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 2 of the shelf.
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Lyman Ward is a retired historian who uses a wheelchair and has lost touch with his son, and he decides to spend what time he has writing the story of his grandparents. Their letters describe a life spent on the frontier of the American west, and the work of reconstructing it makes him examine his own marriage at the same time.
Helen Irvine is eighteen and has just married Lord Giles Cardross, a man some years older than she is. She is also convinced that he married her out of duty rather than affection, and her attempts to manage the situation without asking him anything produce a series of disasters for both of them, made worse by a brother whose gambling keeps emptying her purse.
This is a retelling of the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and of the legend that has grown around Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. The story is told through the voices of the people who were there, in a deliberately Elizabethan style, and the character the book is named after is only one figure among many.
Atretes is a German warrior who won his freedom in the arena as a gladiator, and he means to go home to the forests he was taken from as a child. He takes with him a young Christian woman named Rizpah and her son, and the journey north runs through a Roman Empire that is not finished with any of them.
In 1886 Agnes Foster is told to leave the orphanage in New York where she grew up and make her own way in the world. She takes a teaching post in Persimmon Hollow, a town in frontier Florida that she has never seen and knows only from a newspaper advertisement, and arrives with her Catholic faith and not much else.
James Goodenough brings his family to Ohio in 1838 to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp, having moved there from Connecticut, where the family had originally settled after leaving England. Swamp fever picks off their children one by one while they wrestle with survival. Fifteen years later the story continues with their youngest son Robert, who has been running west and has taken refuge among the redwoods of California.
On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misreads a scene between her older sister Cecilia and the housekeeper's son, Robbie, and tells a story about it that changes all three of their lives. The novel follows the consequences through the Second World War, through Briony's adulthood, and through her life as a writer and the way the book she is writing relates to what happened. McEwan divides it into three periods: England in 1935, wartime England and France, and the present day.
Henry James spends the 1880s and 1890s moving between London, Venice and Paris, writing novels, cultivating friendships and trying to succeed in the theatre. The novel follows his friendship with the artist George Du Maurier, his attachment to the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, his disaster as a playwright, and the long years afterwards. It is as much about the cost of a vocation as about the famous man himself.
It is the 1830s, and the British Empire runs on silver bars enchanted by translation, which is why it needs people who speak languages the empire does not. Robin Swift is taken from Canton to England as a child after his family dies of cholera, raised by the man who needs his Chinese, and trained for Oxford's Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. The tower is comfortable and the work absorbing, and the enchantments that make the empire rich are written in the difference between languages and paid for by the colonies they are taken from. Robin is caught between Babel and a society working against imperial expansion, while the country moves towards a war with China over silver and opium.
Summer, 1927. Bonnelyn Parker sings in church, works hard and plans to lift her family out of poverty, and when the money runs out she takes a night job at Dallas's newest speakeasy without telling anyone. The secret life brings her into the orbit of a convicted felon named Clyde Barrow, while her family believes she is simply working late.
Memphis, 1939: twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger brothers and sisters live aboard their family's shantyboat on the Mississippi until their mother is taken to hospital one stormy night and strangers arrive. The children are taken to a Tennessee orphanage, and the novel also follows a present-day family changed by the same injustice.
A Regency mystery in which a young woman becomes involved in an investigation, in the setting of a country England where the conventions of the period limit what a woman can ask and where she can go. It sits between the historical romance, the woman-detective story and the Regency novel rather than being a straightforward crime novel.
Sethe escaped slavery at a cost that included a husband and a child, and now lives on the edge of a small Ohio town in the years after the Civil War. Her household is her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, her daughter Denver, and a house with room for one more. The young woman who arrives and calls herself Beloved pulls the family's buried history back into the open.
Judah Ben-Hur is a prince of Jerusalem whose life is overturned when someone he had trusted accuses him, and he is enslaved and sent to the galleys. From there he works his way back, through a sea battle and a chariot race, towards his family and the man who had ruined him.
The Zane family's settlement at Wheeling, on the Virginia frontier, is the furthest American outpost in that country, and in 1782 it comes under attack by Native American and Loyalist forces. The novel follows the family through the years of the Revolution, and the youngest daughter, Betty, whose own part in the defence is remembered in the family's history.
Lina Vilkas is fifteen and wants to be an artist, living in Kaunas in Lithuania with her parents and her younger brother. On the night of 14 June 1941 the Soviet secret police break into the family's home, and Lina, her mother and her brother are deported, with thousands of others, by train and then on foot towards labour camps in Siberia. The novel follows the three of them and the people they are transported with, and it is told in Lina's voice.
Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, does not remember a time when she was the favourite at court. When her father dies she is overshadowed by her brother, the boy king, and then imprisoned during the reign of her older half-sister Mary. Much of her young adulthood is spent as the forgotten daughter of the king and his hated second wife.
Eskibahçe is a village in south-western Anatolia where Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims have lived beside each other for centuries, speaking a mixture of both languages and sharing the same water, weddings and grief. Two children growing up there, Philothei and Ibrahim, fall in love, and the century that follows does not allow them to keep it.
Historians at Oxford in the middle of the twenty-first century do their field work by travelling into the past to observe it, using a portal that stays behind in their own time, and each of them can only return when somebody in the future opens it again. Several of them are sent into England during the Second World War.
Born illegitimate, Jane Howard inherits nothing but her mother's red hair and the spirit of the Blake family. When Anne Blake dies, it is Jane who sets out to restore the debt-ridden house in London, and she does it with the profits of smuggling along the Kent coast. Then Charles Blake returns, fleeing the French Revolution, to claim his inheritance.
William Laurence wakes on a shore in Japan with no memory of the years he has spent as an aviator, or of the dragon he serves. He is taken for a foreigner who has broken the rules about where Europeans may go, and the local magistrate keeps him in comfortable confinement at Nagasaki. Temeraire, meanwhile, is repairing the transport that has run aground on a reef, and has no idea where his captain is.
A narrator named Bram Presser tries to find out what happened to his grandparents during the war, working from the small hoard of writing and correspondence they left behind. Jakub Rand and Dasa Roubickova were deported from Poland to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz, and the closer he gets to the record the more the family stories and the documents refuse to agree.
In 1855 Jane Peck sails from Philadelphia to Shoalwater Bay in Washington Territory to join William Baldt, the man who proposed to her. Her passage is on a ship called the Lady Luck and she is accompanied only by her Irish maid Mary, and the voyage costs her more than she expected. Nothing at Miss Hepplewhite's finishing school prepared her for the frontier.
Sara Smolinsky is ten years old and lives with her parents and three older sisters in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the rent is almost always overdue. Her father studies the Torah and will not take a job to feed them, and her mother takes in boarders to keep the family in the room. Sara decides early that she will not live the way her sisters do.
Thomas Cromwell is now the king's chief minister, and Henry VIII has tired of Anne Boleyn. The novel covers the months in which the second marriage is taken apart: the questions asked, the evidence gathered and the men Cromwell uses to gather it, while the court watches to see who rises next. It is the second of three novels following Cromwell, and it keeps to his view of the work in front of him and the household he comes home to.
Britons is a work of history by Linda Colley about how a British national identity was made in the century after the union of England, Wales and Scotland in 1707. It was published in 1992, and it argues that war and empire did as much as anything else to give the peoples of the British Isles a sense of belonging together.
Beth is married to Frank, a farmer, and the two of them have built a life on the understanding that the past stays where it is. Then Frank's brother shoots a dog that has been worrying the sheep, and the dog turns out to belong to Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager, who has come back to the village with his young son.
In the early 1950s there is no work for Eilis Lacey in her Irish town, and a visiting priest arranges a job and lodgings for her in New York. She sails alone, works the floor of a department store, takes night classes in bookkeeping and lives in a boarding house run by a woman who misses nothing. Then she meets Tony Fiorello at a dance.
It is 1936 in Flint, Michigan, and Bud is ten years old, motherless and on the run. He has a suitcase with his own important things in it, a set of rules he has written for himself, and a belief about who his father might be. He has a plan of his own.
Agnes Magnusdottir is a servant in northern Iceland who has been condemned to death for the murder of two men, one of them her employer. While she waits for the sentence to be carried out she is sent to live with a farm family who do not want her, and the only person willing to listen to her account of what happened is a young priest.
Will Andrews leaves Harvard in the 1870s, persuaded by the writing of Emerson that a man should find an original relation to nature, and travels west. In the Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing he falls in with a hunter who tells him about a vast herd hidden away in the Colorado mountains, and puts up the money to join an expedition that goes after it.
In fourteenth-century Aquitaine, under King Edward and his son the Black Prince, the English domains expand and the stronghold of De la Noye is taken from the French. Among those seized by the conquering Sir Hyatt is Lady Aurelie, the young widow of Giles de Pourvre. Recognising her courage and discretion, Hyatt marries her in an attempt to draw the English and French of the province together.
