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 6 of the shelf.
Search by title or author, filter with the subgenre chips, the primary-genre chips or the tag chips, or sort the list. Filtering happens in your browser and nothing about the visit is stored.
Showing 48 of 580 books
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Tim Meeker's older brother Sam joins the rebel army at the start of the American Revolution while the family's store and tavern in Redding, Connecticut, are caught between the two sides. Tim has to decide where he stands, and the war takes the family's trade, its neutrality and finally its members, leaving him to work out what the argument was worth.
Philip Ashley was raised on a Cornish estate by his older cousin Ambrose, and the two of them lived contentedly without women until Ambrose travelled to Florence for his health. There he married, and there he died, writing letters home that blamed his wife. Philip inherits the estate and the letters, and then Rachel herself arrives in Cornwall.
Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are brought back into intelligence work during the Second World War and sent to a seaside hotel, where they are to find a pair of enemy agents living under other names among the guests. The guests are a mixed company, and two of them are not what they seem to be.
Crisostomo Ibarra comes home to San Diego from Spain to mourn his father, and finds that the rich man was ill treated in his final years and in the trial that followed his death. He decides to carry on his father's plan of building a school, to marry his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, and to hold his ground against the parish priest and the colonial government.
Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think about life before the war, but it is now 1943 and life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages and Nazi soldiers in the streets. When the Jews of Denmark begin to be relocated, Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family, and Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous errand.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are pursued by murderous strangers through the bazaars of Jerusalem in 1918. In Palestine they meet Mahmoud and Ali Hazr, two apparently Bedouin guides, and set out to counter a plot against the British administration under General Edmund Allenby, with Russell dressed as a young Bedouin man and learning Arabic as she goes.
Alexandra Bergson inherits the family farm on the Nebraska Divide when her father dies, and makes it succeed while her brothers doubt her judgement. The novel follows the family for more than a decade, and then turns to the next generation and to the people Alexandra has loved, among them the man she has waited for since she was young.
Naomi Nakane is a schoolteacher in her thirties when the news of her uncle's death sends her back to the aunt who raised her and to the years she has spent not thinking about. Her family were Japanese Canadians, and the war took their houses, their work, their freedom and, for a long time afterwards, any way of speaking about what had happened to them.
George Milton and Lennie Small travel together from ranch to ranch in California during the Great Depression, looking for work and carrying one plan between them. Lennie is very strong and does not understand his own strength, and George has spent years keeping him out of the trouble he keeps finding. They take jobs on a farm where the other workers are paid a dollar a day, and they plan to save enough to buy a smallholding of their own. The dream is the part they keep repeating to each other, and the novel is short enough to read in one sitting.
It is 1928, and Matilda Simpkin, once a militant in the suffrage campaign who was jailed five times, now lives on lectures and small routines. Finding an old wooden club in a cupboard brings the past back, and a meeting with an old comrade who has joined the Fascists convinces her that a new cause has arrived. She starts a club for girls.
Travis Coates is fourteen and in charge of the family farm in Texas with his mother and small brother while his father is away driving cattle, when a stray dog comes to the house and steals meat. Travis wants the dog gone, but the animal turns out to be useful, and the two of them become partners in the work of the farm.
Oliver Twist is raised in a workhouse and escapes to London, where he falls in with a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin. He discovers the secrets of his parentage and reconnects with the family he has left. The novel portrays the lives of criminals without romance and exposes the treatment of the many orphans in England in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Ingalls family travels from Kansas to Minnesota and settles in a dugout cut into the bank of Plum Creek, near the town of Walnut Grove. Laura and Mary make friends and start school, their father plants a wheat crop on credit at the store, and a season of grasshoppers followed by a hard winter tests what the family has put into the farm.
Felix has been in a Catholic orphanage in Poland for more than three years, and he believes his parents are coming back for him. When he sees the nuns burning the library's books, he decides to go and find them, and the journey takes him through a country where the danger in the streets is not the sort of thing he has been told about.
Neville Wyatt, Earl of Kilbourne, is waiting at the altar for his bride when a ragged woman runs down the aisle instead. He stares at her, and then announces to the assembled company that she is his wife: Lily, the woman he married, loved and lost on a battlefield in Portugal, whom he had believed to be dead. He says he will honour his commitment to her, and then Lily speaks, and what she asks for changes what he had planned.
In 1875 a group of American women travels west under a government programme that will marry them into the Cheyenne nation, in exchange for horses sent to Washington. The scheme was proposed by a Cheyenne chief and taken up by the administration as a way of assimilating the tribes. The novel is the journal of one of the women who volunteered.
