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 9 of the shelf.
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In a mining town in southern Illinois, a man is tried and convicted of shooting his neighbour during a weekend gathering of the two families, and sentenced to be executed. Days before the sentence is to be carried out he is rescued by masked men and disappears, and what follows is the story of what became of him and of his family.
Leonie de Conyers is an aristocratic young woman whose life is broken by the French Revolution and who lives afterwards in the shadow of the guillotine. Roger St. Eyre is an English nobleman who sets out to bring her to safety, without knowing what taking her out of France will cost either of them.
At the end of the Second World War, four damaged people are living in a ruined Italian villa: a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief and a burned man who cannot remember his own name. As they care for the patient his past as a desert explorer returns in fragments, and the others reveal what the war has cost them.
Cora Seaborne is a recent widow with an interest in natural history, and she moves with her son to a village in Essex where an old rumour has revived: that a serpent has come back to the marshes. The local vicar, William Ransome, is certain the stories are superstition and that there is something worse behind them, and the two of them argue over what nature and faith can account for while the parish looks on. The novel is set in late nineteenth-century England.
Gary Gilmore became famous in 1976 after he robbed two men in Utah and killed them, and after he was tried and convicted he insisted on being executed for it. He then had to fight a legal system that was prepared to keep him alive long after he had given up on the idea himself. The book follows the short and blighted life that led to the killings and what happened when he refused to let the case be appealed.
Rodrigo Borgia becomes Pope Alexander VI, and his belief that his office will excuse anything is the assumption his family lives on. His son Cesare is an ambitious soldier and politician, his daughter Lucrezia is married off to one husband after another for the sake of alliances, and the family's interests are always the first question in Rome. The city's other powers have to decide whether to work with them.
Captain Jack Aubrey is given a new mission: to take his ship to the Pacific and protect the British whaling fleet there from an American frigate, which will mean his first voyage around Cape Horn. Dr Stephen Maturin has not yet identified the senior French agent who escaped him, and he does not know that the letter he sends his wife is going by the hand of exactly that man.
Laura and Almanzo Wilder are married and working their own homestead on the prairie, and this book follows the first four years of their life together. There are good crops and bad ones, debts, weather, neighbours, sickness and livestock, and a daughter called Rose, and not everything the couple builds survives the seasons that follow.
Heather Simmons is an orphan in London, put into service and then forced onto a ship bound for America. Brandon Birmingham, a wealthy planter, comes across her at the docks and takes her with him, and the marriage that follows is not one that either of them chose or wanted at that moment.
Bound home from the far side of the world to take up a new command, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have their passage interrupted by a fire aboard ship, and they find themselves caught up in a war that began while they were away. Much of what follows takes place in Boston, and the book turns two real battles of 1812 into fiction.
The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel by John Fowles, published in 1969 and set in Victorian England. Charles Smithson, a gentleman with a taste for natural history, is drawn to Sarah Woodruff, a former governess whose reputation has been ruined and whom the town has nicknamed the French Lieutenant's Woman, and the book tells their story while keeping one eye on the Victorian novels it imitates.
In Maine in 1789 the Kennebec River freezes over, and the body of a man is found locked in the ice. Martha Ballard is called out to examine him because she is the midwife and healer for the district, and the death turns out to be connected to a case she is already entangled in.
Christy Mansel runs into her cousin Charles in Damascus, and because the two of them are young, rich and used to doing as they please, they decide to visit their eccentric Great-Aunt Harriet. The family has a rule against arriving unannounced at Dar Ibrahim, her crumbling palace in the Lebanese hills, and the cousins go anyway.
Travelling incognito, Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes head for India to search for a missing spy, the man whose story is said to have inspired a famous imperial adventure novel. They find themselves caught in an intrigue that involves more than one government's interests in the region, and the search has to be conducted behind cover.
Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen when she first heard of the man who had been the gardener to the Emperor of Japan, and a war and a decade would pass before she travelled up to the Garden of Evening Mists in 1951 to see him. A survivor of a Japanese camp, she has been helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, and she asks the gardener to create a memorial garden for her sister.
Henry Montague was raised to be a gentleman and has spent his life avoiding it, with the gambling halls and the late nights and the company of whoever he pleased. His father's last attempt at reform is a grand tour of Europe with his best friend and his sister, and the tour goes wrong almost immediately when somebody else's property ends up in his hands.
