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 5 of the shelf.
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Two boys are born on the same day in 1906 on opposite sides of the world: William Lowell Kane, the son of a Boston banking family, and Abel Rosnovski, born in a Polish forest and raised in poverty. Neither knows the other exists, and the novel follows the rivalry that grows between them over the next fifty years.
Katherine de Roet is the daughter of a minor knight from Flanders with no prospects of her own apart from a sister who serves the queen and is to marry Geoffrey Chaucer. Through that connection she marries Sir Hugh Swynford, and through her husband's service she meets John of Gaunt, the duke whose notice changes the whole course of her life.
David Balfour, seventeen and newly orphaned, is cheated of his inheritance by an uncle and sold to a ship's captain to be carried to America. He survives a wreck and a stay on a small island, joins the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart, and is hunted across the Highlands for a murder he did not commit.
Kimball O'Hara is an orphaned boy growing up on the streets of Lahore in British India, able to pass between communities and languages. He attaches himself to a Tibetan lama who is looking for a holy river, and then to the British secret service, and the novel follows both apprenticeships at once.
In a Japanese prison camp in Singapore during the Second World War, an American corporal called King has built a position for himself by trading with the guards and the other prisoners. Peter Marlowe, a captured RAF officer, is drawn into his operation, and the novel follows what survival costs in a place with no rules.
Kate Lundy owns the Tumbling B and Conn Dury is her foreman, and both of them told Tom the rules: men from the cattle drives are not allowed on the north side of town. The townspeople took the cowboys' money, but they thought them too coarse to be near their homes.
Kirsten has come from Sweden with her family to a prairie community in America, and the new school is an ordeal: she cannot follow the lessons and her teacher, Miss Winston, is strict and unsympathetic. Her one escape is a secret friendship with Singing Bird, an Indian girl, but when her friend suggests running away Kirsten has to decide where she belongs.
After her husband Afton, Lord of Langley, dies of plague, the Englishwoman Igrainia finds herself a captive in her own castle, held by the Scottish warrior Eric Graham, whose wife and son died as prisoners of Lord Langley. When the king refuses a trade, Graham forces Igrainia to marry him, though she would rather rot in her own dungeons than accept a kindness from her captor.
Randall is an orphan, the son of a Breton soldier and a Saxon mother, and he works as a dog-boy at Arundel Castle. A knight called Sir Everard d'Aguillon takes him home, and he is brought up alongside Sir Everard's grandson, Bevis. The novel follows the two of them as they grow up in England thirty to forty years after the Norman conquest.
Annis Wychwood is twenty-nine, wealthy, unmarried and long past the age when society expects her to marry. When she takes up the cause of Lucilla Carleton, a runaway heiress, she cannot avoid the girl's guardian, Oliver Carleton, a man with a reputation for rudeness, and the two of them meet far more often than either would choose.
In 1940, with France defeated and an invasion of Britain expected, a British agent brings back intelligence showing that Hitler intends to support the invasion with occult means. The people who can answer that are the country's witches, and the officer who has to organise them is a practising occultist as well as an MI6 man.
The Talamasca, the order that documents paranormal activity, is hunting for the newly born Lasher. Mayfair women are dying of haemorrhages, an unusual genetic anomaly has turned up in Rowan and Michael, and Lasher, who was born from Rowan, belongs to another species altogether and is now in a physical body.
At a party in Portofino in 1953, the playwright Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo meet a young Swedish woman who will not say much about herself. The novel follows the three of them across the next decade, through the theatre, the film business and the friendships that held Williams's work together, and the success that came to one of them rather than the other.
Jean Valjean is released from the galleys after nineteen years and finds that no one will take him in, until a bishop gives him a bed and, in doing so, alters the direction of his life. The novel follows him from 1815 to the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, along with the people whose paths cross his: a dying seamstress, her daughter Cosette, a police inspector who will not allow a former convict to become an honest man, and the students who build the barricades.
The Logans are farming in Mississippi in 1935, and the Depression has made a hard life harder for everyone in their community. Cassie Logan watches the adults around her work out how to keep the land, the family and their standing with their neighbours while the law, the county's white residents and the falling price of cotton make all three uncertain.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer in eighteenth-century Gottingen and an aphorist and satirist on the side. This novel tells the story of his real relationship with Maria Stechard, the flower seller he met near his laboratory and called the model of beauty and sweetness, and of the household the two of them made together.
