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 4 of the shelf.
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In the 1660s Griet goes into service in Johannes Vermeer's house in Delft, after an accident costs her father his sight and the family its income. She is careful and quiet and watches how the painter works, and in time she is allowed to help him in the studio and then to sit for him. The rest of the household notices, and the debts, the order of the house and the difference in station between them all come into it.
Jean Louise Finch, twenty-six and living in New York, returns to her home town of Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her father Atticus and finds the place changed less than she has. What she discovers about the people she grew up with forces her to separate the father she loves from the man he actually is.
King David of Israel is old, close to death and in no mood to make his memoirs tidy. He remembers the sheep, the prophet Samuel, the giant Goliath, Saul and Jonathan, Bathsheba and the arrangements around her, and the children whose quarrels he could never settle, and he argues with God about all of it.
Casiopea Tun is eighteen, lives as an unwanted poor relation in her wealthy grandfather's house in the Yucatán and dreams of escape. In a forbidden chest in his bedroom she finds the bones of the Mayan death god Hun-Kamé, and when a shard of bone pierces her thumb he returns to a semblance of life and binds himself to her.
Scarlett O'Hara is the eldest daughter of a well-off plantation family in Clayton County, Georgia, and the novel opens on her life of parties and suitors before the American Civil War. It follows her through the war and the Reconstruction that follows, including the fall of Atlanta and the march through Georgia, as she works to keep hold of the family land and to rebuild the position she was born into.
William Buelow Gould is a convict in Van Diemen's Land, and his life is told here as a fictionalised account of the real convict artist of that name. The novel is built around twelve fish, each of which gives a chapter its heading: the pot-bellied seahorse, the kelpy, the porcupine fish, the stargazer, the leatherjacket, the serpent eel, the sawtooth shark, the striped cowfish, the crested weedfish, the freshwater crayfish, the silver dory and the weedy seadragon.
Cassie Witting thinks there could be nothing better than a prairie wedding, and one is coming: two lovebirds brought together, aunts arriving from as far away as Maine, a long white dress with a veil, zinnias and satin ribbons, dancing under a clear blue sky. As the family gathers, Cassie finds that life brings the turning of seasons, joy and sorrow, and a dance only her grandfather does.
Richard Hannay is asked to look into rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world, and the enquiry takes him across wartime Europe towards Constantinople. What he finds there is a German plan to use religion as a weapon in the war. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War.
Catherine Tremyne was stolen from her father's Cornish estate as an infant and raised by Gypsies, and she has grown into a beautiful young woman without knowing where she came from. Her life is turned upside down when she is carried off to Paris by Jason Savage, which begins a long passage through danger and captivity at the hands of a man she cannot escape.
Ugwu is a village boy who becomes houseboy to Odenigbo, a mathematics professor with revolutionary opinions in a Nigerian university town, and Olanna is the wealthy, educated woman the professor loves. The novel follows the three of them, and Olanna's twin sister, through the ethnic and political tensions of the 1960s and into the Nigerian Civil War, when households that had looked settled are pulled apart and the people in them have to keep moving.
In Stratford in the 1580s a young Latin tutor meets a woman called Agnes, known for her herbs, her falconry and her habit of knowing things before other people do. They marry, she moves in with his family while he goes to London to work in the theatre, and between them they raise three children largely apart. Eleven years later their son Hamnet falls ill, and the novel stays with the household and with Agnes through the days around his death and what follows it.
Barnabus Pike is no gunfighter and not much of a street fighter, and Eddie Holt is a black boxer in a white man's world, and both of them have taken their share of hard knocks. They mean to survive a brutal winter in a remote Montana line shack and then settle down, until they meet an Irish immigrant and his sister, who have been burned off their land.
Rue has thought Hawke Masters the most insufferable man she has ever met from the moment she saw him: proud, arrogant and overbearing, and insultingly clear that although her grandfather's shotgun forced him to marry her, nothing would make him share a bed with a scrawny backwoods girl like her. Then he takes her home to his ranch to look after his orphaned niece and nephew.
Adelaide Proctor longs for a storybook hero of her own, and when a husband-hunting episode leaves her humiliated she vows to abandon her romantic notions. She interviews for a governess position on a remote Texas sheep ranch, where Gideon Wescott is raising a daughter who has not spoken since her mother died. When the child's uncle comes to claim her and her inheritance, the two of them have to work together.
Charles Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames: an assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior, and a voyage up a river into the Congo Free State in search of a man. The man he is sent to find, an ivory trader named Kurtz, has gone native, and the pursuit becomes the whole of the book.
