody who’s deeply influenced by her beliefs in the spirits of the landscape. What I particularly liked about Manda Scott’s novels is the way she brings these mythical, spiritual things to the story. I think it’s very difficult for archaeologists to understand how Iron Age people saw the world…as a work of archaeology or history, we can’t interpret those things. They’re too complex and too obscure to us. But I think art is a way of looking at issues like that. Writing a novel is a way of thinking about issues that we can’t understand from a historical point of view.” Read more...
The best books on Boudica
Richard Hingley ,
Classicist
“Vidal has clearly read the historical sources. He must have looked at the art and architecture. The story is crafted so carefully. The realia, the indicia of daily life, is echoed so well. But also, the bigger questions, the big what-ifs of Persian history are handled so beautifully, too. He’s also aware of things we talked about earlier, that the Persians didn’t craft their history in ways that we do in the West. He indulges in that, he delights in that, of storytelling within stories. It’s a really fantastic book in its evocation of Persian life.” Read more...
The best books on The Achaemenid Persian Empire
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones ,
Historian
Fire from Heaven is the first book in Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great trilogy. The novel starts when he’s a young boy and takes us through to the point when his father, Philip of Macedon, is assassinated. The book was recommended to us by Hugh Bowden, Professor of Ancient History at King’s College London, as one of the best books about Alexander the Great. The other two books in the trilogy are The Persian Boy Funeral Games
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“It’s the story of Cicero, but it’s narrated by his slave and secretary Tiro. You have this interesting tension, wherein we have a story of all-consuming ambition, narrated by someone whose own ambitions and prospects are completely limited by their enslavement—and yet he does love and is devoted to Cicero. Beyond all of this, it’s just a very fun, propulsive narrative and brilliantly-done courtroom drama—or sequence of courtroom drama set pieces—taking place within this vividly conjured, well-researched late Republic Rome. It’s an excellent character study and a fun, fantastic read.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set During the Classical Era
Ferdia Lennon ,
Novelist
Even if you’re an atheist, it’s hard, as a historian, not to be interested in Jesus. The Christian religion he gave rise to dominated events in Europe—and other places—for close to two millennia and has more than two billion adherents today (just under a third of the world’s population). The Shadow of the Galilean is an absolutely fascinating (and sympathetic) fictional account of Jesus’s life as an itinerant preacher by the German theologian Gerd Theissen. Though you never actually meet Jesus, you feel you’re absolutely there with him, in the dusty desert, hearing about his ministry to the poor.
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☆ Shortlisted for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
War Trash by the Chinese novelist Ha Jin was recommended by Bruce Cumings, Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago and one of the world’s leading authorities on the Korean War. He says, “I just thought that it was a very clear-eyed and true account. It rings very true when you know what is in the archives, even though he didn’t do archive research at all.” War Trash also won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
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“Ha Jin’s novel is obviously based on either his experience or his father’s experience of the Korean War. There are some very stark and striking descriptions. He didn’t have access to South Korea, but he has this wonderful ability to treat everybody fairly and to listen to the songs of women guerrillas that were captured by South Korean prison camps and enjoy listening to them. He does the same thing with North Korean and Chinese soldiers and the civilians who were caught up in the battle” Read more...
The best books on The Korean War
Bruce Cumings ,
Historian
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler
Life and Fate , a novel set in World War II by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman , is one of our most recommended books on Five Books (including by historians). Modeled on Tolstoy's War and Peace , Grossman brought into it his experience as a journalist, accompanying the Red Army at major battles, including Stalingrad and Berlin. He was also among the first to enter Treblinka and witness firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust . Sadly for Grossman, the book was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime.
Life and Fate is a long novel. If you want to listen to it as an audiobook, there's no unabridged version, BUT there is a dramatised version of Life and Fate , starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, that lasts a manageable 8 hours.
(Stalingrad Life and Fate , translated into English for the first time in 2019 and also well worth reading)
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“His central detective character is Yashim, an Ottoman eunuch in 19th century Istanbul, a very clever man who solves crimes – which are ingeniously done. Goodwin can tell a good story, and it’s remarkable what he knows about the Ottoman empire. He knows it better than I do, in the sense that he can tell you about cooking and that kind of thing, or the layout of the old Istanbul streets.” Read more...
The best books on Turkish History
Norman Stone ,
Historian
In the history of war and heroism, few events loom as large in our imagination as the epic defence of the Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae. Defending a small spur of land between mountains and the sea, 300 Spartans were able to hold off the invading Persians long enough for the Greek navy to defeat the Persians at sea and save Greece. You can of course read about Thermopylae in Herodotus’s Histories , the best books on ancient Sparta . It may be fiction, but it also doesn’t hide the darker side of the Spartans and their heroism.
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Crime detection has become more and more sophisticated since the discovery of DNA, but how was it in the days when fingerprinting was a newfangled method and forensic psychology regarded with extreme suspicion? The Alienist , by historian-turned-novelist Caleb Carr, explores the early days of criminology. Set in New York at the turn of the 20th century (when Teddy Roosevelt was Police Commissioner), the novel is about the hunt for a serial killer and is so thrilling it’s even been turned into a Netflix series, The Alienist
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