Transport yourself back in time to the majestic and turbulent epochs of Europe through the captivating lens of historical fiction. Delve into the rich tapestry of narratives that intertwine real events with imaginative storytelling, immersing you in the courts of medieval monarchs, the intrigue of Renaissance cities, and the upheavals of war-torn Europe. From the grandeur of the Victorian era to the tumultuous periods of revolutions, these stories breathe life into the past, offering a vivid portrayal of bygone times, customs, and the intricate lives of people in historical settings.
These Days
by Lucy Caldwell
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
Lucy Caldwell's fifth novel is set during the Belfast Blitz, a series of four devastating major air raids on the Northern Irish city in 1941. It's "an under-told chapter in the fiction of my city," as Caldwell reflected; researching the book felt like "a strange, intense sort of solace" during the early days of the Covid crisis. The novel focuses on two sisters, Audrey and Emma, whose comfortable middle-class existence is shattered during the attacks. While announcing the shortlist for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, the judges noted that "the juxtaposition of the horrific and mundane and the authenticity of detail makes this novel an exceptional study of the terrors and consequences of war."
“John James’s Votan, published in 1966, for me is an object lesson of how the quality of a book has absolutely no bearing on its success whatsoever. I think John Jones is a brilliant writer, I think Votan is a great book. And it is completely and utterly forgotten.” Read more...
Historical Fiction Set in the Ancient World
Harry Sidebottom, Classicist
Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome
by Robert Harris
If you like history, Robert Harris is one of the best historical novelists around. Pompeii (about the eruption of Vesuvius), An Officer and A Spy (about the Dreyfus Affair), even Archangel (set in Soviet Russia) are fabulous thrillers that bring the past alive. But when it came to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman, Harris really went to town and wrote an entire trilogy about him: Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator. The reason Harris was able to do this with a degree of accuracy is because Cicero wrote so much—indeed we have Cicero to thank for large chunks of our knowledge of the Latin language. The trilogy is just a wonderful evocation of what it was like to be an ambitious person in the days of the late Roman republic, as it fell apart and became an empire.
Do remember, though, that this is fiction, told from Cicero’s point of view, and (for example) Julius Caesar may not have been quite as bad as he is portrayed by Robert Harris. According to Classics teacher Olly Murphy, in his interview on the best Classics books for teenagers, Harris “does put in things which now we might say are controversial or we’re not sure about but, for the most part, his portrayal of what it would have been like for a senator going about his daily business is absolutely spot on.”
“It follows a girl called Liesel, the eponymous book thief of the title, and her life in Nazi Germany. It starts when she’s about nine and follows her for the next six years. It’s a story about mortality, love and language. The thing that makes it unique, and obviously relevant to this conversation, is that it’s narrated by Death, who appears to have synaesthesia.” Read more...
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
🏆 War and Peace is one of our most recommended novels on Five Books
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is regarded by many as one of the greatest novels ever written. In our interviews, philosophers, historians and novelists have recommended it as critical reading for understanding a variety of subjects. Like many great books, it was greeted with some scepticism on publication.
“Tolstoy famously said of War and Peace that it wasn’t even a novel. In a sense, it’s a total history of that epoch in Russia in a fictional form…It’s very interesting what happens with the novel linguistically. There’s been a study of the French words in the novel, because there are a large number, and they feature particularly in the early phases of the novel. Towards the end, the novel becomes more Russian in its literary and vernacular style, in its lexicon and syntax. In a sense, the Russian language is the true character of the novel. The growing Russianness of the language is the epiphany, that moment of self-discovery, that the Russian aristocracy goes through at that time.” Read more...
Orlando Figes, Historian
“It’s set in Italy in a monastery. Eco makes interesting demands on his reader. There’s a lot of philosophy, theories of knowledge. I find it very, very heartening that so many people have taken the time to read this complicated book. And I think the reason it’s been so popular is that he did this really genius thing of putting together a very complex field—semiotics or sign theory—with detective fiction, because those two things are essentially the same thing. What do clues tell you? When you have a sign, which could be a footprint, what does that footprint tell you?” Read more...