In Wessex in 873, Kristen Haardrad is nineteen and defiant, and she has been made a prisoner by Royce, Thane of Wyndhurst. He intends to keep her as a slave, and she has no intention of being one, and the two of them recognise in each other a pride and a strength neither had expected. He also carries a hatred for a crime committed by her people, and it was not her crime.
A woman travels to India to find out about Olivia, the first wife of her grandfather, and she reads Olivia's letters as she goes. Through them, and through her own experience of the country, she learns what happened to Olivia in the 1920s, when a bored English colonial wife was drawn into the orbit of a minor Indian prince.
Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris grew up in the same house as stepbrother and stepsister, and their marriage was the subject of gossip before it happened. In April 1865 they accepted an invitation to sit in the President's box at Ford's Theatre, and the night of the assassination became the event that defined the rest of their lives.
Giordano Bruno has left the monastery and the Inquisition behind and reached Elizabethan England, where his ideas about astronomy and other worlds attract the attention of the queen's spymaster. Sent to Oxford to look into a matter for Francis Walsingham, he finds the university full of old arguments, a killer at work among the fellows, and the deaths treated as accidents.
In 1869 three people are killed in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, and a young man called Roderick Macrae is arrested for the murders. The memoir he writes in prison makes it clear that he did it, and the courts then have to decide why: what kind of man kills his neighbours, and whether the law should hold him responsible.
Effia's marriage takes her into the household of the British governor at Cape Coast Castle, while Esi, her half-sister, is imprisoned in the dungeons of the same building, waiting to be shipped across the Atlantic. Neither sister knows the other exists. Each following chapter belongs to a later descendant of one of the two women, so the novel runs from the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century through the slave trade, plantations in the American South, the mines and jazz clubs of the twentieth century, and towards the present, one generation at a time.
Haiwen is buying bananas in a supermarket in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, the girl he knew in Shanghai, for the first time in sixty years. To him it feels like a second chance; to her it is an interruption of a life she has survived by refusing to look back.
Hornblower's promotion to post-captain brings him the Atropos, a sloop of twenty-two guns and barely enough work to justify a captain at all. Before he can sail, he is handed one of the strangest assignments in the Royal Navy, which is arranging the funeral of Lord Nelson, whose death at Trafalgar has left the country in mourning. Then come the pearl divers, the salvage master with a temper, and a wreck full of British army pay.
In the spring of 1803, with the Peace of Amiens collapsing, Horatio Hornblower is newly promoted to commander and given a small sloop along with a task that suits it: to watch the French fleet at Brest and report what Napoleon is preparing. He has just married a woman he does not love, and the mission becomes complicated almost at once, because the war restarts while he is close inshore and nobody has thought to tell him.
They came west by river and by wagon train, across the distances of the Great Plains and through the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada, and the novel follows a set of them: men like Linus Rawlings and women like Lilith Prescott, who fled her family and fell for a gambling man.
Edie was a ruined American heiress until the devil-may-care Duke of Margrave agreed to her proposal of a marriage of convenience. Five years later she is delighted with the arrangement, particularly because her husband is living on another continent. Then a brush with death brings him home, and he proposes a new bargain: ten days to win a willing kiss from his wife.
The Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, live in a London of books, music and conversation, while the Wilcox family lives in a London of business and property. Between them stands Howards End, the Hertfordshire house where the two families and the people they have damaged have to work out what they owe one another.
Lucas loves football more than anything except Benny, his father's friend, who is a firefighter and a former football player. When his parents decide the sport is too dangerous and tell him to stop, Lucas goes to the one person who will understand, and he happens to be in New York on a Tuesday morning in September 2001.
In July 1916, Chet Roscow is fascinated by the newspaper reports of a great white shark attacking people along the New Jersey shore, not far from the town where he is living. He reads the accounts the way a boy reads a ghost story, until the day he goes swimming in Matawan Creek himself.
Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was born in 10 BC, and the stammer and limp that came with him led his own family to treat him as a fool. He lived through the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and the emperor Caligula, mostly by being underestimated, and in AD 41 the guard made him emperor. The novel is written as his own autobiography, covering the murders, marriages and poisonings of the imperial household from close enough to be in danger himself.
V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State took the Booker Prize for 1971. Three stories sit inside a frame that opens on a ferry to Egypt and closes many years later, and the parts are arranged like movements in a piece of music, each one edging towards the same unstated subject: what freedom costs the people who have it.
