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 11 of the shelf.
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Kid McCoy was a championship boxer, a jewellery thief and a confidence man, and he was married often enough for the count to become part of his legend. The novel follows him from his boyhood in Indiana through the fights, the swindles and the smart company of the years around 1900, and lets him tell much of it himself.
Henry Fleming leaves his mother's farm to enlist in the Union Army, imagining battle as a parade of glory. In his first engagement he runs from the firing line, then wanders behind the lines among the wounded and the dying, ashamed of himself and longing for a wound of his own before he can face his regiment again.
Jody Tiflin is ten years old and lives on his father's ranch, where the work is hard, the grown men are mostly busy and the days have a shape he has grown used to. Then he is given a red pony of his own, and looking after it teaches him things about birth, illness and death that the ranch hands could not have explained to him.
Stevens has been a butler at Darlington Hall for most of his working life, and in the summer of 1956 his new American employer suggests that he take a motoring holiday. He drives into the West Country, going back over what he remembers of the years between the wars in the house: the guests, the politics of his employer's dinners, his own standards of service and the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who left. The novel is Stevens's own account of those years and of what he chose to do with them.
The Surprise comes home from the far side of the world with prisoners aboard and a captain who has never met his grown son. Ashore in England, Jack Aubrey is drawn into a different kind of battle, fought on dry land and in the market, where his name and his fortune are no longer safe from the people who wish him harm.
Tess Meredith and Raven Following grew up sharing the Montana plains, and the hardships that fell on the Sioux drove Raven away from his people and from her. He has rebuilt his life in Chicago as a different man, and then Tess arrives there, having become a suffragette. She is there to fight for the causes she believes in, not to find him.
Hester Prynne conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and is punished by being made to wear a scarlet letter as a mark of adultery. Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1642 and 1649, the novel follows her attempt to build a life of repentance and dignity in a community that has decided what she is, and follows the two men connected to her secret.
During the Reign of Terror a band of English gentlemen keeps smuggling French aristocrats out of the country before they reach the guillotine, and nobody knows who leads them, only that a small red flower is left behind each time. In London, Marguerite Blakeney is a celebrated French actress married to Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy man whose visible talents appear to be clothes and a good-natured drawl. French agents are hunting the person behind the flower, and Marguerite knows more about him than she would like.
Lily Owens is fourteen, and her life has been shaped around a blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When her stand-in mother Rosaleen insults three of the town's most committed racists, Lily decides that the two of them should leave, and they travel to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town that holds the answer to her mother's past. There they are taken in by three beekeeping sisters.
Roseanne McNulty is approaching her hundredth birthday in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where she has spent most of her adult life and which is about to be demolished. She begins to write the story of herself and of her parents in Sligo at the turn of the twentieth century, and hides it under a floorboard in her room. The hospital's chief psychiatrist, Dr Grene, is meanwhile trying to establish which of his patients can be released.
Ayla and Jondalar, with their horses and the wolf, complete their journey across Europe and are greeted by the Zelandonii, Jondalar's own people, at the Ninth Cave. Ayla has to be accepted by a community that regards the Clan who raised her as animals, while her healing knowledge and her pregnancy shape how she is received.
Douglas Sherbrooke, Earl of Northcliffe, needs an heir, and an heir means a wife, so he sets about acquiring one. Alexandra Chambers, the youngest daughter of the Duke of Beresford, has loved him since she was fifteen, but the sister everyone considers incomparable is the one he had in mind, and the two families have their own ideas about how it should end.
In the quiet Amish community of Hickory Hollow in Pennsylvania, cherished traditions and heartfelt beliefs have flourished while time has stood still. But a secret lies buried there that could shatter the tranquillity its inhabitants have grown to love. Hickory Hollow keeps the Old Order laws, and questions about the past are not welcome in it.
The novel describes the siege of a fictional Indian town, Krishnapur, during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and it is told from the point of view of the British residents. As the siege tightens, the Europeans find themselves short of food and dignity, and the arrangement in which they govern an Asian population is turned upside down.
In Rome in the year 70, an informer called Marcus Didius Falco meets a frightened young woman in the Forum and makes the rash decision to help her. She is carrying a burden that turns out to be connected to a pile of silver ingots stolen from Britain, and to the people who want them back.
In Warsaw in 1942 the war is raging and people live in fear from day to day. Ruth, Bronia and Edek have to fend for themselves when both of their parents are taken by the Nazis, and the novel follows their attempt to survive and to find each other again across a continent that has been broken up by the fighting.