The Ghost Map is a work of popular history by Steven Johnson about a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and about the physician whose investigation of it changed how people thought about disease. It also takes in the growth of cities in the nineteenth century and the beginnings of modern epidemiology.
The Ghost Road is the last book of a trilogy about shell-shocked British officers at the end of the First World War. Its main figures are the real psychoanalyst William Rivers and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, who has been treated for shell shock and is preparing to go back to France.
Rajkumar is a poor boy in Burma when the British invade in 1885, and he is there when the royal family is taken out of their palace and sent into exile. He becomes friends with Dolly, one of the queen's attendants, and from that beginning he builds a life in the Burmese timber trade, and a family whose story runs through the century that follows.
It began as a problem in one of Holmes's beehives, led to a murderous cult, and appeared to end with an escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have stirred the anger and the resources of the people they thwarted, and now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police and pursued across the Continent.
Wang Lung is a Chinese farmer who works his land and takes pride in it, and the novel follows him and his wife O-Lan from poverty to a position where the family of the great house nearby is no longer above him. The land is what he holds on to and what he loses sight of.
The Joads are a poor family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, changes in the agricultural industry and bank foreclosures. They take to the road in a battered truck and head for California to look for work, and find hundreds of others in the same position, forced to accept breadline wages. They begin as fruit pickers, and then as strikebreakers.
In January 1946 Juliet Ashton is a London writer looking for her next subject when a stranger from the island of Guernsey writes to her about a book that once had her name written in it. He belongs to the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a reading group that began as an alibi when its members were caught breaking curfew during the German occupation. The novel is told in letters, telegrams and diary entries as Juliet gets to know the islanders and what the occupation did to them.
Tom Barton and his uncle Jack are smugglers, and they are good at it: quick wits, a fast vessel and secret cargo holds have kept them ahead of the authorities for years. What they are carrying through Europe in the 1500s is more dangerous than the goods they usually run, and the people who want it stopped have the power of the law behind them.
In 1972, workers digging foundations in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, find a skeleton at the bottom of a well, and a mezuzah found beside it points the police towards the town's only Jewish resident. A hurricane then washes the scene away, and the novel travels back to the 1920s and 1930s and to Chicken Hill, where Black and Jewish families lived side by side and where a deaf boy needed hiding.
Lady Averill Mortagne has spent years learning to control a fierce temper, and her father's habit of parading her in front of English lords who look sideways at her flame-coloured hair is testing it. Her only relief is the time she spends with Kade Stewart, a wounded Scot her brother brought home from the Crusades. He is grateful to her for helping save his life, and he does not think he could subject a gentle lady to the life of a laird's bride.
It is 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi. Skeeter has returned home after graduating from university, and her mother will not be satisfied until she has a ring on her finger. Aibileen is a Black maid raising her seventeenth white child, changed by the death of her own son. Minny is her closest friend and the sassiest woman in the state, and cannot keep her opinions to herself. The three of them take one step together.
A devastating palace fire has killed the royal family of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, leaving Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen Nefertiti, as a survivor whose family has been branded heretical. She is pushed aside and left to run wild in the palace until the Pharaoh's aunt takes her in hand and has her educated as a future queen. Then she catches the eye of the crown prince, and much of Egypt objects to the match.
Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs has been unhappy since her mother's death, living like a servant on her father's farm near Lancaster under the thumb of her father and three sullen brothers, doing the cooking and cleaning. When her father tells her she can no longer go to school, she runs away, becomes a hired girl on six dollars a week, and sets out to become her own young woman.
Squire Allworthy comes home from a trip to London and finds a baby asleep in his bed. He decides to raise the foundling, calls him Tom Jones, and the boy grows up beside the squire's nephew and near the daughter of a neighbouring landowner. Tom is generous, careless, good-natured and always in trouble, and his feelings for Sophia Western are the beginning of a long journey.
Little Nettlebed is a village where the uncanny is part of ordinary life: strange creatures wash up on the riverbed and ravens settle on the roofs of people who are about to die. Then the villagers begin to hear barking at night, and one of them claims that he has watched the Mansfield sisters change shape in front of him in the lane outside his own house.
