Top 100 Historical Fiction Books

📘 The Book Thief

The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Little Women

The beloved classic of American literature, Little Women, narrates the adventures of four March sisters as they grow up during the Civil War era.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Beloved

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or as it is known in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 All the Light We Cannot See

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Le Comte de Monte Cristo

xxix, 608 pages ; 21 cm

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Catch-22

Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Laut Bercerita

Di sebuah senja, di sebuah rumah susun di Jakarta, mahasiswa bernama Biru Laut disergap empat lelaki tak dikenal. Bersama kawan-kawannya, Daniel Tumbuan, Sunu Dyantoro, Alex Perazon, dia dibawa ke sebuah tempat yang tak dikenal.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Number the Stars

Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend, Ellen Rosen, often think about life before the war. But it's now 1943, and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching in their town. The Nazis won't stop.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Help

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Esperanza Rising

Mexican farm workers must adjust to life in California during the Great Depression.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Les Misérables

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow is a 2016 novel by Amor Towles. It is his second novel, published five years after his New York Times best seller, Rules of Civility (2011).

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Im Westen nichts Neues

This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Gone With the Wind

Margaret Mitchell's monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written: more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Pillars of the Earth

A historical novel set in the 12th century, focusing on the building of a cathedral and the surrounding community's fortunes amidst historical events of the time.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Medieval Historical Fiction

📘 Inside Out & Back Again

Inside Out & Back Again is a verse novel by Thanhha Lai. The book was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and one of the two Newbery Honors. The novel was based on her first year in the United States, as a ten-year-old girl who spoke no English in 1975.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Nightingale

Despite their differences, sisters Vianne and Isabelle have always been close. Younger, bolder Isabelle lives in Paris while Vianne is content with life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Jungle

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Daisy Jones & The Six

A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up. Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the real reason why they split at the absolute height of their popularity…until now. Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Published in 2006 by Fourth Estate, the novel tells the story of the Biafran War through the perspective of the characters Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Hired Girl

Ever since the untimely death of her mother, 14 year-old Joan Skraggs has been desperately unhappy. Under the thumb of her cruel father and three sullen brothers, Joan lives like a servant on their farm just outside of Lancaster, forever cooking, cleaning, and attending to the many demands of the home.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The secret life of bees

Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Pachinko

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Palace of Illusions

A reimagining of the epic tale of the Mahabharat, told from the perspective of Panchaali, the wife of the Pandavas, as she balances her wives' kingdoms and faces the threats of war and betrayal.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 Little House on the Prairie

When Laura Ingalls and her family leave their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, they head west for the open prairie skies of Kansas Territory. They travel for many days in their covered wagon until they find the perfect spot for Pa to build them a new home.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall is a 2009 historical novel by Hilary Mantel that follows Thomas Cromwell’s rise in Henry VIII’s Tudor court from 1500 to 1535, earning the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Medieval Historical Fiction

📘 Roots

Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 David Copperfield

T adds to the charm of this book to remember that it is virtually a picture of the author's own boyhood. It is an excellent picture of the life of a struggling English youth in the middle of the last century.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Memoirs of a Geisha

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Cloud Atlas

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 And the Mountains Echoed

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Tattooist of Auschwitz: the heart-breaking and unforgettable international bestseller

This beautiful, illuminating tale of hope and courage is based on interviews that were conducted with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov - an unforgettable love story in the midst of atrocity.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Homegoing

Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Remains of the Day

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Kane & Abel

Kane and Abel is a 1979 novel by British author Jeffrey Archer. Released in the United Kingdom in 1979 and in the United States in February 1980, the book was an international success. It reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. The sequel to Kane and Abel is The Prodigal Daughter, in which Florentyna Kane is the protagonist.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Middlemarch

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Noli Me Tangere

The book revolves on the struggles of young Crisostomo Ibarra: how he humbly fights for his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, for himself and for his fellowmen against the Spanish priest Padre Damaso and the Spanish Government who were then conquerors of San Diego, his native hometown.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 L'amica geniale

