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 7 of the shelf.
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Roughing It in the Bush, published in London in 1852, is Susanna Moodie's account of settler life in Canada, where she had emigrated with her family in the 1830s. Written at her editor's suggestion as a guide for British readers who were thinking of making the same move, it mixes memoir with something closer to fiction and is arranged as a series of sketches in chronological order.
The Liverpool Merchant is a slave ship working the triangular trade in the middle of the eighteenth century, and two cousins are bound up with it: Erasmus Kemp, the son of a wealthy Lancashire merchant, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who sails on the voyage. The novel's subject is greed, and slavery is the medium it uses to examine it.
Sadako Sasaki was born in Hiroshima and was in the city when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. By the time she is twelve she is ill with leukaemia, and recalling a Japanese legend that a sick person who folds a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish, she begins to fold.
Four young people make their way across the winter of 1945 towards the Baltic coast, hoping to board a ship out of the path of the advancing Soviet army. Their separate journeys converge on the liner Wilhelm Gustloff, packed with refugees, and on a disaster that few histories of the war mention and that the novel sets out to recover.
Hetty is fourteen and has just been discharged from the Foundling Hospital, and she goes into service as a scullery maid. She has also found out that the kitchen maid at the hospital is her mother, and she is trying to find out who her father was. Her mother is the kitchen maid at the hospital where she grew up.
Sarai is a princess of Ur in Mesopotamia, and a serious, dutiful one compared with her older sister Qira, who is to marry a desert prince named Lot. Sarai has been promised to the temple as a priestess, until Lot arrives with his uncle Abram, who tells her that he will come back one day and marry her himself.
Anna and her younger brother Caleb live on a prairie farm with their father, who advertises in a newspaper for a wife after their mother dies. Sarah Wheaton writes back from Maine and comes to stay for a month, bringing her cat, her seashell collection and her longing for the sea, while the children watch for any sign that she means to stay.
After three London seasons looking for a husband, Daisy Bowman has been told by her father that she must find one now, and that if she cannot then she will marry the man he chooses: the ruthless and aloof Matthew Swift. Daisy is appalled, and being a Bowman she refuses to admit defeat, deciding to marry anyone rather than Matthew. What she does not expect is that Matthew has charms of his own.
Oskar Schindler is a member of the Nazi Party and a businessman in occupied Poland who, over the course of the war, ends up saving the lives of twelve hundred Jews. The novel was written by Thomas Keneally after a Holocaust survivor showed him his files on Schindler, and it mixes documented people and events with fictional dialogue.
Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist and war profiteer who, faced with the reality of the extermination camps, gambled his life and his fortune to save thirteen hundred Jewish people from the gas chambers. The novel is based on his true story, and on the testimony of the people he saved, and it sets out what it cost him to keep them alive through the war.
Freya is eighteen when she is taken captive in battle, and she is furious that her captor takes no account of her noble birth and treats her as he would any woman captured in a raid. Alaric, the prince who took her, has spent years planning to humiliate the daughter of a man he hates, and he intends to keep her as a slave in his own household. Neither of them plans for what develops between them.
The Ibis is an old schooner with a mixed crew and a hold full of opium, sailing the Indian Ocean in the years just before the Opium Wars. The passengers include a ruined raja, a village widow, an American of mixed parentage and an opium trader with a missionary streak, alongside sailors, stowaways and convicts. The novel moves from the poppy fields of the Ganges to the high seas and the back streets of China, and as their old ties fall away the people aboard begin to think of themselves as ship-brothers.
When Mr Dashwood dies, the estate passes to his son by his first marriage, and his second wife and three daughters are left with very little to live on. Taken in by a distant relative, Elinor and Marianne must each find their way in a world where a woman's marriage is the only security available, and where feeling and prudence pull the two sisters in opposite directions.
Azriel is a spirit summoned out of the ancient world and bound to serve whoever holds him, and in present-day New York he watches a young woman be murdered. He decides to act for himself rather than for a master, and to explain what he has become he tells the story of the life he was taken from, beginning with his family in Babylon and the bargain that turned a merchant's son into a servant of the bones.
Diana Bishop is a historian from a family of witches, and Matthew Clairmont is a vampire who has been alive for centuries. They are looking for a manuscript whose contents could explain what they are. To find it they travel back to Elizabethan London, where Matthew's old acquaintances are waiting and where a woman who is not supposed to practise magic needs to be taught how.
Having left Egypt with the Hebrews during the Exodus, Shira is living in freedom at the foot of Mount Sinai. When the people build a golden idol in defiance of Yahweh, the chaos that follows gives her an unexpected chance to learn midwifery, and she discovers that her gifts show best when she is helping at a birth. Her mother wants her to keep to the family weaving trade, and Shira apprentices herself as a midwife anyway. Then a delivery goes badly wrong.
