Outstanding Historical Fiction
Discover the best outstanding historical fiction books that bring the past to life. Explore captivating stories, rich settings, and unforgettable characters in our curated list of top picks.
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Echoes
by Danielle Steel
On the shores of Lake Geneva in 1915, the Jewish beauty Beata Wittgenstein falls in love with a Catholic French officer and marries him despite the wishes of her family, but when Hitler's terror arrives, Beata has to undertake a harrowing journey of survival and reconsiders her roots. 900,000 first printing.
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The Fiery Cross
by Diana Gabaldon
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠The fifth book in Diana Gabaldonâs acclaimed Outlander saga, the basis for the Starz original series. âA grand adventure written on a canvas that probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit across [centuries].ââCNN The year is 1771, and war is coming. Jamie Fraserâs wife tells him so. Little as he wishes to, he must believe it, for hers is a gift of dreadful prophecyâa time-travelerâs certain knowledge. Born in the year of Our Lord 1918, Claire Randall served England as a nurse on the battlefields of World War II, and in the aftermath of peace found fresh conflicts when she walked through a cleftstone on the Scottish Highlands and found herself an outlander, an English lady in a place where no lady should be, in a timeâ1743âwhen the only English in Scotland were the officers and men of King Georgeâs army. Now wife, mother, and surgeon, Claire is still an outlander, out of place, and out of time, but now, by choice, linked by love to her only anchorâJamie Fraser. Her unique view of the future has brought him both danger and deliverance in the past; her knowledge of the oncoming revolution is a flickering torch that may light his way through the perilous years aheadâor ignite a conflagration that will leave their lives in ashes.
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To the Last Man
by Jeff Shaara
Jeff Shaara has enthralled readers with his New York Times bestselling novels set during the Civil War and the American Revolution. Now the acclaimed author turns to World War I, bringing to life the sweeping, emotional story of the war that devastated a generation and established America as a world power. Spring 1916: the horror of a stalemate on Europeâs western front. France and Great Britain are on one side of the barbed wire, a fierce German army is on the other. Shaara opens the window onto the otherworldly tableau of trench warfare as seen through the eyes of a typical British soldier who experiences the bizarre and the horribleâa âTommyâ whose innocent youth is cast into the hell of a terrifying war. In the skies, meanwhile, technology has provided a devastating new tool, the aeroplane, and with it a different kind of hero emergesâthe flying ace. Soaring high above the chaos on the ground, these solitary knights duel in the splendor and terror of the skies, their courage and steel tested with every flight. As the conflict stretches into its third year, a neutral America is goaded into war, its reluctant president, Woodrow Wilson, finally accepting the repeated challenges to his stance of nonalignment. Yet the Americans are woefully unprepared and ill equipped to enter a war that has become worldwide in scope. The responsibility is placed on the shoulders of General John âBlackjackâ Pershing, and by mid-1917 the first wave of the American Expeditionary Force arrives in Europe. Encouraged by the bold spirit and strength of the untested Americans, the world waits to see if the tide of war can finally be turned. From Blackjack Pershing to the Marine in the trenches, from the Red Baron to the American pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, To the Last Man is written with the moving vividness and accuracy that characterizes all of Shaaraâs work. This spellbinding new novel carries readersâthe way only Shaara canâto the heart of one of the greatest conflicts in human history, and puts them face-to-face with the characters who made a lasting impact on the world.
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Zorro
by Isabel Allende
A swashbuckling adventure story that reveals for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, he is a child of two worlds. Diego de la Vega's father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during Diego's childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage. At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege. Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures -- duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues -- Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.
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The Birth of Venus
by Sarah Dunant
Turning fifteen in Renaissance Florence, Alessandra Cecchi becomes intoxicated with the works of a young painter whom her father has brought to the city to decorate the family's Florentine palazzo.
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A Land Remembered
by Patrick D. Smith
"In 1858 Tobias MacIvey abandoned his Georgia farm, loaded his meager possessions and his wife and infant son in a wagon and headed south into the Florida wilderness to search for a new life. What follows in A LAND REMEMBERED is a big rough-tough, folksy Florida saga -- three generations of the MacIvey family (1858-1968) from a dirt-poor cattle-droving cracker to a Miami real estate tycoon."--Front flap.
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The Virgin's Lover
by Philippa Gregory
A fictional portrait of the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I follows the young queen as she copes with intrigues aimed at placing Mary, Queen of Scots, on the British throne, and her passion for the traitorous Robert Dudley.
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Ireland
by Frank Delaney
An epic tale-within-a-tale based on the history of Ireland finds a traditional wandering Storyteller revealing his life experiences while forging a poignant new relationship in the home of an eight-year-old boy. A first novel. 50,000 first printing.
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Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Inman, an injured and disillusioned Confederate soldier, embarks on a harrowing journey home to his sweetheart, Ada, who herself is struggling to run the farm left her at her father's sudden death.
