Stories built inside a past period rather than around it: cathedral builders, courtiers, soldiers, cowboys, revolutionaries and the people whose names were left out of the record. 580 books so far, across 96 series, plus 414 titles with no series listed. This is page 10 of the shelf.
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Jack Aubrey has been struck off the Navy List, and the frigate Surprise, bought at auction by his friend Stephen Maturin, sails out of an English port as a privateer with a letter of marque. Her crew is a mixed company of old hands, privateers and smugglers, and her captain is looking for a cruise profitable enough to restore him.
John Butler was four years old when Lenape warriors took him from his family's Pennsylvania farm, and eleven years later he is True Son, accepted as a son by the man who raised him. When a treaty obliged the Lenape to give up their white captives in 1764, he is handed back to a father he does not remember and a life he does not want.
In 1842, thirteen-year-old Maria Merryweather is left an orphan and goes to live with her guardian in a village in the West Country of England. Moonacre Manor is beautiful, the village is charming, and the whole estate is under an old curse that has been running for generations and that nobody living there is willing to explain.
July is born on Amity, a sugar plantation in Jamaica, and grows up enslaved there in the last years before emancipation. The novel is presented as her memoir, looking back in old age, and follows her through the Baptist War of 1831 and the abolition of slavery in 1833, along with her mother Kitty, the people who work the cane, and Caroline Mortimer, the white heiress who inherits the estate.
After an October blizzard the Ingalls family leaves their claim shanty for the town of De Smet, intending to wait out the winter there. A local man has predicted seven months of bad weather. The trains stop running, the town runs short of food, and the blizzards keep arriving one after another.
On a Virginia plantation in the years before the Civil War, the oldest and most respected enslaved man on the estate begins to tell the story of his life. His son Chapel has taught himself to read, has fallen in love with the owner's daughter, and intends to run north. The father has to decide what he is willing to do about it.
A thriller set in Washington DC after the events of The Da Vinci Code, built on Freemasonry for both its recurring theme and its major characters. It centres on the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and a kidnapping that proceeds through the symbols and secret societies of the American capital, with a deadline attached to the search.
Ailey Pearl Garfield grows up in a northern city and spends her summers in Chicasetta, Georgia, where her mother's family has lived since their ancestors were brought from Africa. Her grandmother expects her to become a doctor and Ailey wants to be a historian. The book moves between her own life and the generations before her, from slavery through the civil rights movement to the present.
Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika on the New Zealand goldfields in 1866 and walks into a meeting of twelve men who are trying to work out a series of crimes committed in the town. Each of them holds a piece of the story, and the novel assembles them into a structure that mirrors the heavens.
Olivia Dunne, a Denver minister's daughter who had planned to study archaeology, finds herself pregnant and quickly married off to a farmer she has never met in southeastern Colorado. In a landscape of beet fields and wartime shortages she starts a life with a patient stranger and makes friends with two Japanese American sisters held at a camp nearby.
The Amazing Arden is the best known female illusionist of her day, famous for the trick in which she appears to saw a man in half. One night in Iowa she uses a fire axe instead of a saw, her husband is found dead under the stage, and the policeman who catches up with her hears a story he cannot quite believe.
Ayla and Jondalar, travelling with two horses and a wolf, reach the camp of the Mamutoi, the Mammoth Hunters, and are taken in by the Lion Camp. Ayla must learn the Mamutoi language and customs before she can be accepted, and the attentions of a man from another camp put the bond she and Jondalar have formed under strain, while the camp's ceremony and hierarchy shape what she is allowed to say.
In Providence, Rhode Island in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of an eleven-year-old boy named Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared. The boy's story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist, and the investigation places a real disappearance beside the kind of fiction its investigator writes. Edmund has almost no authority of his own, which is why he needs the writer.
General William Tecumseh Sherman marches sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then north into the Carolinas, in the last months of the American Civil War. His soldiers live off the land as they go, and a population of freed people and refugees follows them. It is the people in the path of the army that the novel follows.
In 1756, in the settlements of upper New York, ten-year-old Edward Van Alstyne and his mother are left to look after the farm while his father goes with the militia. The house holds an old Spanish matchlock gun, far too heavy for a boy to manage, and news keeps arriving of raiders burning farms up the valley.
Jack Aubrey is ashore on half pay with no ship when Stephen Maturin arrives with secret orders: he is to take a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope under a commodore's pennant and take two strategic islands in the Indian Ocean from the French. Two of the captains under him, a pleasure-seeking dilettante and a disciplinarian whose severity nearly drives his crew to mutiny, make the commission harder than the enemy does.
