History fiction top 40
Explore the top 40 historical fiction books that bring the past to life. Discover gripping tales of love, war, and adventure from master storytellers across the ages.
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Sons of Yocahu
by Gloria Bond
When Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola, he discovered the magnificent culture of the Tainan people - a people who believed in peace, because of their great zemie, Yocahu. Many of the arriving Europeans brought with them brutal assumptions of superiority. Would the Taino tradition of peace be destroyed by that brutality? Or would the Europeans who claimed to worship the "Prince of Peace" learn from those they conquered? The answers depend not on the culture, but on the quality of the individual Sons of Yocahu.
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Sao Tome
by Paul D. Cohn
In 1485, the Portuguese Crown and Catholic Church began to kidnap Jewish children, forcibly convert the young conscripts, and ship them to So Tom Island to work the sugar plantations. This is a little-known chapter of the Diaspora. The collision of slavery, sugar agriculture, and discovery of The Americas transformed this island colony into the nidus of the wholesale black slave trade that infected Africa and Western commerce for the next 350 years. "So Tom" tells the story of young Marcel Saulo abducted with other children from their synagogue in Lisbon and shipped 4,000 miles to the West-African island.
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Graves in the Wilderness
by Jock R. Gordon
Settling in Australia after the American civil war, the son of Ulster-Scott migrants and the only survivor of the East Texas black Indian Karankawa tribe rebuild their lives as cattlemen in Cooktown, a fledgling portal to the gold mines of the Cape York wilderness.
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Unburnable
by Marie-Elena John
Set partly in contemporary Washington, D.C., and post-World War II Dominica, this debut novel deftly intertwines the cultures of blacks in the United States and the West Indies as an extraordinary multigenerational family saga unfolds.
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Churchill
by Geoffrey Best
Churchill's inspiring leadership left him above criticism for many years. Recently, however, his record has come under attack. In this book, one of Britain's most distinguished historians makes sense of this extraordinary man, and his long, controversial, colorful, and heroic career. versions of Churchill, in a biography that balances the private and the public man and offers clear insight into what made him truly great.
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The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century
by Harry Turtledove
Explore fascinating, often chilling “what if” accounts of the world that could have existed—and still might yet . . . Science fiction’s most illustrious and visionary authors hold forth the ultimate alternate history collection. Here you’ll experience mind-bending tales that challenge your views of the past, present, and future, including: • “The Lucky Strike”: When the Lucky Strike is chosen over the Enola Gay to drop the first atomic bomb, fate takes an unexpected turn in Kim Stanley Robinson’s gripping tale. • “Bring the Jubilee”: Ward Moore’s novella masterpiece offers a rebel victory at Gettysburg which changes the course of the Civil War . . . and all of American history. • “Through Road No Wither”: After Hitler’s victory in World War II, two Nazi officers confront their destiny in Greg Bear’s apocalyptic vision of the future. • “All the Myriad Ways”: Murder or suicide, Ambrose Harmon’s death leads the police down an infinite number of pathways in Larry Niven’s brilliant and defining tale of alternatives and consequences. • “Mozart in Mirrorshades”: Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner explore a terrifying era as the future crashes into the past—with disastrous results. . . . as well as “The Winterberry” by Nicholas A. DiChario • “Islands in the Sea” by Harry Turtledove • “Suppose They Gave a Peace” by Susan Shwartz • “Manassas, Again” by Gregory Benford • “Dance Band on the Titanic” by Jack L. Chalker • “Eutopia” by Poul Anderson • “The Undiscovered” by William Sanders • “The Death of Captain Future” by Allen Steele • and “Moon of Ice” by Brad Linaweaver The definitive collection: fourteen seminal alternate history tales drawing readers into a universe of dramatic possibility and endless wonder.
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Devil in Vienna
by Doris Orgel
Inge Dorenwald and Lieselotte Vessely have been best friends for most of their thirteen years. They share secrets, fears, hopes and even the same birthday. It never mattered that Inge was Jewish and that Lieselotte was the daughter of a Nazi SS officer—until now. Hitler and Nazism are infiltrating Vienna, Austria, in 1938 and suddenly it is forbidden for the girls to continue seeing each other. Despite the danger, Inge and Liselotte struggle to keep their friendship alive. But will they be able to do it? This novel, based on the author’s own experiences during World War II, is an ALA Notable Book and winner of the Sydney Taylor Award and the Golden Kite Award.
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Bloodfever
by Karen Marie Moning
"New York Times" bestselling author Moning returns with a second undeniably sexy Fever novel, further chronicling the adventures of "sidhe"-seer MacKayla Lane in the world of the immortal Fae.
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World Without End
by Ken Follett
#1 New York Times Bestseller In 1989, Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in twelfth-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. World Without End is its equally irresistible sequel—set two hundred years after The Pillars of the Earth and three hundred years after the Kingsbridge prequel, The Evening and the Morning. World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroads of new ideas—about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race—the Black Death. Three years in the writing and nearly eighteen years since its predecessor, World Without End is a "well-researched, beautifully detailed portrait of the late Middle Ages" (The Washington Post) that once again shows that Ken Follett is a masterful author writing at the top of his craft.
