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 8 of the shelf.
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She is beautiful, exasperating and, in the words of the story, a little hellcat with barnyard manners. Marshal Travis Kincaid has decided that if anybody is going to make a lady of her, it will be him, and he takes on the project even with outlaws overrunning his town. The novel is a western romance.
Brianna Munro escapes into Scotland at night to avoid the marriage her guardian has arranged for her, and travelling alone and fearing for her safety she takes shelter at Castle Glenloch. She intends to stay for a single night, and then she meets Hugh Christie, Laird Glenloch. She tells him she is a lady's maid running from a vengeful employer, and he can see that she is hiding something.
Poppy Hathaway loves her unconventional family, though what she longs for herself is an ordinary life. Then she meets Harry Rutledge, the enigmatic owner of a hotel and an inventor with wealth, power and a dangerous hidden side to the way he lives. When their flirtation compromises her reputation and the season's gossip starts, Poppy surprises everybody by accepting his proposal of marriage, and finds that she has married a man who will share his passion but not his trust.
Medieval England is usually remembered as a place of knights on horseback rescuing fainting damsels, of merciless kings and of peasants mired in superstition and ignorance. Terry Jones and Alan Ereira set out to show a livelier and more inventive country, and to explain where some of the best known ideas about the Middle Ages came from, from witch burning to the flat earth.
Tess Durbeyfield is sixteen, the eldest child of a haggler in a poor rural family, when the local parson tells her father that his surname is a corruption of d'Urberville and that he is descended from an ancient Norman family. Her father celebrates by drinking, the family's wagon crashes on the road to market, and the loss of their horse starts everything that follows.
Tom Sawyer is a boy growing up along the Mississippi River in the 1830s and 1840s, in the fictional town of St Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived as a child. He has a series of adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn, and the novel follows him through predicaments that include running away to an island, pursuing a treasure and being trapped in a cave.
Newland Archer is charming, tactful and thoroughly a product of the New York society of the 1870s. He accepts its standards and abides by its rules while recognising its limitations, and his engagement to May Welland promises him a safe and conventional future. Then May's cousin Ellen Olenska arrives, independent and separated from her husband, and Archer has to decide where his loyalty lies.
Lee Miller arrives in Paris in the late 1920s intending to work as an artist rather than be looked at as a model, and she becomes the assistant and then the lover of a celebrated photographer. The novel follows her discovery of what she can do with a camera, the cost of living inside a more famous man's life, and the work she went on to do as a correspondent during the war.
Michelangelo Buonarroti is apprenticed to a painter's studio in Florence as a boy, is taken up by the household of Lorenzo de' Medici, and spends the next sixty years working in marble, paint and stone. The novel follows the sculptor from his first carved figure through the quarries, the workshops and the long quarrels with the popes and patrons who wanted him for themselves.
It is 1896, and a New York Times reporter is called out at night to look at a body with his old friend Laszlo Kreizler, a doctor who studies the minds of criminals and is known as an alienist. The dead boy was a child prostitute, and the way he was killed suggests a mind rather than a quarrel. Theodore Roosevelt, new in the job of police commissioner, asks the pair to work it.
Haven Ambrose, a nautical archaeologist, comes to Positano to look at the shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast, and she is also privately searching for a trove of gemstones her father saw on his last dive. Then maelstroms and misfortunes begin to trouble the town. The water off that coast has swallowed a great deal, and it is still taking things.
In 1939 a nineteen-year-old refugee from Prague arrives in New York and moves in with his seventeen-year-old cousin, who was born in Brooklyn. Between them they invent a superhero, and the two of them become part of the golden age of the comic book. The Escapist is their way of fighting back.
The Ballad of the White Horse is a long poem by G. K. Chesterton about the wars of Alfred the Great against the Danes, published in 1911. It is written in the form of a traditional ballad, and it tells how Alfred came back from defeat to win at Ethandun, with help, in the poem's account, from the Virgin Mary.
Philippe Charboneau is the illegitimate son of James Amberly, the sixth Duke of Kent, and in November 1770 he travels with his mother Marie from Auvergne to England to stake his claim to his inheritance. The Duke's family refuses to recognise him, an altercation leaves the Duke's legitimate son crippled, and mother and son flee to London.
Omakayas is seven years old in 1847 and lives with her Ojibwe family in a birchbark house on an island in Lake Superior. The book follows the household through four seasons of hunting, fishing, gathering and storytelling, and into the winter when smallpox reaches the island and takes one of her brothers. She takes her share of the work and resents a good deal of it.