The Memory Cathedral takes Leonardo da Vinci past the sketchbook and gives him a working flying machine. In this version of the Renaissance he builds the devices he only ever drew, takes his inventions into the service of a Syrian general, and sees his designs for war used in a battle in the Middle East.
In a West African city recovering from a long civil war, a dying man named Elias Cole spends his last weeks talking about a woman he was obsessed with and her husband, whose life he ruined. A psychologist newly arrived from England listens, and a local surgeon who lived through the war has his own account of what happened.
Tom and Maggie Tulliver grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire. Maggie is clever and hungry for affection, and her brother Tom is the one sent away to be educated and given authority in the family, and the difference in what is expected of the two of them shapes everything that happens between the brother and sister.
The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's trilogy charts the last four years in the life of Thomas Cromwell, minister at the court of King Henry VIII, from 1536 until his execution in 1540. It follows Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and completes the rise and fall of the man who ran the king's business, on whom the whole machinery of the reign depends.
Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes investigate a death on Dartmoor, together with sightings of a phantom coach on the moor. The case places the two of them in a landscape whose legends are as much a part of the evidence as the physical traces, and the investigation has to separate the two.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have built a working partnership over a decade, and each of them has secrets that the other has learned to leave alone. This time the secrets belong to the household around them: the housekeeper who has kept Holmes's house since long before Russell arrived, and who has a history of her own that nobody in the house has ever thought to ask about.
In 1327 the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his novice, Adso of Melk, travel to a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy for a disputation between the Pope's representatives and the Franciscans, in a year when emperor and pope are at war. The abbot asks William to look into the death of one of the monks, and then another monk dies. The abbey's library, which nobody but the librarian may enter, sits at the middle of the questions he has to ask.
In 1718 a headstrong fifteen-year-old girl in a parish near Newcastle begins an affair that ruins her, and when the man denies that they were ever joined she has to leave for London. There she takes a position in the household of an apothecary, hoping to salvage what she can of her reputation. What she finds in that house is not what she was promised.
In 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano Lopez begins courting Eliza Lynch, an Irish woman who becomes his mistress and follows him to Paraguay. In Asuncion she lives as the first lady of a country she does not understand, while the man she came with rises to lead the nation into the Paraguayan War of 1865 to 1870.
Vianne and Isabelle are sisters in France when the German army occupies the country, and they answer it in opposite ways: Vianne stays in the village and tries to keep her daughter fed and her household intact, while Isabelle joins the resistance and works on escape routes for downed Allied airmen. The book moves between the occupied years and a frame set in 1995, as an elderly woman looks back at what she and her sister did.
Sir Waldo Hawkridge is thirty-five, unmarried and famous in society for his athletic skill, which is why everyone calls him the Nonesuch. When a cousin he has never met leaves him a ramshackle property in the West Riding, he travels north to look at what he has inherited, and his arrival turns the neighbourhood upside down.
A Yorkshire whaling ship called the Volunteer is bound for the Arctic in the 1850s, in a trade that is being killed off by cheaper fuels. On board are a harpooner named Henry Drax, who is as dangerous as he is capable, and Patrick Sumner, a disgraced former army surgeon taken on as the ship's doctor for want of anything better.
In November 1963 a German freelance crime reporter follows an ambulance to the flat of a Holocaust survivor who has killed himself, and is given the dead man's diary. What the diary describes is a former SS commander, and the search for him has to be made inside a secret organisation. That organisation exists to protect men like the one he is hunting.
Mary Boleyn is married young and becomes the mistress of Henry VIII, and it is her sister Anne who decides what to do with that. The novel follows the two of them through the years in which the king is trying to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the court is working out which family will keep his favour. Mary tells her own part in it: the children she raises, the sister she loves and cannot trust, and a court in which being noticed by the king is both a career and a danger.
Henri is a French soldier who follows Napoleon out of a village that expected nothing of him, and he ends up running the Emperor's larder, cooking for the man who has become the reason for his life. Villanelle is the daughter of a Venetian boatman, married to a gambler who has wagered away her heart. The novel follows the two of them through the Russian campaign and back toward Venice, where the news of the war has not entirely arrived.
Natty Bumppo, called the Pathfinder, is in his middle years and guiding a party across the country towards Lake Ontario, the inland sea of the title. The journey takes them through forest and water and past men who would rather they did not arrive. Among the travellers is a young woman, Mabel Dunham, and Natty finds his own convictions tested by her.
Bagoas is a young Persian from an aristocratic family who is captured by his father's enemies, castrated and sold as a slave to King Darius III, who makes him his favourite. When Alexander the Great overthrows Darius and takes the Persian Empire, Bagoas becomes his lover and most faithful servant. The novel is narrated by Bagoas and covers the last seven years of Alexander's life.