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The Boleyn Inheritance
by Philippa Gregory
From the "New York Times"-bestselling author of "The Other Boleyn Girl" comesa tempestuous Tudor tale about two queens, Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr, and the woman who destroys them both.
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The 48 Laws of Power
by Robert Greene
Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. This is the only authorized paperback edition in the US. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
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The World is Flat
by Thomas L. Friedman
Offers a concise history of globalization, discussing a wide range of topics, from the September 11 terrorist attacks to the growth of the middle class in both China and India.
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A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah
My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is a war.” “You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.” I smile a little. “You should tell us about it sometime.” “Yes, sometime.” This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
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1776
by David McCullough
Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for "Truman" and "John Adams," McCullough returns with the story of the Revolutionary War, now spectacularly packaged with reproductions of rare historical artifacts and memorabilia.
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Temeraire: Empire of Ivory
by Naomi Novik
An epidemic of unknown origins has decimated the noble dragons' ranks and only Temeraire and a pack of newly recruited dragons stand as the only means of an airborne defense against France's ever bolder armies.
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An Army at Dawn
by Rick Atkinson
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A splendid book... The emphasis throughout is on the human drama of men at war."--The Washington Post Book World The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. Opening with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algiers, and then take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually becomes a superb fighting force. At the center of the tale are the extraordinary but flawed commanders who come to dominate the battlefield: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, and Rommel. Brilliantly researched, rich with new material and vivid insights, Atkinson's vivid narrative tells the deeply human story of a monumental battle for the future of civilization.
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The Tainos
by Irving Rouse
Tells the story of the Taino people from their ancestral days in South America through their migration to the northern Caribbean islands where they were the first natives to interact with Columbus, to their rapid and immediate decline under the European gifts of forced labor, malnutrition, disease, and dispersal. Includes a glossary without pronunciation. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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You Wouldn't Want to Sail with Christopher Columbus!
by Fiona Macdonald
Describes what it would require to launch a voyage of discovery, what shipboard life would be like, and what the rewards would be using the voyages of Columbus as an example.
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The Last Voyage of Columbus
by Martin Dugard
The Year is 1500. Christopher Columbus, stripped of his title Admiral of the Ocean Seas, waits in chains in a Caribbean prison built under his orders, looking out at the colony that he founded, nurtured, and ruled for eight years. Less than a decade after discovering the New World, he has fallen into disgrace, accused by the royal court of being a liar, a secret Jew, and a foreigner who sought to steal the riches of the New World for himself. The tall, freckled explorer with the aquiline nose, whose flaming red hair long ago turned gray, passes his days in prayer and rumination, trying to ignore the waterfront gallows that are all too visible from his cell. And he plots for one great escape, one last voyage to the ends of the earth, one final chance to prove himself. What follows is one of history's most epic-and forgotten-adventures. Columbus himself would later claim that his fourth voyage was his greatest. It was without doubt his most treacherous. Of the four ships he led into the unknown, none returned. Columbus would face the worst storms a European explorer had ever encountered. He would battle to survive amid mutiny, war, and a shipwreck that left him stranded on a desert isle for almost a year. On his tail were his enemies, sent from Europe to track him down. In front of him: the unknown. Martin Dugard's thrilling account of this final voyage brings Columbus to life as never before-adventurer, businessman, father, lover, tyrant, and hero.
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Rethinking Columbus
by Bill Bigelow
Provides resources for teaching elementary and secondary school students about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America.
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Christopher Columbus
by Peter Roop
Recounts the life story of the noted explorer, including excerpts from his own writings.
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Columbus's Outpost Among the TaĂnos
by Kathleen A. Deagan
In 1493 Christopher Columbus led a fleet of seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men to found a royal trading colony in America. Columbus had high hopes for his settlement, which he named La Isabela after the queen of Spain, but just five years later it was in ruins. It remains important, however, as the first site of European settlement in America and the first place of sustained interaction between Europeans and the indigenous Tainos. Kathleen Deagan and Jose Maria Cruxent now tell the story of this historic enterprise. Drawing on their ten-year archaeological investigation of the site of La Isabela, along with research into Columbus-era documents, they contrast Spanish expectations of America with the actual events and living conditions at America's first European town. Deagan and Cruxent argue that La Isabela failed not because Columbus was a poor planner but because his vision of America was grounded in European experience and could not be sustained in the face of the realities of American life. Explaining that the original Spanish economic and social frameworks for colonization had to be altered in America in response to the American landscape and the nonelite Spanish and Taino people who occupied it, they shed light on larger questions of American colonialism and the development of Euro-American cultural identity.
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The Truth about Columbus
by James W. Loewen
An historian sets the record straight on Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, using art and text to sum up recent revisionist thought and to debunk common myths about the European invader responsible for the deaths of thousands. Original.