It is 1889 in Wyoming, where homesteaders have claimed land that a cattleman named Luke Fletcher used to run his herds across. The Starrett family are among the settlers, and a stranger rides into their lives: a quiet man with a past who takes work on their farm, says nothing about where he came from and is plainly more than a hired hand.
Sharpe's Eagle is a historical novel by Bernard Cornwell, published in 1981, and it was the first of the Richard Sharpe books to appear. It is set in Spain in July 1809, during the campaign that ended at Talavera, and it puts its hero and his riflemen under a commander who has no business leading them.
Sharpe's Fury is the eleventh of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2006 and set in 1811 during Wellington's campaign in the Iberian peninsula. It places Sharpe in the middle of the politics as well as the fighting, with Cadiz the last Spanish city still holding out. Sharpe is caught between the French in front of him and the politics of his own side behind him.
Sharpe's Gold is the second of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels to be published, though ninth in the series' internal order, and it is set in August 1810. Sharpe is sent behind enemy lines after a hoard of Spanish gold, and the story ends with the destruction of the fortress at Almeida. It belongs to the early part of the series, when its hero is still proving himself to the people above him.
Sharpe's Rifles is the sixth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels in the series' internal order, though the ninth to be published, and it came out in 1988. It follows Sharpe and his riflemen through the French invasion of Galicia in January 1809, during the retreat to Corunna, and it is the book in which he first meets the soldier who becomes his closest companion.
It is 1799 and Richard Sharpe is a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot, serving in southern India, with a talent for trouble and no prospect of promotion. Sent into the enemy camp in disguise, he finds himself in a siege that will make a hero out of a soldier the army would rather forget.
Sharpe's Trafalgar is the fourth of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, published in 2000, and the first of them to take its hero into the wars against Napoleon. Sharpe is on his way home from India as a passenger, and the voyage takes him to the fleet that fought at Trafalgar. He is aboard as a traveller with no business in the fighting at all, which is part of the joke.
Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Waterloo appeared in 1990 under the title Waterloo, and it was the eleventh novel in the series. It puts its hero back in uniform for the campaign that ended the Napoleonic Wars, with his old friend Patrick Harper at his side, and it follows the days before the battle in close detail.
In a Yorkshire mill town during the Napoleonic wars, the machinery that keeps the local economy going is being destroyed by men who have no work, and the mill owners are waiting for the army to arrive. Two young women in the neighbourhood are deciding what to do with their lives while the men around them argue about trade and wages.
John Blackthorne, an English navigator, is wrecked on the coast of Japan and wakes in a country closed to most of the world. He has to learn the language and the rules of a society in which the line between life and death is thin, and he becomes a piece in the struggle between two warlords, the Portuguese and Spanish missionary presence, and the Japanese lords who want his knowledge of ships and guns. The novel is set in feudal Japan at the start of the seventeenth century.
Siddhartha sets out on a spiritual journey of self-discovery during the lifetime of the Gautama Buddha, and the novel follows his search rather than his arrival. It is written in a simple, lyrical style, and it is a compact work that reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom rather than a biography of its subject.
A young Portuguese Jesuit is smuggled into seventeenth-century Japan, where the government is determined to stamp out Christianity and foreign influence, and finds the Christian communities driven underground. He is a fugitive in a country he does not know, dependent on villagers who risk their lives to shelter him, and he begins to doubt his mission as he waits for an answer that does not come. The novel is told partly through his letters and partly through the record of the persecution around him.
Lady Kathryn Grayson has a privileged future ahead of her until her uncle decides that he wants her fortune, and the simplest way to take it is to have her committed to an asylum. Her escape is to hide in the carriage of a stranger, Lucien Montaine, the Marquess of Litchfield, who is travelling away from the city with no wish for company.
In Connecticut in 1666 an ancient spirit wakes in the woods, and the settlers who live near it have a name for him and a use for it. To Abitha, a young widow who is being squeezed out of the land her husband left her, he is the one thing in the colony that is not pretending to be respectable.
Wulfric Bedwyn, the Duke of Bewcastle, is the eldest of the six Bedwyn brothers and sisters, and he is cool, arrogant and mysterious, the head of a family of passion and privilege. All of London is waiting for his arrival at the most glittering social event of the season, and the only woman in the room who is not trying to capture his attention is the one who interests him. Then he invites Christine Derrick to become his mistress.