Harry Clifton grows up in Bristol expecting to work on the docks like his father and uncle, and he has one thing they did not: a voice good enough to be noticed. A choir mistress, a schoolteacher and an old soldier all take an interest in him, and the question of who his father really was follows him from the docks to a scholarship and a war.
Oscar Hopkins is an Anglican priest from Devon and Lucinda Leplastrier is a young heiress from Parramatta who owns a glass factory in Sydney, and they meet on a ship from England to Australia. Both of them gamble, one obsessively and one compulsively, and Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot carry a glass church to a remote settlement four hundred kilometres up the coast.
Claire Randall, who served as a nurse in the war, is travelling in the Scottish Highlands in 1945 when a standing stone takes her to 1743, into a country of raiding clans and a Jacobite rising not yet begun. A clan that does not know what to make of an Englishwoman in strange clothes takes her in, and the safest arrangement available is marriage to Jamie Fraser, a young Highlander with a price on his head.
In the 1950s Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate killed a series of people across Nebraska and Wyoming, and the case has been told over and over since. This novel comes at it from three directions: Caril Ann looking back on the beginning of the relationship, a collector in Manhattan haunted by the crimes, and the man's wife.
Doby Kernohan and his father have travelled a long way looking for a new start, and the abandoned cabin they find seems like a good place to settle until they see the dead man in the front yard. The killing turns out to be an omen of darker events, for a cycle of violence that began long ago is about to reach its end.
Sunja is the daughter of a fisherman in Korea in the early 1900s, and she falls for a wealthy stranger who turns out to be married. She refuses his offer to buy her out of the consequences and instead accepts a proposal from a sickly minister on his way to Japan, which takes her away from her home and sets the family on a different course. The novel follows four generations through the markets, churches, universities and pachinko parlours of Japan, in a country that treats Koreans as outsiders.
Almeyda grows up as a slave on a plantation in Brazil in the 1670s, with a mother who is stern and a grandmother who is not like anybody else. She hears about Palmares, a city governed by freed and escaped slaves, and her life becomes a long journey through the country. She is looking for her husband, and the country is very large.
Corinne is the scandalous darling of Boston society, and she sails halfway around the world to Hawaii to ruin the man who ruined her: Jared Burkett, who took her, humiliated her, and left her with feelings she did not want to have. She hates him as much as she wants him, and he wants to possess her as well, whatever the cost to both of them.
In a small town in Georgia in the 1950s, a store owner named Paris Trout kills the younger sister of a man he has been doing business with and wounds the man's mother. The killing follows a car deal that went wrong, and the town has to decide what it is prepared to do about a man everybody knows.
George Mallory is a Cambridge graduate and a climber with a reputation for going on where other men turn back, and his ambition is the summit of Everest. The novel follows his expeditions and his marriage, and it takes seriously the old question of whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the top of the mountain in 1924, twenty-nine years before anyone else.
Mark Castallack is a proud and difficult man who brings his bride Janna home to Penmarric, the great house on the Cornish coast that gives the family its name and its standing. What follows is a feud inside one family, carried on by children and grandchildren, with the house and the land it stands on as the prize.
Seventy-year-old John Sidney Howard is on a fishing holiday in France when the German army overruns the country. Asked by an English couple at his hotel to take their two children home to safety, he agrees, and every delay on the road adds another child to his charge until he is leading six of them through occupied France towards the sea, with the Nazis close behind.
In 1665 a privateer named Charles Hunter is hired by the governor of Jamaica to take a Spanish galleon and the treasure she carries, at a time when the English colony at Port Royal is holding on against the power of Spain. What he plans is a raid on a Spanish fortress, and he has to assemble the men to carry it out.
Marcus Attilius Primus comes from Rome to take up the post of aquarius on the Aqua Augusta, the aqueduct that waters the towns around the Bay of Naples, and finds its springs failing and the man he replaced missing. Working along the line from Pompeii towards Misenum, he is drawn into the affairs of the towns it serves, including a wealthy former slave, the engineers who answer to Rome and the officials with their own arrangements. Nobody yet knows what the mountain above the bay is about to do.
Philip Jettan is a provincial squire in eighteenth-century England, and his childhood friend Cleone Charteris has come home from finishing school with a taste for polished, aristocratic men. Philip is none of those things. Encouraged by his father, he leaves for Paris to acquire the manners Cleone says she wants, and returns home a different man.