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die, because the man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and the hired killers are Eli and Charlie Sisters. Eli does not share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, and on the road to a gold-mining claim he begins to wonder what he does for a living.
In 1920 Jack and Mabel have left Pennsylvania for a homestead in the Alaskan wilderness, and the work is harder and the isolation longer than either of them expected. Mabel is still grieving the baby they lost. The night of the first snow they build a girl out of snow, and in the morning she is gone, and there are small human tracks at the edge of the property.
A team of archaeologists opens a tell in Israel, the mound left behind by one settlement built on top of another across thousands of years. Each layer they cut through releases the story of the people who lived on that ground, from a Canaanite town to a family in the twentieth century.
During the American Revolution, the strip of New York country between the British and Continental lines is nobody's ground, and both armies move through it at night. At a house called The Locusts, a Loyalist family shelters a stranger from a storm, and a peddler named Harvey Birch arrives behind him. Nobody in the house can agree on whether the peddler is a patriot, a thief or a British agent, and the fighting that follows is as much about who deserves to be trusted as it is about which army wins.
On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of the infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham, whose household invites other artists to live and work at the family home in order to escape the conservatism of 1930s Australia. Lily becomes infatuated with the makeshift family. Lily is looking back from old age, so the reader knows from the start that the experiment did not last.
Jake Barnes lives in Paris in the 1920s among American and British expatriates, and he is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an attachment that cannot be consummated. The group travels south to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín, where the drinking, the bullfights and the tensions between them come to a head.
A mail packet running for England is chased across the Atlantic for the papers in Stephen Maturin's hands, and for the woman travelling with him. Safely ashore, Jack Aubrey is given a small ship and a mission on the Danish coast, and the two friends find that the war has another kind of danger waiting for them.
The Wart is a boy being raised in the household of Sir Ector, with no idea that he is anyone important. When the magician Merlyn arrives to tutor him and Sir Ector's son Kay, the lessons turn into a series of transformations into fish, hawks, badgers and snakes, none of which quite explain what the magician is preparing him for.
A young widow called Helen Graham arrives at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion that has stood empty for years, with her small son and one servant. She keeps to herself, sells her paintings for money and refuses to explain her past, and the village decides that a woman living like that must be hiding something, until the man who falls in love with her learns the truth.
Two Royal Navy ships sail north in 1845 looking for a passage across the top of the world, and two years later they are still there, frozen in with the coal running low and the food behind it. The novel follows the officers and crews of the Terror and the Erebus as cold, scurvy and each other wear them down, and as something out on the ice starts picking them off.
News that England may be encouraging the Spanish colonies to break away changes the Surprise's orders, and Jack Aubrey's commission is restored to him along with a ship to carry an envoy to the Malay states. Stephen Maturin goes along for the treaty, the natural history, and the chance to work on a problem of his own.
The Cleary family leaves New Zealand for Drogheda, a sheep station in the Australian outback, where Paddy Cleary will work for his wealthy sister. Meggie Cleary is four years old when the family arrives and the youngest of seven, and the novel follows her from that arrival into adulthood against the running of the station, the drought, the sheep and the money. The other constant in her life is Father Ralph de Bricassart, a priest whose career in the church and feelings about Meggie grow at the same time and in opposite directions. The book runs from 1915 to 1969 and covers three generations.
In the autumn of 1881 a divorce affidavit arrives at Sally Lockhart's house, and it says that a commission agent named Arthur Parrish is her husband and the father of her daughter, Harriet. Sally has never been married. The affidavit also says that Harriet's father wants custody of the child, and Sally's lawyer has no sympathy at all to offer a woman with no power of her own.
In 1832 thirteen-year-old Charlotte Doyle sails from England to join her family in America as the only passenger on a merchant ship. Caught between a murderous captain and a crew preparing to mutiny, she has to decide who to believe, and the voyage changes what she thinks a young woman of her class is able to do.
Professor William Waterman Sherman sets out to cross the Pacific alone in a balloon, intending to spend a year by himself above the ocean. Three weeks later he is pulled out of the Atlantic surrounded by the wreckage of twenty balloons, and the account he gives of how he got there makes up the rest of the novel.
Cora is enslaved on a cotton plantation in Georgia, and when a new arrival tells her about the Underground Railroad she decides to take the risk and go. In this version of it the railroad is real: engineers and conductors operate tracks and tunnels under the soil of the South. Cora and her companion travel north from state to state with a slave catcher behind them, and each place they stop has its own arrangements for Black people and its own particular danger.
