Every year, we interview the judges of the Walter Scott Prize to hear about the latest historical novels we should be reading, but with so much new historical fiction being published every week, we like to keep a look out for other books that look interesting. We also keep track of new books by authors who have done an interview with us or whose books have been frequently recommended on Five Books. If you're interested in a particular era, we have a special section devoted to the very popular genre of World War II historical fiction. We also have an interview on the best medieval historical fiction, recommended by Professor Marion Turner, a medieval literature expert at the University of Oxford.
“The Marriage Portrait considers the marriage of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and the ill-fated Lucrezia, 15-year-old daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, ruler of Florence.” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Journalist
The Blunder
by Mutt-Lon
The Blunder by Mutt-Lon, the pen name of Nsegbe Daniel Alain, is a historical novel set in early 20th century Cameroon, when the country was split between French and English colonial administrations. It's based on the true story of Dr. Eugène Jamot, a French military doctor whose head still graces a monument outside the Ministry of Public Health in Yaoundé, the capital, but whose legacy is decidedly mixed. The book is a revealing, refreshing and entertaining read, written in French and translated into English by Amy Reid.
“I’m not one for technology on the whole, but Amanda Smyth’s novel, which describes the dash and bravado of the early days of drilling for oil in Trinidad, with all the intricacies of machines and derricks and oil pipes, is completely absorbing. Smyth, herself a Trinidadian, evokes the ‘creaking forests’ where the ‘frogs sang their sirens’ with absolute assurance. Her cast of risk-taking oilmen, business investors, anxious landowners and the glamorous woman at the heart of the central love story, hurtle inexorably to the thrilling climax. Fortune is more than an adventure story. It shows the turmoil that the discovery of oil inevitably causes to the settled societies that experience it.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Elizabeth Laird, Novelist
“Rose Nicholson is a terrific historical adventure story in the grand old tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott himself. We couldn’t resist its sheer gusto—the mad dashes down the murky wynds of sixteenth-century Edinburgh, the icy blasts of wind against the granite walls of St Andrews, the thrill of a reiver raid across the Border. Andrew Greig brings his characters brilliantly to life: the drooling James VI, the peacock courtier Esmé Stewart, and William Fowler, the main character himself, with all his doubts and fears, his strengths and endearing failings.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Elizabeth Laird, Novelist
News of the Dead
by James Robertson
*** Winner of the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction ***
I’ve been thinking about it for about five years, so it’s taken a while for it to come together. I wanted to write a novel that was set in one place, but that took place over a huge amount of time. So I invented this glen, Glen Conach, which is, in my head, not far from where I live. There are three stories going on: the story of Conach himself, an 8th-century Christian missionary to the Picts who becomes a hermit in the glen; then a story set in the early 1800s, where Charles Gibb comes to the big house in the glen to look at this manuscript about the life of Conach; and finally a modern story narrated by a woman called Maya, one of the oldest residents of the glen in the year 2020.
It would appear that there are no connections among these stories other than the fact that they’re taking place in the one place, but the more you read, the more you realise there are threads linking them. Themes of refuge, of arriving and leaving and looking for a place of safety. That’s one of the biggest questions facing us today: people are on the move, forced to move because of war, famine, lack of jobs, political collapse, whatever it is. People are on the move because they want a better or safer life for themselves and their children. Who can deny that that is a legitimate and basic aspiration for any human being?
“The Magician is a magisterial work taking in a wide sweep of twentieth-century history while sensitively dissecting the inner life of one of the greatest writers of his day. A less author than Tóibín would have been overwhelmed by the richness of his material, spanning as it does the rise of Nazism, Mann’s need to escape from Germany with his Jewish wife and family, and his turbulent years in America. But The Magician is a novel, not a biography, and Tóibín’s focus is always on Mann himself, his homo-erotic longings, his curious detachment from his unruly children and the way in which he used his own experiences to create his novels.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Elizabeth Laird, Novelist
Katharine Parr, The Sixth Wife: A Novel
by Alison Weir
'Divorced, beheaded, died//Divorced, beheaded, survived' is the rhyme by which we remember what Henry VIII, who ruled England from 1509-1547, did to each of his six wives. He was the second ruler in the new Tudor dynasty, after the death of his father, Henry VII. Historian Alison Weir has done the world a huge service by recreating the lives of Henry VIII's wives by means of a historical novel about each of them, her Six Tudor Queens series. This is the last in the series, about Katharine Parr, the wife who survived Henry. Like all the books in the series, this is a historical novel that appeals to the historian, a reconstruction of a life rather than a lyrical flight of imagination.
“Steven Conte’s writing is direct and compelling—the chapter describing a forty-hour shift of operations on the wounded is a masterclass of relentless horror and humour. But The Tolstoy Estate is much more than just a war story…This novel is also a love story and, with most of the action taking place at Yasnaya Polyana, the former estate of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, it’s also a love-through-literature story.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor (narrator)
*** Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021 ***
“I really think of Piranesi as a fantasy book because it’s about this man who’s living in a maze. He is talking to statues and interacting with them and he has someone that comes and visits him once or twice a week. He’s also on a journey of self-discovery…It just really makes you sit and listen. It’s a seven-hour book, and it was hard for me to walk away from it, because I was trying to figure out what was going on, to peel back the layers of the onion, and work out the maze. It really sucked me in.” Read more...
The Best Audiobooks: the 2021 Audie Awards
Michele Cobb, Publisher
The Prophets
by Robert Jones Jr.
In The Prophets Robert Jones Jr. recreates life on a plantation in the American South, before the Civil War. It's a beautifully told love story, of love between two men, both enslaved and how others on the plantation, including fellow slaves who have found Christianity, respond.