Best Medieval Historical Fiction
Marion Turner, Biographer
“The Detective’s Daughter is partly set in 1981. The murder happened two days before Charles married Diana…The detective’s daughter is Stella Darnell. Her father gave her an application form for the police when she was 18 and she tore it up. She never wanted to be a detective and did not want to follow him into the Metropolitan Police. She saw how it ruined her parents’ marriage. She never saw her father, he was always being called away. That wasn’t the life she wanted. So in lieu of something else to do, she starts cleaning, which she actually loves. She starts a cleaning company. By the time we meet her she has a successful cleaning company and has been doing it for years. In the first book, her father has died. She meets Jack when she’s cleaning out her father’s house that she’s inherited and comes across an unsolved case of his from 1981. She starts investigating it. That’s how she meets Jack, who is investigating it too because it’s his mother’s death and he wants to find the person who did it and kill them.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
“I love this book. I first read it years ago, when it came out, and I read it again ten years ago. I also taught it for a while. I’ve just read it for the third time when I knew I was going to be talking to you. I finished it yesterday. It’s set during the Second World War and it’s mainly the story of this group of six women. They’re doing men’s jobs and have much more leeway than either before or after the war. So they’re working in factories, driving ambulances, being ARP wardens or firefighters—because there weren’t the men to do those jobs. Sarah Waters starts from the end of the story and we end at the beginning. When we meet all these characters, their story is the past. But it’s in front of us…The Night Watch is so clever. It makes us look at the way the drama unpeels, as opposed to unfolds, if you like. We get to the ‘Oh, that’s why and that’s why and that’s why.’ It’s another way of looking at history, which I also thought was really interesting.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
Dominion
by C.J. Sansom
“With my latest novel Dominion I have fulfilled a long-held ambition and written an alternate history novel, a “what-if”.”
Dissolution: A Novel of Tudor England
by C.J. Sansom
Dissolution is book 1 of C.J. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake mystery series, set during the English Reformation
“Shardlake is a lawyer…In Dissolution his job is to go around all the dissolved monasteries to check out what they’re doing and take notes on what’s happening. He discovers a murder… but you’re not thinking, ‘This is a murder mystery.’ You’re thinking, ‘I’m in the Tudor times, I’m looking through a window. I’m a silent witness to all of this’…They’re fantastic stories. The series is one long chronicle if you like. He’s written seven so far.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
“I did a huge amount of research, partly because I just got so interested. Some of it is interviews, some of it walking the ground of where something is, and a lot of it is reading. I read this great big biography of Churchill and another biography of somebody who’d worked for Churchill. None of which has gone in the book, but what’s gone into the book is the sense of really belonging there, of really centering the past in that way.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
“It’s such a marvellous adventure story. It goes back to the days of chivalry in France, and I think this never loses its interest. This is a cape and sword book. A young provincial gentleman, d’Artagnan, coming to Paris with an ambition to become a musketeer—which was part of the royal guard. He fails to get in, and very early on he meets three musketeers and gets into a fight with them; he takes them on one by one and beats them all in a duel. They then strike up an inseparable bond and survive a series of death-defying scrapes, always on the side of justice against the king’s scheming courtiers. It’s such a good story, written with such dashing gusto that I don’t think people can ever get tired of it.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France
David Lawday, Biographer
“Notre-Dame de Paris is the tragic love story of the grotesquely ugly hunchback Quasimodo—a bellringer at Notre-Dame—and the wild and beautiful gypsy Esmerelda. They both die in the end. But what’s wonderful about the book is that good still triumphs over evil, at least for the reader. It shows the purity of love. It’s also a marvellous insight into late medieval Paris.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France
David Lawday, Biographer
“This book is a pacifist book, a great anti-war book. It was very popular when it came out. Erich Maria Remarque wrote the book at the end of the 1920s. When Hitler came to power, the book was banned, and was one of the books that was burned in that infamous book-burning episode in Berlin. Later on, Remarque was forced to leave Germany. He went to America and remained in the United States. It’s a story of a young man’s tragic disenchantment with war.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France
David Lawday, Biographer
“It’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I know Mavis Cheek, she’s a fantastic author and her books have me creased up with laughter. It’s about Anne of Cleves’ portrait coming to life, intertwined with a story of a woman who’s been widowed—but is actually a merry widow because she’s so pleased to be rid of her boring old duffer of a husband. She sees the portrait and feels a kinship with Anne, who nightly talks to the other woman in the portraits in the room.” Read more...
The Best Tudor Historical Fiction
Alison Weir, Historical Novelist
“It’s based on the life of the Anne Askew, who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1546, and is about how ordinary people suffered quite genuinely for their faith. The detail in the book makes you feel like you are really there. Not every book stands the test of time. But I went back to The Heretics after many decades and I thought, my goodness, it is so well done. It ought to be better known.” Read more...