Richard Shelton is a young man in the England of the Wars of the Roses, and the guardian who is supposed to protect him and his inheritance is not to be trusted. When a black arrow carries a threat of vengeance into the forest, Richard has to work out who killed his father and which side of the war he belongs to.
Ranulf is the English conqueror known as the Black Lyon, darkly handsome and rich beyond imagining, and a man no woman has been able to win. Then he meets Lyonene, a tawny-haired beauty whose temper matches his own, and the two of them are married after a whirlwind courtship. A web of lies spread by a jealous rival drives Lyonene away from her home and across the Irish Sea, and only Ranulf can undo the plot against their marriage.
A light aircraft bound for the Galapagos Islands ditches into the sea, and the zoologist on board, Daniel Kennedy, has to decide whether to save himself or the woman he is with. In a second story set in 1917, his great-grandfather Andrew is preparing to go over the top at Passchendaele and will be tested in the same way.
Berta grows up hearing everybody exclaim over her little sister Glenna, and somewhere along the way she decides that whatever Glenna is, she will not be. The two sisters become opposites, and the distance between them grows until it has to be faced. The novel is about what caused the rift and what it cost them both.
Liesel Meminger is nine when she arrives in a small German town to live with foster parents, having buried her brother on the way and lost her mother. She learns to read with her foster father, steals books where she can find them, and lives through the Nazi years among her neighbours, the Jewish man hidden in the basement and the war that eventually reaches the town. The novel is narrated by Death, who takes an interest in the girl and her use of words.
Bruno is a German boy whose father becomes the commandant of a concentration camp, and the novel follows his friendship with a Jewish detainee named Shmuel. Bruno's understanding of what is happening around him is deliberately limited by his age, and the book's plot develops from that gap rather than from adult comprehension of the situation.
Parvana is eleven and lives in a one-room flat in Kabul with her family, and since the Taliban took the city she has rarely been outside. Her father, the person who could go out, is arrested, and the family has no man to send to the market. To feed them Parvana has to become something the authorities will allow in the street.
Alan Duncan comes home to his parents' sheep station in Australia after the war, a lawyer who lost both feet in an air crash, and finds that the housekeeper has killed herself. Searching the house for the papers she hid, he discovers that she was not who the household believed her to be, and her letters and diaries lead him back to the war and to his own family.
Oscar de León is a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey who is overweight, loves science fiction and fantasy, and keeps falling hopelessly in love. His family is also carrying a curse, and the novel follows them back to the Dominican Republic under the dictator Trujillo. It is a family history as much as it is the story of one boy.
Daniel bar Jamin saw his father crucified by Roman soldiers and has lived in the mountains with a band of rebels ever since, waiting for the chance to fight. When his sister is left alone and unwell he has to care for her, and the teacher he meets near Capernaum asks him to give up the hatred he has built his life on.
On 22 June 1941 Tatiana Metanova turns seventeen the next day, and the morning begins with her older sister Dasha announcing that she is in love and with the radio reporting that Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. Later that day, waiting for a bus in Leningrad, Tatiana is watched by a Red Army officer. His name is Alexander Belov, and he is Dasha's new love.
Ann Hamilton is ten years old in 1784 when her family settles on land west of the Allegheny Mountains, in a cabin whose door faces west because that is the way the family came from. She is lonely for the town she left behind, and then a stranger rides up to the house and everything about the place looks different.
Enola Holmes has few people in her life beyond the occasional run-in with her brother Sherlock, and the closest thing she has to family is her landlady, Mrs Tupper, who is nearly deaf and cannot cook but is thoroughly endearing. So when Enola comes home to find that Mrs Tupper has been kidnapped, the search becomes personal almost at once.
Enola Holmes is the much younger sister of the detective Sherlock Holmes, and she has been brought up quietly in the country by a mother who does not care what the neighbours think. On her fourteenth birthday her mother disappears, leaving a small amount of money and no explanation, and Enola's older brothers arrive to arrange her future.
Jimmie Blacksmith is an Aboriginal man in nineteenth-century New South Wales, caught between his own family and culture and the world of white settler colonialism. The novel is written from his perspective, and it follows him on a mission of revenge. It is based on the life of the bushranger Jimmy Governor and was written from Jimmie's point of view.
A five-year-old girl named Ayla, who readers come to understand is Cro-Magnon, is orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake. She is taken in by a group of Neanderthals, and the novel follows her upbringing among people unlike her, in a story that speculates about the interactions between Neanderthal and modern human populations in prehistoric Europe.
Celie is a poor Black girl in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century, and the novel is made of the letters she writes, first to God and later to her sister Nettie, who has gone to Africa as a missionary. Through them the reader follows Celie's marriage, the women who come into her life, including the singer Shug Avery, her sister's letters from another continent, and the slow accumulation of a life that Celie begins to shape for herself.