Care lettrici, cari lettori, provate a leggere questo libro e vorrete che non finisca mai. Elena Ferrante, con il suo nuovo romanzo, torna a sorprenderci, a spiazzarci, regalandoci una narrazione-fiume cui ci si affida come quando si fa un viaggio con un tale piacevole agio, con un tale intenso coinvolgimento, che la meta più è lontana e meglio è.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

Hiroshima-born Sadako is lively and athletic--the star of her school's running team. And then the dizzy spells start. Soon gravely ill with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease," Sadako faces her future with spirit and bravery. Recalling a Japanese legend, Sadako sets to work folding paper cranes.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Alias Grace

A gripping historical mystery about a woman's unjustly condemned life and the pursuit of truth in the 19th-century Canada.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Liebeszauber

A story of the intertwined fates of the Kashpaws and the Lamartines near a North Dakota reservation from 1934 to 1984.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The war that Saved my Life

Nine-year-old Ada has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada’s twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn’t waste a minute—she sneaks out to join him.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Bronze Bow

After witnessing his father's crucifixion by Roman soldiers, Daniel bar Jamin is fired by a single passion: to avenge his father's death by driving the Roman legions from the land of Israel. Consumed by hatred, Daniel joins the brutal raids of an outlaw band living in the hills outside his village.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 Palace of Illusions

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 The Good Earth

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Water for Elephants

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Sarah, plain and tall

Sarah, Plain and Tall Saga

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Poor things

A fantastical historical tale set in Scotland, exploring themes of masculinity and ambition, presented as a 19th-century manuscript discovery.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Girl with a Pearl Earring

This book "centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Last of the Mohicans

The classic tale of Hawkeye—Natty Bumppo—the frontier scout who turned his back on "civilization," and his friendship with a Mohican warrior as they escort two sisters through the dangerous wilderness of Indian country in frontier America.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Moi, Tituba, Sorcière…Noire de Salem

Offered here for the first time in English is I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem, by Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Salt to the Sea

Salt to the Sea is a 2016 historical fiction young adult novel by Ruta Sepetys. It tells the story of four individuals in World War II who make their way to the ill-fated MV Wilhelm Gustloff. The story also touches on the disappearance of the Amber Room, a world-famous, ornately decorated chamber stolen by the Nazis that has never been recovered.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Code talker

After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Between Shades of Gray

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they’ve known.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Exodus

A novel about the struggle to establish the modern state of Israel, the story concerns a plan to smuggle Jewish refugees from a detention camp in Cyprus to Palestine.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 War Horse

In the deadly chaos of the First World War, one horse witnesses the reality of battle from both sides of the trenches.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Доктор Живаго

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Before We Were Yours

In this poignant novel, inspired by a true story, two families, generations apart, are forever changed by a heartbreaking injustice. Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi River shantyboat.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Underground Railroad

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Jazz

It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Valley of Horses

Cast out of the Clan that is all she has ever known, Ayla, a Cro-Magnon woman raised by Neanderthals, ventures forth alone into a strange world. Resourceful and inventive, Ayla is able to craft a comfortable life for herself, but her loneliness and longing for the family she once knew is almost unbearable.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 Voice in the Wind

A compelling romance set against the backdrop of the decline of the Roman Empire, featuring a bond between a slave and a gladiator.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound, a "red badge of courage," to counteract his cowardice.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 On the Banks of Plum Creek

Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Master and Commander

This is book 1 in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Here is the maiden voyage of O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin series, which follows the unique friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 A Lesson Before Dying

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Concrete Rose

If there’s one thing seventeen-year-old Maverick Carter knows, it’s that a real man takes care of his family. As the son of a former gang legend, Mav does that the only way he knows how: dealing for the King Lords. With this money he can help his mom, who works two jobs while his dad’s in prison.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 I Survived The Nazi Invasion, 1944

I love this book. It's about 10-year old max and his little sister who go through WW||. So, WW|| in a kid's point of view :D

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Mémoires d'Hadrien

*Mémoires d'Hadrien* est un roman historique de l'écrivaine française Marguerite Yourcenar, publié en 1951. Ces pseudo-mémoires de l'empereur romain Hadrien ont immédiatement rencontré un extraordinaire succès international et assuré à son auteur une grande célébrité. Il s’agit d’une œuvre dont le projet remonte à l’adolescence de l’autrice.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 Caddie Woodlawn