Rachel Fleischer has good reasons not to be at her father's deathbed, and she nearly misses the funeral entirely. When a stranger there gives her an odd gift and an apology, she is drawn into the story of her father's war as a Jewish sergeant in charge of a platoon of Black soldiers, and the scandal that shaped his life.
Mary Jemison is twelve and takes her family's farm in eastern Pennsylvania for granted until a war party takes the household captive in 1758. She is separated from her parents and travels to a Seneca village, where she has to learn the language, the work and the customs of people she was brought up to fear. She tries several times to run away.
Miranda leaves a French convent for the New World and an arranged marriage to a prosperous Texas rancher. On the journey she meets Derek Bragg, the fiancé's friend, a Texas Ranger whose blunt manner and frank comments about her beauty infuriate the shy young woman, and the two of them cross the wilderness together.
In February 1975, Hà Kim and her family celebrate the new year in South Vietnam while the war continues. As the fall of Saigon approaches, she leaves school early, the search for her missing soldier father goes on, and the family prepares to evacuate. On 30 April they flee on a navy ship, and the novel follows the first year of their life in the United States.
A young girl named Karana is stranded alone for years on an island off the California coast after being left behind by her family and her village. She learns to do the work that only the men of her tribe did before, and she has to deal with the hunters who visit the island as well as her own loneliness.
On a June evening in 1925, at their home on the Sussex Downs, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes take a telephone call about an old friend's aunt, who has not returned from a supervised outing from Bedlam. Russell has had a difficult few weeks, and the search for the missing woman takes her from the asylum to Venice.
Marguerite is the heir to a fortune until she is orphaned and her guardian takes charge of both her money and her life, spending the inheritance and taking her with him on an expedition to New France. On the voyage she and the guardian's servant fall in love, and when the affair is discovered the two of them are punished and left on a small island with no prospect of rescue.
Gareth St. Clair has been left an old family diary by a father who detests him and who is determined to ruin what should have been his inheritance. The diary may hold the secret of his past, but it is written in a language he cannot read, and the woman he asks to translate it is Hyacinth Bridgerton.
Wilfrid of Ivanhoe comes home from the Third Crusade in disguise, disinherited by his father for following King Richard instead of marrying as he was told, and finds England split between the Normans who hold it and the Saxons who do not. He rides in a tournament at Ashby, becomes caught up in the fate of a Jewish moneylender and his daughter, and ends up among the outlaws and loyalists trying to raise the king's ransom. The novel runs on disguise, trial by combat and the slow return of Richard.
Jim overhears that he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, and he runs while he works out what to do next. At the same time Huck Finn has faked his own death, and the two of them set off down the river together, with Jim's own account of the journey replacing the one that readers know.
Jaffy Brown is running through the back streets of east London when he comes face to face with a tiger that has escaped from a menagerie. Charles Jamrach takes him out of its jaws and gives him a job. Some years later Jaffy, now sixteen, is sent to the other side of the world on a whaling ship to catch something for the collection.
It is 1926 and the city is Harlem, where a man in his fifties has killed the girl he was in love with and his wife has taken a knife to the body at the funeral. The story of all three of them, and of what brought each of them to that room, reaches back into the American South of the previous century.
Stosh is surprised when Bobby Fuller, the boy who has always been his enemy, asks him for a favour: to take him back in time to meet Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion who lost his medals after a scandal and never recovered his fame. The two of them travel into the past on a quest to save Thorpe's reputation.
Johnny Tremain is a fourteen-year-old apprentice silversmith in Boston in 1775, badly burned when a crucible he has been told to hold breaks. With his hand ruined he has to find another trade, and the work he takes up brings him into the town's political circles just as the quarrel with Britain becomes the Revolutionary War.
Jonah is a hunchback larrikin who lives in a Sydney slum and leads the local street gang, which is known as the Push. He is feared and respected in the neighbourhood, and his life changes when he becomes the father of a son, after which he sets out to break away from the world he has grown up in.
Jubal Sackett's urge to explore drove him westward, and when a Natchez priest asks him to undertake a nearly impossible quest he ventures into the endless grassy plains that the Indians call the Far Seeing Lands. He is looking for a Natchez exploration party and for its leader. That leader, Itchakomi, is the woman who will rule her people when their aging chief dies.
Hours after returning from solving the riddle of The Moor, Holmes and Russell are visited by a bloodied stranger who pleads for their help. Recovered, he tells them the story of Marsh Hughenfort, younger brother of the Duke of Beauville, who returned to England on his brother's death and wants the truth about the death of the hall's expected heir, Gabriel Hughenfort, which scandalised the family during the First World War.
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