Try these great historical fiction selections
Explore captivating historical fiction books with our curated list of top selections. Dive into rich, immersive stories that bring the past to life—perfect for history lovers and avid readers.
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The Tale of Murasaki
by Liza Dalby
The Tale of Murasaki is an elegant and brilliantly authentic historical novel by the author of Geisha and the only Westerner ever to have become a geisha. In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, the most popular work in the history of Japanese literature. In The Tale of Murasaki, Liza Dalby has created a breathtaking fictionalized narrative of the life of this timeless poet–a lonely girl who becomes such a compelling storyteller that she is invited to regale the empress with her tales. The Tale of Murasaki is the story of an enchanting time and an exotic place. Whether writing about mystical rice fields in the rainy mountains or the politics and intrigue of the royal court, Dalby breathes astonishing life into ancient Japan.
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The Book of Saladin
by Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali's second novel in The Islam Quintet is a rich and teeming chronicle set in twelfth-century Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem.
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Dark Eagle
by John Ensor Harr
Meticulously researched, "Dark Eagle" is a fictionalized story of Benedict Arnold's career, his heroism, his military exploits, and his May-September romance with Peggy Shippen, who became his wife and partner in treason. Maps.
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The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes
by Stephen Marlowe
Here is the novel that readers and critics have found as bountiful as its main character's own deathless creation, DON QUIXOTE. Stephen Marlowe gives us Cervantes' life as it was, might have been, and should have been, and proves that the art of the novel has lost nothing of the power given it by one of its earliest practitioners.
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Justinian
by H. N. Turteltaub
Born to the throne of Byzantium--the new Rome--Justinian II was determined to bow to no man. Headstrong and stubborn, he fought with the very nobles on whom his reign depended. And so he was overthrown, mutilated, and exiled to beyond the Black Sea. But not forever. --From publisher's description.
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Julian
by Gore Vidal
The remarkable bestseller about the Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, Julian is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal's finest historical novels. Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to restoring the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign. A marvelously imaginative and insightful novel of classical antiquity, Julian captures the religious and political ferment of a desperate age and restores with blazing wit and vigor the legacy of an impassioned ruler.
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The Pillar of the Sky
by Cecelia Holland
Here is the story of Moloquin, the unwanted child. Outcast sister-son of the chief of Ladons tribe, he is adopted instead by the wise-woman Karella, storyteller, lawgiver, prophetess. He was a special one, a speaker to the gods, who was determined to build a gateway to heaven, and inspired a people to follow him, to raise the great stones on Salisbury Plain.
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The Black Rose
by Thomas Bertram Costain
Walter of Gurnie, bastard son of an English peer, is forced to flee from Oxford for his part in the university riots of 1273. Inspired by Friar Bacon, he determines to travel to China. With his friend Tristam, he fights his way to the heart of the fabulous Mongol Empire, and returns famous, to find that he must choose between the first love he thought lost and the exotic flower that he found in the East.