In England in 1020 a boy watches his mother die and decides to become a healer. Barred from studying medicine at home, Rob Cole travels across Europe and into Persia, where he conceals who he is in order to enter the school of a famous physician, and learns a medicine that Europe has not yet imagined.
Kingsbridge is a small English town with a priory, a market and no cathedral, and in the twelfth century a group of people set out to build one. The novel follows the masons, monks, nobles and villagers whose lives the building changes, from the sinking of the White Ship to the murder of Thomas Becket, through a civil war that leaves the country without a settled ruler. A prior, a builder and a woman who works in wool each carry part of the story across several decades.
The Pioneers is set in a settlement beside Lake Otsego, where a new town is working out how to live on land it has only recently taken. Into this comes Natty Bumppo, a hunter and frontiersman whose understanding of the forest is shared by almost none of his neighbours, and whose freedom the new laws do not protect.
Ayla and Jondalar are travelling west along the Great Mother River, away from the lands of the Mammoth Hunters and towards the country Jondalar was born in. The journey crosses the territories of many peoples, each with its own customs and its own way of treating strangers, and the two of them have to find a way through all of them.
An alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the Roth family through the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families are persecuted on various levels. The narrator is the young Philip, whose confusion and terror are rendered closely.
In 1959 Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist missionary, takes his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo. The family's belongings and beliefs are both transformed by the country they arrive in, and the novel is told by the five women who came with him.
Isabel Archer, a young American with more imagination than money, is taken to Europe by an aunt and refuses two good proposals to keep her independence. A legacy from her cousin changes her situation entirely, and the freedom it gives her becomes the ground on which two expatriates scheme to arrange her life for her.
In a Mexican state where the church has been suppressed, a whisky priest is the last of his kind still at large, moving between villages and avoiding the police. He is not a good man, and the novel follows his flight and the people who shelter or betray him as the pursuit closes in.
Peekay is an English-speaking boy in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, sent away to a boarding school where being English among Afrikaans children is reason enough to be a target. The people he meets along the way shape the rest of his childhood and decide what he will do with it.
Five hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, five hundred miles into the Louisiana Purchase, a party of squatters crosses the prairie in 1805 looking for somewhere to settle. Among them are the rough Ishmael and Esther Bush and their grown sons, Esther's brother Abiram White, a niece called Ellen Wade and an eccentric naturalist, Dr Obed Bat, and they are watched by an old trapper who knows the country better than they do.
In sixteenth-century London, a poor boy named Tom Canty and the Prince of Wales discover that they look exactly alike, and they exchange clothes for a few minutes to see how it feels. The exchange is not undone, and each boy is taken for the other: Tom is treated as the heir to the throne while Edward is driven out into the city.
Duncan McKaskel is taking his wife Susanna and their twelve-year-old son west to start again, and he has prepared for the travelling and the weather. What he has not prepared for is the men who follow families like his, or for Con Vallian, the stranger who saves his life one night and does not explain why. The family's own camp is the part he cannot read.
The Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955 and set in Vietnam in the last years of French colonial rule. Its narrator is Thomas Fowler, a British journalist, and its story turns on his young Vietnamese lover Phuong and on Alden Pyle, an earnest young American whose certainty about how the country should be remade draws all three of them in.
In colonial New England, the British are hunting a masked patriot whose raids frustrate them at every turn, and he is known only as the Raider. Jessica Taggert, proud and quick-tempered, is thrilled by the Raider's midnight embrace and despises Alexander Montgomery, the drunken town buffoon. The two men are the same person, and only his success against the Redcoats will let him tell her so.
Fay Larkin is being held prisoner in a hidden canyon near a Mormon village where wives are sealed to their husbands, and anyone who finds the place is not expected to leave it. John Shefford, who wants to marry her, goes looking for her through the canyon country. He does it without a gun.
A historical novel is set substantially in a period before the one it was written in, and that setting has to matter: the world the characters move through, the rules they obey and the choices open to them all come from the time. An old book is not automatically historical fiction, so a novel written about its own present sits elsewhere. Myth, ancient-world stories and alternate histories are welcome when the period is the frame the story is told in.
The shelf runs from the nineteenth-century historical novel through the twentieth-century family sagas to books published this decade: medieval, Tudor, Victorian, colonial, civil war, frontier, wartime and post-war stories, plus the historical mysteries and historical romances where the period carries as much weight as the plot or the love story. Those two kinds also sit on the mystery and romance shelves when they genuinely belong there.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books