Twin sisters Stella and Desiree Vignes run away from the small Louisiana town of Mallard as teenagers, and their lives separate completely. Desiree returns years later with a daughter, while Stella passes for white, marries and disappears into a life in California, and the novel follows the generation that comes after both of them.
Judith marries Gavin Montgomery at an altar decorated with flowers, and the ceremony is celebrated by everyone except the two people in it. She has decided that her husband will get nothing from her that he does not take, and Gavin, who has married her for reasons that have nothing to do with affection, is not prepared to be refused anything.
The bells are ringing for Elizabeth in the autumn of 1558, and the country she inherits is bankrupt and divided. Her adviser tells her she can only hold it by marrying a strong prince, but the man she wants is Robert Dudley, who is already married, and Amy, his wife, has no intention of setting him free. Around the queen, a court of ambitious men watches to see which way her favour will fall.
Ada's clubfoot has finally been operated on, and the operation settles one question for her: she is not what her mother told her she was, damaged and deranged as well as crippled. It leaves another question open, because if she is not her mother's daughter any more, what is she instead? The war is still going on all around her.
Ada has never been allowed outside: her mother is ashamed of her club foot and keeps her shut in a London flat while she cares for her younger brother Jamie. When the city's children are evacuated in September 1939, Ada slips away with Jamie and is billeted in the countryside with Susan Smith, a woman who did not ask for either of them.
When Yance Sackett's sister-in-law is taken from her home, the family has one response. Yance and his brother Kin leave their Carolina settlement and ride north into country they do not know, following the men who took her and expecting to be welcome nowhere along the way. They are travelling towards a frontier where kidnapping, the slave trade and the claims of the nations whose land they cross all have to be answered.
Madeleine McCarthy is eight years old when her father's posting takes the family to a quiet air force station near the Canadian border in the early 1960s. The base is friendly and orderly, the Cold War is being watched from the other side of the fence, and then a child goes missing from the neighbourhood and the local investigation reaches into her own household.
Holling Hoodhood is the only Presbyterian in his seventh-grade class, which means that every Wednesday afternoon, while his classmates go off to religious instruction elsewhere, he stays behind with Mrs Baker, a teacher he is convinced dislikes him. Over the school year of 1967 and 1968 the two of them read Shakespeare together, while the war in Vietnam and Holling's father's expectations close in on him.
Jemmy is an orphan kept in a palace for one purpose: whenever Prince Horace misbehaves, Jemmy is punished in his place. He has learned to read, write and do mathematics while living in the castle, he is beaten several times a day, and he would rather be back out on the streets that he came from.
In the 1960s, in the Australian country town of Deane, Odette Brown cares for her granddaughter Sissy, who was conceived after Odette's daughter Lily was raped by a local white pastoralist. Lily has fled Deane for the city, and Odette has to keep Sissy out of the hands of the new local policeman. Deane is a small town, and the people in it have known Odette her whole life.
Elizabeth Woodville is a young widow with two sons when she puts herself in the path of King Edward IV to ask for her late husband's estate back. The two of them marry in secret, and the match makes enemies of the men who had believed they controlled the king, since the family she brings with her becomes a political problem for the crown.
Journalist John Easley goes north to Alaska to investigate the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands, a story the American government has censored, leaving his wife Helen behind. His plane is shot down over Attu and he survives only to face the wind, the cold and starvation while evading the Japanese, as Helen at home has to work out who she is without him.
The chase of the Franklin has taken the Surprise across the Pacific to the coast of Peru, where an undercover mission that has waited for years is finally within reach. Stephen Maturin has to cross the Andes to rejoin his ship, while Jack Aubrey, out on the ocean, finds the weather and the sea itself turning against him.
Uther, High King of Britain, is dead, and his only heir is an infant. The king's illegitimate nephew Arthur takes charge of the country as its protector, holding together kingdoms that are ready to fall apart while enemies arrive from across the sea and the loyalties of the men who served the old king come into question.
In 1687 sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler leaves Barbados after her grandfather dies and goes to live with her aunt's family in the Puritan community of Wethersfield, Connecticut. She finds the colony cold and narrow, and the only place she feels free is the meadow where she talks to an old Quaker woman the neighbours call a witch.
Frances McGrath is twenty and training as a nurse in Southern California when she is told that women can be heroes, and she joins the Army Nurse Corps to serve in Vietnam. Her family tells her that women do not go to war, and the country she comes home to tells her the same thing again, which leaves her with the years she lived through and nobody willing to hear about them.
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