In London in 1948, Hortense arrives from Jamaica to join a husband she has barely met, expecting the country she was raised to think of as home. Gilbert has served in the Royal Air Force and is living in a single room in a house owned by Queenie and Bernard, a white English couple whose war has left its own damage. The novel is told in four voices and moves between Jamaica and England, and between the war years and what came after them.
In 1897 the explorer Robert Peary brings six Inuit from Greenland to New York, where they are put on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Among them are a father and son, and when the father dies the museum keeps his bones. The novel tells the story of Minik, the boy who was left behind.
After exposing a suitor's dishonourable intentions toward the daughter of a client, Harry Cartwright is hired by a wealthy marquis to solve a murder that takes place at a house party. The case is complicated by the host's wish to keep the matter discreet, which limits what can be asked and of whom.
On an island in Puget Sound, where the people make their living from salmon fishing and strawberry farming, a Japanese American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a fellow fisherman. It is 1954, the war is recent, and the internment of Japanese Americans during it hangs over the courtroom. The case turns on what the islanders remember and what they would rather not.
Lily is the daughter of a farmer in nineteenth-century China, and at six years old she is told by the local matchmaker that her feet, if bound properly, will be flawless. Since a woman's prospects are judged by the size and shape of her feet, that is very good news for her family and years of pain for her. She learns the secret women's script called nu shu, and she is matched with an 'old-same', Snow Flower, from a more refined household; the two of them carry that bond through their marriages and their households.
In the winter of 1940 German troops arrive in a small Norwegian village and take it over, and nobody there expects to be able to do anything about it. Then Peter Lindstrom's uncle explains what the children can do with their sleds, and a plan begins that puts the country's gold bullion and their own lives on the same sled run down the hill.
Alexandra Lawrence is a country girl with no interest in the rules of fashionable society, and she marries Jordan Townsende, the Duke of Hawthorne, a man whose wealth and position have never obliged him to explain himself to anyone at all. Their marriage takes her into London society, where the two of them have to work out what they actually owe each other.
A boy lives with his sharecropper family and their dog, Sounder. When his father is jailed for stealing a ham from the place where he works in order to feed them, the family loses what little security it had, and the boy goes out to make his own way by learning to read.
Victorian London has a murderer the newspapers have christened Jack the Ripper, and the police have nothing to show for their investigation. A well-off young woman, more interested in dead bodies and forensic work than in the marriage her family has in mind for her, decides that she is going to work out who he is, using the parts of London society that the police cannot enter.
Jess Goldberg grows up working-class and butch in the second half of the twentieth century, leaves home as a teenager and finds factory work, bar life and a community in Buffalo and New York. The novel follows her through police raids, hormones, violence and the search for a body and a life she can live in.
Catherine Enderly is sixteen and on her way to boarding school when she is abducted and taken from England to the coast of Ireland, where she becomes the prisoner of Sean Culhane, a young and powerful man who has sworn vengeance against her family. She meets him with a defiance out of proportion to her size, and his determination to have his revenge becomes complicated by what he begins to feel for her.
Lara had been told that her husband was lost at sea, and the marriage he left behind was cold, formal and unloving, so she had made her peace with being a widow. Then a man walks into her life claiming to be Hunter, Earl of Hawksworth, and proving what he says with private details that only a husband could possibly have known.
Amanda Briars is a successful novelist who has reached her thirtieth birthday without ever having been kissed, and she decides to buy herself an improper present: one night with a stranger. The man who arrives at her house turns out to be Jack Devlin, a businessman of considerable reputation, and he is willing to keep the arrangement private only for a price.
Suite Francaise follows French families of very different kinds through the exodus of June 1940, when the roads out of Paris filled with people fleeing the German advance. The first part covers that flight and the small cowardices and fragile moments of solidarity that came with it; the second moves to the village of Bussy, where a German garrison is billeted and old resentments between neighbours find new encouragement. Nemirovsky wrote it while the events were unfolding, and it was published decades later.
Nel Wright and Sula Peace meet as children in the town of Medallion, Ohio, and their friendship survives the town's opinion of them, a secret they share and the very different lives they choose. Nel marries and stays; Sula leaves and comes back. The novel follows both women and the community around them across four decades.
This novel chronicles the life of Richard III of England, beginning in 1459 with him as a young boy and ending in 1485 with his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It is set against the Wars of the Roses, and it argues for a Richard very different from the one tradition has handed down.
Lydia Bryant joins a wagon train bound for Texas with a secret she does not intend to explain and a determination that no man will ever have power over her again. Ross Coleman is travelling the same road, with a past that has followed him out of the law's reach. They are thrown together by the journey, and by the men pursuing both of 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