A newly arrived lieutenant joins HMS Renown and finds that her captain's suspicions of his officers have grown into something close to madness. The story is told by William Bush, one of those officers, which leaves the reader to work out for themselves what happened in the hold on the night the captain fell.
Michael K is a poor man with a cleft lip who has spent his childhood in institutions and works as a gardener in Cape Town. When civil war and martial law close over the country and his mother falls ill, he builds a cart to carry her back to the rural birthplace she remembers, Prince Albert.
Ursula Todd is born on a snowbound night in 1910, dies before she can take a breath, and is born again a few pages later. As her lives accumulate she moves through the decades around two world wars, and each version of her history gives her another chance to act on what the previous one taught her.
In February 1862, Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery. The novel follows Willie into the bardo, a space between death and rebirth peopled by ghosts who will not accept that they have died, and follows the grieving president who returns at night to hold his son's body.
On a small island in the Scilly Isles in 1915, a boy who has slipped away from school to go fishing hears a sound coming from an island nobody lives on. What he finds there is a girl who cannot or will not say who she is, and the question of where she came from slowly divides the people of his community.
Jack Crabb is 111 years old and has two fathers, one white and one a Cheyenne chief who named him Little Big Man. He has been a Cheyenne, a white man, a buffalo hunter, a shopkeeper's assistant and a survivor of the fight at the Little Bighorn. He tells the whole story to a credulous young man who has come to write it down.
Laura Ingalls lives with her Ma and Pa, her older sister Mary and the baby Carrie in an isolated log cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, where the nearest neighbour is miles away and the family lives off what it can grow, hunt and preserve. The book follows a year of that life, from the work of autumn through a winter spent almost entirely in the cabin.
The Ingalls family leave their house in the Wisconsin woods and travel west by covered wagon into Kansas Territory, where Pa builds a one-room log house on land the Osage have been moved from. The family plants and hunts, meets a neighbour living alone on the prairie, and then learns they are living where they should not be.
Cedric Errol is a small American boy who knows nothing about his father's English family until he is told that he is to be an earl. He goes to England to live with a grandfather who dislikes everything about him, and the two of them have to get used to each other. The boy does not hold any of it against him.
Caroline Quiner is the girl who will one day be Laura Ingalls Wilder's mother, and she is watching the town of Brookfield in Wisconsin grow up around her as new buildings appear overnight and more families arrive. She marches in her first Independence Day parade, a circus comes to town, and then her family has the chance to move to another farm.
The long winter is over and the town of De Smet comes back to life around the Ingalls family. Laura is fifteen, takes her first paid work away from home, goes back to school, and sets out to earn a teaching certificate so that her sister Mary can stay at a college for the blind.
The four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, grow up during the American Civil War, and the novel follows them from childhood towards adulthood through their work, their friendships and their losses. It is loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, and it was published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869, before being issued as a single novel in 1880.
Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are former Texas Rangers living in a small border town with little to occupy them, until Call decides to drive a herd of cattle north to Montana. The novel follows the drive and the people attached to it: the cowboys who sign on, a woman they rescue along the way, a young man with something to prove, and others who have no intention of leaving Texas. It is set in the late nineteenth century and built out of the ordinary work of the frontier rather than its legends.
John Ridd is the son of a respectable farming family on Exmoor, and his father was murdered by the Doones, a clan of outlaws who were once noble and now rule a valley of their own. John grows up intending to be a farmer rather than a revenger, and then he meets Lorna Doone by accident and falls in love with her, which puts him on the wrong side of the clan that killed his father.
Marty Claridge's husband is killed in a horse accident, and she marries Clark Davis, a man who needs a mother for his daughter Missie. The arrangement is practical for both of them, and over the months that follow Marty becomes attached to the child and to her husband. When the wagon train returns in the spring, she has to decide whether to go home or stay.
Adrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, has been warned that Lady Clarissa Crambray is dangerous: she steps on toes and sets things alight, and she has earned a nickname for the mayhem she causes. He is a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and considers one woman and her unfortunate past to be a challenge he can handle. Clarissa, meanwhile, wants a husband, though possibly not as much as her mother wants one for her.
Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet leave Pemberley to travel through England, visiting friends and relations, and this is the story of the first part of their marriage. The weddings are over and the story that Pride and Prejudice left unfinished has to be arranged: a great estate to run, a household to establish, and a family that includes the relations Elizabeth's husband has spent years avoiding.
