Novels Recommended by Historians
Last updated: November 14, 2024
History books seek to explain and analyse the past with objectivity, but novels (or plays) written at the time show what an individual actually living through the period experienced, thought about and was preoccupied with. Hence, the assertion by Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford, that, “You learn much more about Russia before the revolution by reading The Cherry Orchard than you will by studying the tsar and his land reforms or other decisions made in St Petersburg by the leadership.”
Here, we've listed all of the works of fiction that have been recommended by historians interviewed on Five Books. Overall, the most recommended book in our history section is in fact a novel: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. A Soviet journalist, Grossman witnessed the nightmare of both the German invasion of Russia during World War II and the Holocaust. The Vietnam War and the American Civil War have also attracted a number of fiction recommendations. Perhaps there is something about the horror of war that fiction is particularly suited to capturing.
“The Spider’s Web was Roth’s first novel. Far more people know his nostalgic work, The Radetzky March, about the late Habsburg Empire. But I think this earlier novel, which was first serialised in a newspaper at the very beginning of the 1920s, is extremely insightful, even prophetic in a way.” Read more...
The best books on The Weimar Republic
Robert Gerwarth, Historian
“The classic Faulkner line that everybody trots out is: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Absalom, Absalom! is the great iteration of that line. It’s not even real; it’s become a chimera or a fabrication, another story being told. It’s a live issue that is sustaining and replenishing people. Or, in an awful way, they are kind of yoked to it, doomed to have the same argument again and again and never get to the end of it. Absalom, Absalom!—to the point that it baffles a lot of people—is the greatest exploration of that Southern theme.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South
Xan Brooks, Novelist
“This book is a mini-classic that is neglected. It gives a very good feel about what it was like to be on the Italian campaign, but it also gives a good feel about war. It is specific to Anzio, absolutely. There is a moment when they’re back in Capri and recovering before going off again. It has a sense of place. But, at the same time—and this is really the point about much war literature—it’s about what it reflects of war more generally. And this book does that.” Read more...
The Best Military History Books
Hew Strachan, Military Historians & Veteran
“It was a great moment in Russian history. So, as a kind of period piece that captures Russia in the late 19th, early 20th century, it’s the most poignant text I’ve ever read…You learn much more about Russia before the revolution by reading The Cherry Orchard than you will by studying the tsar and his land reforms or other decisions made in St Petersburg by the leadership.” Read more...
Peter Frankopan, Historian
“Irish intellectual life is deeply indebted to its literary culture…Joyce’s depiction is one of Ireland in the aftermath of the fall of Parnell. At the start of the 1890s, much of Ireland glimpsed the prospect of national unity based around Parnell himself, embodying a national project, whilst offering credible leadership. This, as the Portrait reflects, fell apart under the weight of sexual scandal and ensuing religious polarities. One can see all the characters participating in the Christmas dinner scene as representing different strands of contemporary Irish opinion.” Read more...
The best books on Modern Irish History
Richard Bourke, Historian
“At the time it came out, in the 1990s, the North Vietnamese had been stereotyped as robotic killers and fanatic communists. The Sorrow of War was a revelation for anyone who wanted to hear the other side. Kien, the protagonist, is a soldier with the North Vietnamese Army. He is a sensitive, sorrowful soul, caught up in these terrible, terrible events.” Read more...
Sherry Buchanan, Journalist
“It’s probably the most influential novel of the 18th century. The mid-18th century is when the novel was invented, so it’s possibly the most influential novel ever written in English, because it influences everyone who comes afterwards, from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen onwards.” Read more...
The best books on The 18th Century Sexual Revolution
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Historian
“I love the Cazalet books, and Marking Time is part of that series. I also loved the TV adaptation, which only ran for one series but was fabulously filmed and acted. This is the best book in the series. War is coming, and the Cazalet family are plunged into the situation. Like everyone else they have to deal with the start of the war, and the youngest son goes off to fight in Dunkirk…….It is steeped in authenticity. It all feels right. All the characters feel very real, because they were based on real people. I can’t think of another book which more vividly captures the mood at that time of an upper middle-class family on the cusp of war.” Read more...
Novels and Memoirs of World War II
James Holland, Military Historians & Veteran
“Everyone has read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I would say is unquestionably one of the greatest ever espionage novels, perhaps simply one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Tinker, Tailor is a whodunit, essentially. It’s not literally a country house murder mystery, with a lineup of characters including Colonel Mustard. But there are four of them and it’s about finding out which one is the mole (a word which, I think, le Carré invented)—the Soviet traitor in the ranks of British intelligence. It’s such a great plot and it mirrors life very closely. It’s essentially about the Cambridge spy ring and the real-life traitors who worked for Stalin after the war.” Read more...
Five Classic European Spy Novels
Patrick Worrall, Thriller and Crime Writer
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
🎧 Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award for a truly exceptional audiobook
“This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient…Orwell is of perennial fascination to me because…he straddles the world of investigative journalism and fiction. He also deliberately chose to experience different levels of society, which I believe is essential for a novelist interested in the truth about the way we live now. He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies. Orwell saw the death of the dream at first-hand in Spain. He was in contact with a lot of communists, and fought on their sides against Fascism but, as Stalin’s Russia gained power, he could see this dream of equality that so many idealistic and young people have shared leaves a nightmare, just like Fascism. Anything other than democracy and truth leaves the jackboot stamping eternally into the human face, as Winston realises. His hero Winston is named, of course, after Winston Churchill” Read more...
Amanda Craig, Journalist
“Life and Fate…is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.” Read more...
The best books on World War II
Antony Beevor, Military Historians & Veteran
“Roadside Picnic is the single greatest work of sci-fi fiction, written by these two scientist brothers. Roadside Picnic is, among other things, a wonderful indirect metaphorical reflection on everything about Soviet Russia – from its terrible scrappy industrial texture, through to the way that the possibility of miracles kept bobbing on through the wasteland like will-o’-the-wisps. It’s about the way that industrial grime and decay always coincided with promises that at any moment things could be radiantly wonderful.” Read more...
The best books on 20th Century Russia
Francis Spufford, Historian
“It’s short stories about Vietnam written by a guy who was there as a very young man. And it really is a book about what it is like to be a regular ordinary American teenager and suddenly find yourself neck-deep in a jungle fighting a war that you neither understand nor care about. Killing people that are so different from you with no opportunity to understand or appreciate their culture. He presents you with a gang of teenagers carrying 60 or 70 pounds of equipment in 40-plus centigrade temperatures with malaria, fighting insects, fighting monsoons, fighting conscience, fighting political ideology, fighting religious ideas and their own code of ethics and morals even more than they are fighting what they have been told is the common enemy. And I think the way that he does that with such humanity and such heart is outstanding. And again it is a book I have read probably three times.” Read more...
The best books on Human Dramas
R J Ellory, Novelist