Mrs Bennet has five daughters and no son, which in the England of the novel means that the family estate is entailed away from the women and that all five will need to marry well or live on very little. When a wealthy young man rents a house nearby, the neighbourhood's mothers go to work on him. His friend, Mr Darcy, is richer still and worse at being liked. Elizabeth Bennet, the second daughter, is quick, stubborn and prepared to think badly of him, and he is prepared to think badly of everybody.
Rowena Belleme has been ordered to produce an heir, and if she does not the stepbrother who controls her family's lands will destroy what is left of her inheritance. Her answer is to take a prisoner: Warrick deChaville, a knight, is seized and held so that he can father the child that will save her, and he is not the sort of man to accept such an arrangement for long.
Thomas Peaceful is a soldier in France, looking back over his life from a village childhood in Devon to the farm he worked on and the girl he grew up with. His brother Charlie is somewhere nearby, and Tommo has a single night in which to remember how the two of them came to be where they are now.
In the Judean desert, about two thousand years ago, five travellers are strung out along the road that a caravan took earlier that morning: three men, a woman, and someone too far behind for anyone to guess at, walking barefoot with no staff, no water and no food. They are all going into the wilderness for their own reasons, and the heat is the least of what they will find there.
Elsie Kettle lives with her grandmother and is looking forward to going to London for the coronation of Elizabeth II, and then the two of them are taken into hospital with tuberculosis. What she finds on the ward is a set of other children and a hospital cat called Queenie. The ward is full of children in the same position.
Gillian lost her sister as a child and watched her father killed by a baron who wanted a jewelled box belonging to King John. Years later, while she is searching the border country for her sister, she is taken by a Scottish laird who has his own reasons for holding on to her and for keeping her alive.
Jacky Faber is on her way home to marry the man she has loved for years when British Naval Intelligence takes her off the ship and hands her another assignment. She is to lead an expedition after a Spanish treasure ship that went down with millions in gold, and she is promised a share of it and a pardon for her past.
In the gold country of California in 1850, Angel has been sold into prostitution as a child and expects nothing from men but betrayal. Michael Hosea, a farmer who believes he has been directed to marry her, does so and sets about loving her without conditions, and the novel follows her resistance and the flight that answers it.
Three children, three journeys. Josef is a Jewish boy leaving Nazi Germany by ship in 1939, Isabel is a Cuban girl sailing for Florida on a raft in 1994, and Mahmoud is a Syrian boy walking towards Europe in 2015. The stories are separated by decades and continents, and the book links them through the families and the objects they carry.
At Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland, officers who have broken down in the trenches are sent to be treated and returned to the front. Among the patients are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the doctor who has to decide what recovery is supposed to mean in a war like this one.
Val Darrant was four years old on the snowy night his mother abandoned him, and instead of meeting a lonely death he met Will Reilly, a gentleman, a gambler and a worldly, self-taught scholar. For ten years each of them was all the family the other had. Those years take them from the boomtowns of the American West to the cities of Europe.
In the middle of the 1840s a thirteen-year-old English boy named Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by a group of Aboriginal people. Sixteen years later, when white settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans and is given shelter by the McIvors, but fear and mistrust are already at work in the settlement.
Echo Sackett has never been far from her Tennessee home until the day she sets out for Philadelphia to collect an inheritance left to her family. She is sixteen, she can handle herself as well as any of the Sackett men, and the city lawyer who means to take the money from her has no idea what he has taken on.
In 1915, after The Birth of a Nation casts its spell over the country, the Ku Klux Klan grows in number and something else comes with it: the Klansmen are not entirely human. Maryse Boudreaux hunts them with a sword, and she and her companions follow the trail back to the source of the power.
In rural Mississippi in 1933, nine-year-old Cassie Logan lives with her three brothers on land the family owns, which is unusual for a Black family of the period, since most around them sharecropped. Cassie has grown up protected and strong and has not yet understood that a white person could force her to be untrue to herself. One turbulent year, with night riders and burnings, shows her why the land matters so much.
Roots begins with Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka youth captured near his village in the Gambia as a teenager and carried to North America, where he is sold into slavery and renamed. From his daughter Kizzy and her son Chicken George, the book follows seven generations of the same family through plantations, the Civil War and freedom, down to the author's own lifetime.
Instead of the new life her family expected to forge out west, seventeen-year-old Angela is thrust into the role of caring for her three younger siblings after the death of their parents. With her older brother's help, and her trust in God, she is determined to raise the children as her mother would have wanted.
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