Jack Aubrey, now a commodore with a squadron under him, is sent to the coast of West Africa to act against the trade in slaves, and afterwards to a station where Napoleon's navy is to be found. On land, meanwhile, Stephen Maturin meets a daughter he has never seen and finds that an old enemy intends to reach him through her.
Katherine of Aragon is born Catalina, the Spanish Infanta, to parents who are both rulers and warriors, and at four years old she is betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales. In this version of her life the marriage becomes a real and loving partnership with plans to rule England together, and it ends after three months when Arthur dies of the sweating sickness. What follows is the rest of her career in England.
Edmond Dantes is a young sailor with a promotion and a wedding ahead of him when he is denounced by men who want what he has and imprisoned without trial in an island fortress. The novel follows what becomes of him, of those who accused him and of the people who once depended on him, across France, Italy and the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1839. It opens on the day Napoleon leaves Elba, and the politics of the Bourbon Restoration run underneath everything.
Lady Sophia Bryant has no intention of ever marrying, but her parents have been estranged for fourteen years and her one wish is to bring them back together. Announcing a betrothal, even a false one, would force them both to attend to her. Lord Francis Sutton, a handsome and notorious rake, is perfect for the deception, being always ready for a game provided it costs him nothing.
Sarah Noble is eight years old when she travels with her father into the Connecticut wilderness to build a new home for the family. She is left in the care of a neighbouring Native family while her father goes back for the other children, and she has to find her courage in a place she has never been.
In 1900 a twelve-year-old girl is sent by boat to be married to a widower she has never met, and arrives at a family estate in Kerala where the household keeps a water tree, a family record marked with the names of the drowned. In every generation at least one member of the family dies in water, and the novel follows the girl who becomes Big Ammachi.
Sugar works in a Victorian London brothel and has a plan for getting out of it, and William Rackham is the heir to a perfume business who decides that he wants her. He installs her in his house, where she is drawn into the running of the business, the unhappiness of his wife and the household's arrangements. The novel moves between its characters and follows Sugar's own writing as well as the family's fortunes, taking in the smells, streets and commerce of the 1870s.
Alvin Miller, a seventh son of a seventh son, is staying at a boarding house where mixed-blood children are cared for when he uses his knack to clear the mosquitoes and the disease out of a well. A young woman the people call Dead Mary asks him to heal her mother, who has yellow fever, and the cure spreads through Nueva Barcelona and heads off a war over slavery.
An American veteran of the Second World War goes back to Germany after the fighting to find the woman he left there, and stays. What he finds is a country in ruins where the currency everybody deals in is not money but American cigarettes. He stays there far longer than he meant to.
Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is in hospital with a broken leg, and an actress friend brings him pictures of historical figures to occupy him. One of them is a portrait of Richard III, and Grant cannot square the face with the monstrous uncle of the history books. The case he takes up is five hundred years old, and he has nothing to do but think about it.
Tyrel Sackett is eighteen when he has to leave Tennessee, having killed a man who was trying to kill his brother. Orrin catches up with him, and the two of them head west to New Mexico, where land grants are being voided by fraud and where a man with a gun and a willingness to use it is not automatically welcome.
Lady Emmalene Eberhart was eager to be a good wife, and when her husband died she was still a virgin. Her dowry and her hand then become part of a struggle over feudal power, and she is promised to Amaury de Aneford, a landless knight whose sword has preserved the King's crown. On the wedding day a rival knight is already riding towards the bridal chamber.
Natty Bumppo, called Deerslayer, is a young frontiersman on Otsego Lake in upstate New York in the 1740s, before the wars that will make his name. He is travelling to meet a friend of his father's when he falls in with two men who are much less particular than he is. One of them, Harry March, wants to take scalps, and Deerslayer will not.
In 1634 the investigator Samuel Pipps is put aboard a ship at Batavia to be taken back to Amsterdam, where he is to be tried and probably executed for a crime he may or may not have committed. His bodyguard Arent Hayes goes with him, determined to clear him, and the voyage begins badly. What follows happens almost entirely aboard that one ship.
Robin is ten years old and about to be sent away to serve as a knight's page when illness takes the use of his legs. With the plague sweeping through London and the household that was to take him in emptied by it, he is left behind with nothing to do and has to find another way of being useful in a country that has already decided what a boy like him can be.
Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, comes back to London in 1813 with a reputation for arrogance and no intention of ever marrying. Daphne Bridgerton is the eldest daughter of a large and noisy family whose mother has pushed her into the marriage market, and the two of them agree to a pretence that will keep the matchmaking mothers of the ton away from both of them for the season.
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