The Best Tudor Historical Fiction
Alison Weir, Historical Novelist
“This was published in 1967. It’s a wonderful book, an evocation of what it was like to be a nun dispossessed when the monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII. It’s set in the 1530s and is a beautifully told story. I remember loving it when I was young, and I managed to get a copy a couple of years ago after it was republished. I couldn’t put it down and really recommend it.” Read more...
The Best Tudor Historical Fiction
Alison Weir, Historical Novelist
“This was the first novel I read on Anne Boleyn, in the 1960s, and it’s excellent. It really sums up Anne. It’s so beautifully written that you can forgive the inaccuracies in it. There’s a fictional nurse in it, who gives her poppy juice in difficult times—but that’s one tiny detail. Norah Lofts is my favourite author. I have all 63 of her books.” Read more...
The Best Tudor Historical Fiction
Alison Weir, Historical Novelist
“It’s a wonderful bird’s eye view of the French Revolution, which has been the birthplace of so much in modern life. It zeroes in on the lives and inner feelings of the leading participants, in particular the lives of Maximilien Robespierre and George-Jacques Danton. Mantel has a special intuitive talent for seeking out what makes people do what they do.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France
David Lawday, Biographer
“What I find so engaging is Julian’s mix of innocence and burning ambition to make his way. You don’t really blame him for doing what he does. As I say, it’s a wonderfully wicked tale. I mean, I should say, it all falls apart in the end because of the jealousies of the women Julian seduces. In the end he gets his comeuppance. Still, one can’t help sympathising with him as a character.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France
David Lawday, Biographer
Bring up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
***Winner of the 2012 Booker Prize***
The author almost becomes Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s adviser and key figure in both the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn
“Hilary Mantel breathes life into history. You see the ruthlessness of Tudor society and you see the parallel with politics and power today. She just has an incredible way of making you smell and touch and feel everything. She brings alive the world and the fear: how easily people’s lives were expendable—one small thing and they were gone…In the second one, Anne Boleyn is executed. It’s very good in terms of the politics of it, how Anne Boleyn’s death happens.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
***Winner of the 2009 Booker Prize***
Now we’re at Wolf Hall, the first book in historical novelist Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, henchman to King Henry VIII, who spearheaded the Reformation in England. It’s a very, very convincing depiction of life in 1530s England and it’s hard not to completely believe in—and sympathise with—the Thomas Cromwell character she creates. Given this book also won the Booker Prize, Wolf Hall scores highly both as history and as fiction.
The other books in the trilogy are Bring Up the Bodies, which won the 2012 Booker Prize, and The Mirror and the Light, published in 2020.
“With Wolf Hall, I was right there in the Tudor era. Thomas Cromwell—or her version of Thomas Cromwell—really came alive for me. You live with him and his family. You have sympathy with him and his life and the way he operated. That’s what I want from books: that they take me into another world and immerse me in it…I forgot that she was a contemporary writer. I could have been reading something that was a journal of the times, it felt so real. It’s so clever how she uses the language. You’re not bogged down with the way they might have talked, but you have the rhythm of the language.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
“I love this book. I was absolutely bowled over by it. There’s a lot of mystery to it. A group of people convene in Kent for a house party in the 1960s. It turns out they are all reincarnations of people who lived in Tudor times, in the reign of Edward VI. You have to work out who was who in a previous life, with all the dramas and tensions of their earlier existence being played out in the modern world. It’s a brilliant book. It’s also got one of the best descriptions of Wyatt’s Rebellion that I’ve ever read in history or fiction.” Read more...
The Best Tudor Historical Fiction
Alison Weir, Historical Novelist
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England, recommended by Lesley Thomson
For avid readers always on the lookout for new books to fall in love with, finding a good author and reading every single book they’ve ever written is a not uncommon strategy. British crime novelist Lesley Thomson introduces some of her favourite books, all works of historical fiction set in England.
The Best Historical Fiction Set in France, recommended by David Lawday
Historical fiction offers us emotional insight into impactful historic events and an immersive sense of time and place, says David Lawday, the longtime Economist foreign correspondent and author of a new novel set during the Siege of Paris in 1870. Here he highlights five of the best historical novels set in France of centuries past.
The Best Tudor Historical Fiction, recommended by Alison Weir
The Tudor dynasty, which ruled England from 1485 to 1603, has been the focus of extraordinary public attention in recent years, thanks to the success of books like Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and the lavish television drama The Tudors, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. We asked Alison Weir, the author of many bestselling factual and novelistic books on the period, to recommend her favourite works of Tudor historical fiction.