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The Warriors
by John Jakes
The Kent Family Chronicles continue as Confederate Corporal Jeremiah Kent carries out his commander's dying request-while the Union Army ravages Georgia.
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The Far Side of the World
by Patrick O'Brian
Captain Jack Aubrey, accompanied by ship's surgeon and British intelligence operative, Stephen Maturin, sails for Cape Horn, assigned to intercept an American frigate that is disrupting the British whaling trade. Reissue. (A 20th Century Fox film, directed by Peter Weir, releasing November 13, 2003, starring Russell Crowe & Paul Bettany) (Historical Fiction)
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The Sugar Camp Quilt
by Jennifer Chiaverini
In Creek's Crossing, Pennsylvania, in the years before the Civil War, Dorothea Granger agrees to sew an unusual quilt to fulfill her uncle's deathbed request, realizing later that the quilt pattern contains an Underground Railroad map.
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The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
A Chinese peasant overcomes the forces of nature and the frailties of human nature to become a wealthy landowner.
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The Power of One
by Bryce Courtenay
âThe Power of One has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama.â âThe New York Times âUnabashedly uplifting . . . asserts forcefully what all of us would like to believe: that the individual, armed with the spirit of independenceââthe power of oneââcan prevail.â âCleveland Plain Dealer In 1939, as Hitler casts his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, the seeds of apartheid take root in South Africa. There, a boy called Peekay is born. His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives heroic dreamsâwhich are nothing compared to what life actually has in store for him. He embarks on an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice where he will learn the power of words, the power to transform lives, and the power of one. âTotally engrossing . . . [presents] the metamorphosis of a most remarkable young man and the almost spiritual influence he has on others . . . Peekay has both humor and a refreshingly earthy touch, and his adventures, at times, are hair-raising in their suspense.â âLos Angeles Times Book Review âMarvelous . . . It is the people of the sun-baked plains of Africa who tug at the heartstrings in this book. . . . [Bryce] Courtenay draws them all with a fierce and violent love.â âThe Washington Post Book World âImpressive.â âNewsday âA compelling tale.â âThe Christian Science Monitor
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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"
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The Wandering Hill
by Larry McMurtry
The second volume in Larry McMurtry's four-part historical epic featuring the Berrybender family as they continue their journey through the West during the 1830s. In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family in the still unexplored Wild West of the 1830s. Their journey is one of exploration, beset by difficulties, tragedies, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of day-to-day survival in a land where nothing can be taken for granted. By now, Tasmin is married to the elusive young mountain man Jim Snow (the "Sin Killer"). On his part, Jim is about to discover that in taking the outspoken, tough-minded, stubbornly practical young aristocratic woman into his teepee he has bitten off more than he can chew. Still, theirs is a great love affair and dominates this volume of Larry McMurtry's The Berrybender Narratives, in which Tasmin gradually takes center stage as her father loses his strength and powers of concentration, and her family goes to pieces stranded in the hostile wilderness. The Wandering Hill (which refers to a powerful and threatening legend in local Indian folklore) is at once literature on a grand scale and riveting entertainment by a master storyteller.
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One Thousand White Women
by Jim Fergus
Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of May Doddâa remarkable woman who, in 1875, travels through the American West to marry the chief of the Cheyenne Nation. One Thousand White Women begins with May Doddâs journey into an unknown world. Having been committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope for freedom and redemption is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from âcivilizedâ society become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. What follows is a series of breathtaking adventuresâMayâs brief, passionate romance with the gallant young army captain John Bourke; her marriage to the great chief Little Wolf; and her conflict of being caught between loving two men and living two completely different lives. âFergus portrays the perceptions and emotions of women...with tremendous insight and sensitivity.ââBooklist âA superb tale of sorrow, suspense, exultation, and triumph.â âWinston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
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The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
Nominated as one of Americaâs best-loved novels by PBSâs The Great American Read #1 New York Times Bestseller Oprah's Book Club Selection The âmonumental masterpieceâ (Booklist) that changed the course of Ken Follettâs already phenomenal career. Look out for the prequel, The Evening and the Morning, coming from Viking in September 2020. âFollett is a master,â extolled the Washington Post on the release of The Pillars of the Earth. A departure for the bestselling thriller writer, the historical epic stunned readers and critics alike with its ambitious scope and gripping humanity. Today, it stands as a testament to Follettâs unassailable command of the written word and to his universal appeal. The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known . . . of Tom, the mason who becomes his architectâa man divided in his soul . . . of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame . . . and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother. A spellbinding epic tale of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfth-century England, this is Ken Follettâs historical masterpiece.
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The Nutmeg of Consolation (Vol. Book 14) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)
by Patrick O'Brian
Captain Aubrey, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, and the crew of the Diane are shipwrecked on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies.
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Pompeii
by Robert Harris
This latest "New York Times" bestseller by the author of "Archangel" chronicles the suspenseful last days of the legendary ancient city nestled below the slopes of the volcano Mount Vesuvius. "[An] intelligent, engaging historical novel."--"The Washington Post Book World."