Lucinda Vane is born into a wealthy Melbourne family, and she spurns the love of a distinguished family friend to marry the dashing aide-de-camp to the Governor, Hugo Brayford. Her life of ease ends when Hugo takes her to England just before the First World War. The novel spans the early 1900s to the Second World War and moves between Melbourne and England.
The Weber family lives in a crowded house in Mannheim in 1777, where the father copies music and the four daughters sing and play well enough to be noticed. One of them, Aloysia, takes the attention of a young composer passing through, and the novel follows the sisters over the years in which he marries one of them.
Jack Aubrey, a Royal Navy lieutenant newly promoted to master and commander, meets the physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin at a concert in Port Mahon and takes him aboard as surgeon of the sloop Sophie. The two of them sail the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing prizes under a first lieutenant, James Dillon, whose Irish politics complicate the ship. Their orders run from escort work to a fight against a far larger opponent.
Maurice Hall is a schoolboy when a teacher explains the facts of life to him, and the explanation leaves him quite unprepared for what he feels for other men. The novel follows him through Cambridge, a failed affair and a period spent trying to cure himself, until a relationship with a gamekeeper's son gives him a way to live.
Chiyo is nine years old in 1929 when her father sells her and her sister into the entertainment districts of Kyoto: Chiyo to a geisha house in Gion and her sister to a brothel. She is trained in music, dance and the etiquette of the teahouses, takes the name Sayuri, and learns how a geisha's career is financed, negotiated and envied. Her account runs from the fishing village she came from, through the war years and the decades on either side of them.
In the provincial town of Middlemarch, in the years around the Reform Act of 1832, Dorothea Brooke marries a scholar she believes will give her a life of useful work, and Tertius Lydgate arrives as a new doctor with plans to reform the medicine of the town. Both of those ambitions meet the expectations of a community in which everyone knows everyone else's business.
Ishmael goes to sea because he feels like it, signs aboard the whaling ship Pequod in Nantucket and only discovers once the voyage has begun what the captain intends. Captain Ahab lost a leg to a white whale on a previous trip and has come back to sea for one purpose, which is to kill that whale wherever it leads him. The crew is a working crew of harpooners, boat handlers and a ship's carpenter, they are paid on the profits of the oil they render, and their captain has quietly converted the voyage into a private hunt. Ishmael narrates the whole of it, including the parts he cannot have witnessed.
William Tell Sackett is carrying thirty pounds of gold from the Arizona goldfields to the booming town of Los Angeles when Dorinda Robiseau asks him for safe passage. Sackett is no ladies' man but he can spot trouble easily, and he agrees reluctantly, which leaves him crossing the most brutal desert on the continent with a companion he does not trust.
Claudia Hampton is a seventy-six-year-old historian, terminally ill in a London hospital bed, who decides to write a history of the world and finds herself writing her own instead. The novel moves backwards and forwards through her life, from a childhood competing with her brother for fossils to the war and the people she has loved.
Howard W. Campbell Jr, an American who grew up in Germany, became a famous playwright and then a broadcaster of Nazi propaganda. He is also, by his own account, an American agent, and the novel is his memoir, written in an Israeli prison while he waits to be tried for what he said on the radio.
Charles Dickens is not feeling the Christmas spirit. His latest book has been a flop, the critics have turned against him, and relatives on every side are asking him for money. When his publishers try to blackmail him into writing a Christmas book he refuses, and then meets a mysterious woman on one of his night walks.
In January 1794, on the eve of the wars with France, a seventeen-year-old called Horatio Hornblower joins the Royal Navy as a midshipman. He is seasick, awkward and socially hopeless, and the other midshipmen decide he is a dullard. Then he is sent to board a French merchant ship and take charge of it, and something in him turns out to work properly at sea.
Brigadier-General Richard Hannay is recalled from the Western Front to hunt a German agent who is at large in Britain, and the work has to be done under cover. He goes about the country disguised as a pacifist, and the trail is not the one he expected to find. The war is still going on all around him.
Ernest Hemingway married four times, and this novel gives each of the four women a turn: Hadley Richardson in Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn in Spain and Cuba, and Mary Welsh. Each of them tells what it was like to be married to a man who turned his own life into material, and each learns in her turn that the role has a successor already in view.
Katherine Mary O'Fallon is sixteen when she travels from Boston to Calgary in 1907 to visit her uncle and recover from pleurisy, and there she meets Sergeant Mike Flannigan of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They marry and go north into the Canadian wilderness, where the two of them live among the hardships and the landscape of the early twentieth-century North. The novel is based on the stories of the real Katherine Mary O'Fallon Knox.
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