London, 1890, and a fine art dealer named Edmund Carstairs comes to Baker Street to ask for help. A man in a flat cap has followed him all the way from America and means him harm, and in the days that follow his house is robbed and his family is threatened, so that a case beginning as a matter of intimidation leads somewhere the doctor is careful about setting down.
Hugo Cabret is an orphan living in the walls of a busy Paris train station in the 1930s, keeping the station clocks and stealing what he needs to repair an automaton his father left him. His thefts bring him to the attention of a toy-seller, and to the story of the man behind the machine.
Hetty Grimke, known as Handful, is an enslaved girl in an early nineteenth-century Charleston household, and she wants a life on the other side of its walls. Sarah Grimke grows up in the same house certain that she is meant for something large, and on her eleventh birthday the two of them are handed a relationship neither of them chose.
The Ionian Mission is the eighth of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, first published in 1981. It begins with a marriage and a spell of blockade duty off Toulon, and it ends with the two of them sent to the Greek islands to look for a new ally among the pashas.
The novel follows a Lithuanian immigrant family in the Chicago stockyards at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it exposes the conditions of their working lives. Sinclair set out to show the odds against immigrants and other working people who were trying to secure a share of the American dream, and the book instead became a national scandal about the meatpacking industry.
Iliana Wildwood is being pressed into marriage by a baron who wants her lands, and her answer is to run for the Highlands and marry a Scottish laird instead. Duncan of Dunbar Castle is a warrior with a household and a reputation, and the wife who arrives with her own reasons for the marriage is not what he expected to be sent.
The Battle of Gettysburg is told over three days from the point of view of the officers who fought it, among them Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet for the South and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain for the North. The novel follows their decisions and the ground they have to take or hold, with the outcome of the war resting on them.
Danielle D'Aville is the ward of Edward III, and she is sworn to obey the King's order that she marry her enemy: Adrien MacLachlan, the Scottish knight who masterminded the fall of Aville, the home she loved. She becomes the reluctant wife of a man she has promised herself she will despise, and she is carried off to his castle in the Scottish Highlands.
Amir grows up in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, the son of a wealthy man, and his closest friend is Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Their friendship is shaped by the inequality between them. The novel follows Amir into adulthood, through the Soviet invasion, the flight of Afghan refugees and the rise of the Taliban, as he reckons with an act of betrayal he committed as a boy.
Harrison William Shepherd is born in the United States and grows up in his mother's Mexico, where he mixes plaster for the mural painter Diego Rivera and then cooks for Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. He also works as a secretary for Leon Trotsky during his exile, and the politics he witnesses there follow him north.
Paul-Edward Logan is the son of a prosperous white landowner and a woman of Black and Native American ancestry, and he is raised openly by his father in Georgia after the Civil War. He looks white, which means Black people distrust him and white people turn on him when they learn about his mother, and he has to find a place of his own.
Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes come home to Sussex in 1924 after seven months travelling in India and Japan, and within days Holmes's estranged son arrives asking for help. A woman and a child have disappeared, the search leads into a religious community in the English countryside and then to Scotland, and the whole case is bound up with the personal failure Holmes has never been able to settle.
When the last of the Roman legions leaves Britain, a young officer named Aquila decides that his loyalty belongs to the country he was born in rather than to Rome. He joins the forces of a Roman-British leader to fight the Saxons. The country has to be held together after the legions go.
A captain in the Confederate cavalry is in the middle of a battle when the air around him turns to a strange mist, and he finds himself somewhere he does not recognise. A woman dressed in the clothes of a different century takes him prisoner, and neither of them knows how they came to be there.
Frank Morgan is a gunfighting legend, and he is about to come face to face with another kind of legend, one that stalks the woods of northern California. The loggers call it the Terror of the Redwoods: something that kills like an animal, growling, clawing and ripping. A local timber baron has put a bounty on the creature, and the woods are full of hunters who are bound to hurt somebody.
In 866 the Danes attack Northumbria and kill the father of ten-year-old Uhtred, who is taken as a boy by the Danish earl who raised him and taught him to fight. When events send him into the service of Alfred of Wessex, Uhtred has to choose between the culture that made him and the kingdom that needs him.
During the French and Indian War the daughters of a British commander are escorted through the wilderness towards a fort under siege, accompanied by an outlawed scout called Hawkeye and two Mohican men, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. The journey becomes a pursuit by enemy forces and by Huron warriors after a guide betrays the party.
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