Caddie Woodlawn is a children's historical fiction novel by Carol Ryrie Brink which received the Newbery Medal in 1936 and a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958. The original 1935 edition was illustrated by Newbery-award-winning author and illustrator Kate Seredy. Macmillan released a later edition in 1973, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers." January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Daisy Miller

A beautiful American girl, Daisy Miller, is pursued by the sophisticated Winterbourne, who moves in fairly conservative circles. Their courtship is frowned upon by the other Americans they meet in Switzerland and Italy because Daisy is too vivacious and flirtatious and neither belongs to, nor follows the rules of, their society.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 An echo in the darkness

Marcus's journey into Christianity changes the course of his life and the course of history.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 Die Blechtrommel

A dwarf in Nazi Germany who can break glass with his voice becomes embroiled in the lives of his neighbors and the history of Danzig.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Fever 1793

It's late summer 1793, and the streets of Philadelphia are abuzz with mosquitoes and rumors of fever. Down near the docks, many have taken ill, and the fatalities are mounting. Now they include Polly, the serving girl at the Cook Coffeehouse. But fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook doesn't get a moment to mourn the passing of her childhood playmate.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 In the Time of the Butterflies

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Red tea

Tea plantations in India during the British Raj. Exploitation of impoverished villagers of the plains of South India forcibly taken to the Eastern Ghat hills tea plantations as labour.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Go Set A Watchman

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout" -- returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 A Painted House

Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 The Killer Angels

*The Killer Angels* (1974) is a historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 A single shard

In this Newbery Medal-winning book set in 12th century Korea, Tree-ear, a 13-year-old orphan, lives under a bridge in Ch’ulp’o, a potters' village famed for delicate celadon ware. He has become fascinated with the potter’s craft; he wants nothing more than to watch master potter Min at work, and he dreams of making a pot of his own someday.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Medieval Historical Fiction

📘 The farming of bones

It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haitian border. Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a maid to the young wife of an army colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Hamnet

In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Medieval Historical Fiction

📘 Boy of the pyramids

At any time and in any place, when there is a mystery to be solved, a ten-year-old boy will want to have a hand in it. So it was with Kaffe, an Egyptian boy of long ago. With his friend Sari, a slave-girl, Kaffe had many adventures—the harvest feast, the fight of the bulls, the flood.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Ancient Historical Fiction

📘 Kim

Kim is Rudyard Kipling's story of an orphan born in colonial India and torn between love for his native India and the demands of Imperial loyalty to his Irish-English heritage and to the British Secret Service. Long recognized as Kipling's finest work, Kim was a key factor in his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Obasan

224 pages ; 21 cm

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Suite française

A poignant and intimate historical novel set during World War II, Suite française by Irène Némirovsky vividly depicts the desperate situation of a war-torn France.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 20th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Narziss und Goldmund

First published in 1930, Narcissus and Goldmund is the story of two diametrically opposite men: one, an ascetic monk firm in his religious commitment, and the other, a romantic youth hungry for worldly experience. Hesse was a great writer in precisely the modern sense: complex, subtle, allusive: alive to the importance of play.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Medieval Historical Fiction

📘 The Door in the Wall

From the back cover of Scholastic Inc. copy of this book: By Marguerite de Angeli, recipient of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the Regina Medal, and the Newberry Medal. The bells clang above plague-ridden London as Robin lies helpless, cold, and hungry.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Medieval Historical Fiction

📘 The longest memory

Written in taut, poetic language, THE LONGEST MEMORY is set on a Virginian plantation in the 19th century, and tells the tragic story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave who breaks all the rules: in learning to read and write, in falling in love with a white girl, the daughter of his owner, and, finally, in trying to escape and join h...

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Little Town on the Prairie

Pa's homestead thrives, Laura gets her first job in town, blackbirds eat the corn and oats crops, Mary goes to college, and Laura gets into trouble at school, but becomes a certified school teacher.

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: 19th Century Historical Fiction

📘 Bring Up the Bodies

Historical Fiction Novel by Hilary Mantel

Genre: Historical Fiction Subgenre: Medieval Historical Fiction