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 World and All That It Holds
by Aleksandar Hemon
The World and All That It Holds is a new historical novel by Bosnia-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon, who we interviewed more than a decade ago on the cheery topic of 'Man's Inhumanity To Man'. This novel is set at the outbreak of World War I and ranges from Sarajevo (where the main protagonist witnesses the killing of Archduke Ferdinand and Sophie, his wife) to Shanghai.
M: Son of the Century
by Antonio Scurati
***Winner of the 2022 European Book Prize***
Antonio Scurati's novel about the rise of Fascism in Italy, told from the point of view of Benito Mussolini. There are also excerpts from newspapers and reports. The first in a trilogy, this 700+ page book includes the March on Rome as well as the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, ending in 1925.
Act of Oblivion
by Robert Harris
New historical novels by British writer Robert Harris are always worth looking out for so don't let the blitz of marketing surrounding his latest, Act of Oblivion, put you off. It's set at an interesting point in English history: the immediate aftermath of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Through the reflections of one of the main characters, we see the events leading up to the execution of Charles I more than a decade previously, in 1649, as well as the battles of the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army. Puritan America is also an important part of the setting. If you're interested in history and don't know the details of this period, it's an interesting book, not least because you can't help but reflect on what it takes to tip a country into civil war.
“This is by Maggie O’Farrell, who wrote Hamnet, which was a great success last year. In The Marriage Portrait, she takes us to 16th-century Italy and the Medicis. It’s about a child bride, Lucrezia de’Medici who is the daughter of Cosimo de’Medici. She marries the Duke of Ferrara at the age of 15. This is a true historical event. The actress Genevieve Gaunt, who narrates the audiobook, has the perfect voice for this story. She’s got a huge range of characters she has to do. She has to be a 15-year-old bride, who has a lot of spirit, but she’s up against a huge force in the Duke of Ferrara, who has a deep baritone. Then you’ve got the courtiers, the princes and her maid. The book is beautifully written, so there are lots of descriptions of the court and the palaces and her garments. Genevieve Gaunt captures not only these portraits, which are very powerful and very diverse, but all the details. She makes you feel like you’re there—you’re seeing a table laid with all these foods, or Lucrezia’s gown. You just see it so beautifully…Interestingly, the book reviews in print have been mixed. Lots of people love it but there have been some fairly negative reviews. When I read those I thought, ‘You just didn’t have Genevieve Gaunt telling you this story!’ She just places you there as a listener in 16th-century Italy.” Read more...
Robin Whitten, 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 ***
“Behind the beguiling, interlinked narrative of three characters from different periods of history—an Iron Age hermit, a nineteenth-century literary conman, and a child thrown out into the world from war-torn Europe—is a profound appreciation of a landscape, the rocks, the rain, the streams, trees and mosses of the remote Scottish glen where these three lives are lived. In our own restless, shifting times many of us have lost any sense of rootedness to a particular place. James Robertson’s novel draws us gently back to contemplate the importance of place and nature in our lives. For many of us, an appreciation of our homes and our surroundings has been one good thing that we will take away from our months in lockdown.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2022 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist
Elizabeth Laird, Novelist
“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.
Hamnet
by Maggie O'Farrell
*** Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 ***
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, a fictionalised account of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s also read beautifully as an audiobook by Ell Potter.
Narrator: Ell Potter
Listening time: 12 hours and 42 minutes
“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
The Mirror and the Light
by Hilary Mantel
“His voice is as close as can be to the voice that’s in my head as I write” —Hilary Mantel
The print book of The Mirror and the Light has got rave reviews, but award-winning actor Ben Miles does an amazing job narrating the audiobook. As Hilary Mantel has pointed out, the British actor (who also starred in the Crown) has already played Thomas Cromwell for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in London’s West End and on Broadway: “Ben understands the main character from the inside. His insights from the rehearsal room helped shape the story. He is familiar with how all the characters grow, from first page to last.”
Narrator: Ben Miles
Length: 38 hours and 11 minutes
“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.