Jack's aunt must sell the family house and it still is not enough to clear her debts. Twelve-year-old Jack sails for California to find gold, taking the family butler with him, and the two of them discover that a gold rush is far more crowded, far more expensive and a great deal less glamorous than they had imagined it.
The Ingalls family is in debt, the years at Plum Creek have gone badly and Mary has been left blind by illness. Pa goes west to work as a bookkeeper in a railroad camp in the Dakota Territory and sends for his wife and four daughters. They become the first settlers in the new town of De Smet, and the railroad follows them.
Caddie Woodlawn is eleven and growing up in Wisconsin in the 1860s, running wild with her brothers while her mother wants her to become a lady. The family has settled near a Native American community, and the novel follows Caddie's adventures, the practical work of a frontier farm and the trouble her curiosity creates.
Roxanne Sherwood flees a typhus epidemic in Boston and runs into a band of Indians, who take her captive. A white stranger claims her as his wife to protect her, and the band rules that she must live with him as a married couple, which leaves her torn between duty and desire and between the society she came from and the frontier that now holds her.
Marguerite Ledoux is thirteen and alone in the world when she is taken on as an indentured servant by a family settling on the Maine coast in 1743. The family regards her as very little better than the people they are afraid of, and the first winter is not kind. She earns her place slowly, by knowing what to do when nobody else does.
Christina Wakefield is seventeen when the promise of adventure takes her to the Arabian desert, and she is captured soon after arriving there. The man holding her is a sheikh known as Abu, and she has met him before under another name in England, which complicates a situation in which she has no power at all and no way of getting home.
Yossarian is an American bombardier stationed on a Mediterranean island in the closing months of the Second World War, and he has decided he does not want to fly any more missions. The rule that governs his problem is the one that gives the novel its title: a man who asks to be grounded for insanity is demonstrating that he is sane, because caring about his own survival proves it. His commanding officers keep raising the number of missions that count as a tour of duty. The novel moves backwards and forwards through the squadron's history rather than in order.
Ben Cowan and Bijah Catlow have been bound as friends since childhood, but they grew into different men: Catlow became a top cowhand with a wild streak, and one disastrous confrontation with a band of greedy ranchers turned him into an outlaw. That left it to Cowan, now a United States marshal, to bring him in alive, if Catlow will let him.
Tayo comes home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation after surviving the Pacific war and a Japanese prison camp and finds that sleep, drink and his own family cannot hold him together. His cousin Rocky died on the Bataan Death March, the reservation is caught in a drought, and the medicine men Tayo visits tell him his cure lies in stories older than the war.
Hatshepsut is the daughter of a pharaoh, and she grows up expecting to rule Egypt in her own right, which no woman has done. The novel follows her from a childhood spent in temples and on the river to her marriage to her half-brother, the years in which she governs, and the opposition of priests and courtiers who cannot accept a woman on the throne.
A baby is born to a humble Jewish family in first-century Israel with a great destiny ahead of him, and the novel follows him as a boy of seven or eight beginning to understand his own powers and the whispered mysteries surrounding his birth. The tyrannical rule of King Herod has driven the family out of the Holy Land to the relative safety of Alexandria, and the story begins with their return.
Leningrad, winter 1942. Lev, a seventeen-year-old arrested for taking a parachute from a German body, and Kolya, a cheerful deserter, are offered a way to avoid execution: find a dozen eggs for a Soviet colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their search takes them out of the starving city, through the wreckage of the front and towards the German lines.
From an abusive and alcoholic father, to townspeople who treat him as though he were cut from the same cloth, to his own insecurities, nothing Alec does is ever good enough. He cannot see how he could let himself love the boss's daughter, or why she would have declared her love for him. Then Clara's life is threatened by cattle rustlers and he has to answer for both.
In 1943 a British aircraft comes down in occupied France, and the woman who survives is taken prisoner by the Germans. The account of how she came to be there, and of the pilot who was flying her, is written by a captive who tells the story she has to tell in order to stay alive.
Ned Begay is sent to a boarding school where he is taught that his own language is useless, and punished for using it. Then the Marine Corps comes looking for Navajo men, and the language he was told to forget becomes the basis of a code the American military uses through the islands of the Pacific.
Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier who walks away from an army hospital as the American Civil War closes and sets out for Cold Mountain in North Carolina, where Ada, the woman he barely knew before he left, is trying to keep her father's farm from slipping away. Ada was raised to be ornamental and has no idea how to work land, until a young drifter called Ruby arrives and teaches her. The novel moves between his walk home and her farm, through a South being remade behind 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