“Kate Grenville has taken the bland letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, the so-called ‘father of the Australian wool industry’, and read between the lines to give us an alternative story. And what a compelling tale she’s woven, of a canny, resourceful woman, not perfect by any means, but who, through her own efforts and ingenuity, is transformed from reluctant Australian immigrant, a victim of sorts, into a vigorous and successful matriarch.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“The Dictionary of Lost Words is the kindest book you’re ever likely to read. But don’t mistake me. Pip Williams’s kindness isn’t of the sweetly insipid variety. Rigorous, full of insights and honesty…The Dictionary of Lost Words is as carefully constructed as the Oxford English Dictionary whose creation is the novel’s setting.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
Troy
by Stephen Fry
If you loved Mythos and Heroes, the first two instalments of Stephen Fry's mythical trilogy, you'll love Troy. Fry is a talented actor and the audiobook—which he narrates himself—is particularly delightful, appealing to adults and kids alike. What was the story based on? Here, Stephen Fry explains which books were his main sources for Troy, many of them beautiful poetry with wonderful English translations.
“It’s a great story, and beautifully told…see how she ensures that Shakespeare’s wife and children are never overshadowed by their father. In less skilled hands, not naming Shakespeare would grate and fail. With Maggie O’Farrell, this not-naming seems effortless and natural. As we said in our judge’s quote, a bravura performance.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“We start with an ending—Anne Boleyn’s head has just been severed. Nobody does an execution like Hilary Mantel…In The Mirror and The Light…the pace slowly but inexorably increases as the complications of Cromwell’s ambitions and responsibilities multiply. We know what the end will be, but the tension, the tension!” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“In the hands of a careless writer, A Sin of Omission might have been an impossible read, but Marguerite Poland’s restraint, whilst not sparing us, beckons us on. We trust her, and when you trust an author, you enjoy being absorbed into the world being offered, whatever the delights or otherwise of that world itself.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
Immortal
by Jessica Duchen
Immortal, by Jessica Duchen, is a historical novel that aims to solve the mystery of Beethoven's 'immortal beloved' letter, which was found in a drawer in his apartment after he died, and has led to endless speculation about who it was intended for. Jessica Duchen is a specialist music writer, and the book is being published by Unbound, the crowdfunded publisher.
Jessica Duchen spoke to us about the best books on Beethoven.
“In The Redeemed we, like Leo and Lottie, move from what we might call the ‘prelapsarian’ world—the established, hierarchical world measured in horse-speed—towards the noisier, speedier world of the motor, with class barriers broken, or at least breached. Through their experiences we witness the birth of something new, and the birth isn’t an easy one. Many critics describe Tim Pears’ prose as ‘lyrical’. It is, but there’s steel in the lyricism. Pears shies away from nothing. Too wise to go technicolour, he instead deploys meticulous detail to intensify emotional heft. Reading The Redeemed is like watching a master craftsman at work.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“Shadowplay employs both first and third person narrative, uses diary pages, private notes, newspaper cuttings and, occasionally, Ellen Terry’s voice. Yet it’s so smooth. Never a hiccup. Also, though the novel’s ostensibly about three titans of the Victorian theatre, it’s really a deep exploration of the exposed and the hidden, ‘the other man that every man contains’. Joseph O’Connor wants us to shiver, and we do.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“James Meek has quite simply given us something technically ambitious and glorious to read. I found myself smiling and occasionally doing that strange British thing of shaking my head in admiration. It’s punchy stuff! Meek has fashioned a language both familiar and unfamiliar, in other words a language that without losing subtlety or nuance sounds ‘fourteenth century’. But readers shouldn’t be alarmed. Two pages in and you’re fluent.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“Ambition, bravery, freshness—The Parisian, a first novel, has all three in spades. It’s a rare talent that can take on the complications and shifting identities of early 20th-century Middle Eastern politics and keep the reader charmed. But through her hero, Midhat Kamal, Isabella Hammad does that and more. It takes a remarkable eye for detail and ear for dialogue to succeed in both broad panorama and delicate miniature.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
“The Narrow Land is a triumph of intimacy, an immersive experience, illuminating through different perspectives and revealing through layers. The book is all-absorbing, as a picture can be all-absorbing. You witness events, some small, some larger, from varying angles and through differing lights and shades, and all the way through, though the technique is invisible, the effect is intense.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Katharine Grant, Historical Novelist
Stalingrad
by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life and Fate is one of our most recommended books, especially popular with historians. It remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1964, but went on to attract enormous acclaim—and has been described more than once as "the War and Peace of the 20th century." Stalingrad is its precursor. Initially published in the 1950s under the Russian title 'For a Just Cause', it has now been translated for the first time into English by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler, as well as being significantly reworked to reinsert text from earlier manuscripts that were censored during the Soviet era.
Equal to Life and Fate in its size and epic scope, the publication of Stalingrad is—as Marcel Theroux has remarked —“like discovering the Bayeux tapestry has a prequel.”
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Laird
Every year, the Walter Scott Prize highlights the best new historical novels. In 2022, the shortlist comprises four fantastic works of historical fiction that immerse the reader in the past—from 16th-century Scotland to 1920s Trinidad—while confronting universal human dramas we still struggle with today. Elizabeth Laird, one of the judges, talks us through their choices this year.
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2021 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, recommended by Katharine Grant
The Walter Scott Prize seeks to highlight the very best of historical fiction—and in 2021, we find the shortlist dominated by Australian writers. Katharine Grant, the acclaimed novelist and chair of the judges, returns to Five Books to discuss the cream of this year’s crop, and the art of transforming the historical record into a creative exercise.
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, recommended by Katharine Grant
Historical fiction is experiencing something of a golden age at present: there’s never been a better time to immerse oneself in the past. The acclaimed novelist Katharine Grant—chair of the judges for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction—talks us through their 2020 shortlist.
