50 Heart-Pounding Historical Novels to Read Right Now

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Daren Wang’s beautifully researched debut tells the story of Mary Willis, an abolitionist living in the only secessionist town north of the Mason-Dixon line at the advent of the Civil War.

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John Boyne’s latest traces the steps of one man, Cyril Avery, who was adopted at birth by a couple living in Dublin. The book examines his life over decades—from 1940s Ireland to today—as he attempts to uncover and understand his own history.

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The late 1800s play host to this lush epic, about a widow named Cora Seaborne whose curiosity leads her to England’s Essex countryside—and to the legend of the Essex Serpent, which locals say has resurfaced after a centuries-long dormancy.

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Alexander Chee’s glorious tale draws on historical figures to construct a glittering world of music and intrigue. This novel introduces readers to Lillie Berne, a famed opera singer in late 17th century Paris who is swept up in a mystery when she is offered an original role in an opera with a plot that is oddly familiar to her.

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Open Sarah Faber’s All Is Beauty Now to be transported to Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s. This story excavates the aftermath of one family’s loss and the challenge of starting again in a new landscape while still carrying the guilt and strife of years past.

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This luminous novel is built on the facts of the life of Isadora Duncan, an infamous and boundary-breaking dancer of the early 20th century whose days were marked by tragedy, passion, creativity, and travel throughout Europe. 

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s moving novel is set in the late 1960s in eastern Nigeria, a time of tumult in which the Republic of Biafra struggled to establish an independent state.

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Jennifer Egan’s latest transports readers to 1940s New York, where the first female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard uncovers secrets about her family and her missing father when a figure from her past re-enters her life.

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This novel immerses readers in the Italian Renaissance, examining the House of Borgia—Rodrigo, Lucrezia, Cesare, and the rest of the dynasty—with the immediacy of a thriller.

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Travel once again to the frontier alongside the Ingalls in this book by Sarah Miller. Authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust, this novel animates life on the frontier through the eyes of Caroline “Ma” Ingalls and with the sort of sensorial splendor that has made the Little House books such classics.

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Step into the U.S. Revolutionary War alongside General George Washington and his aide Josiah Penn Stockbridge at a pivotal moment in the general’s leadership—a moment which has the potential to shape the country’s future.

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This story of loves lost and found centers on three young people whose lives are disrupted and cleaved apart by the turmoil of World War II. The novel moves from a Texas internment camp to wartime Japan, Shanghai, and the South Pacific. 

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This beautifully crafted novel is set in the 1860s and moves from Mexico to bustling Havana, Cuba, and then to Spain as a family’s triumphs and turbulences both threaten their legacies and promise to rebuild their futures.

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Ukraine in the year 1941 is the setting for this historical novel, a complex and moving story of a town invaded, threatened, and torn apart during the German occupation of World War II.

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After their births in 18th-century Ghana, the lives of two half sisters—Effia and Esi—diverge sharply. Esi is sold into slavery and Effia marries a British slaver; through their eyes and the eyes of their family, Yaa Gyasi brings to vivid life the landscapes of 1700s-era America and Ghana.

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A Place of Greater Safety is Hilary Mantel’s epic about the French Revolution and the people whose lives are enlarged, enriched, and engulfed by it. Her novels about Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, are also fantastic (and Booker-winning) forays into Mantel’s historical fiction.

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Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book is about cousins Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, who join forces in 1939 New York to storm the Golden Age of comic books and introduce a hero called The Escapist.

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Helen Oyeyemi’s luminous book is a retelling of the Snow White tale and also illuminates issues of family, vanity, relationships, race, and identity. The story begins in Massachusetts in 1953, when Boy Novak arrives in search of a new life after leaving New York.

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The stark and untamed landscape of 1885 Alaska is the setting of this wonderfully vivid historical novel by Eowyn Ivey, which follows the expeditions of Colonel Allen Forrester who is recording his ventures in a journal for his wife, Sophie.

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Open this late-medieval mystery to be transported to Italy in 1327, to the center of a scandal, a series of murders, and an investigation in which logic, clues, symbols, and religion collide.

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Michael Ondaatje’s evocative Booker Prize-winning novel is set in a deserted Italian villa at the close of World War II. The book’s four central characters—Hana, Caravaggio, Kip, and the English patient—struggle against the past while trying to understand the present.

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Immerse yourself in the rugged world of California’s 1849 Gold Rush alongside a young Chilean woman named Eliza Sommers, an orphan who moves from Valparaiso to the U.S. in search of a new life.

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Edward P. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is set in Virginia two decades before the advent of the Civil War and excavates the heartrending complexities and moral fault lines of an African-American slave-owner, his widow, and the world in which they live. 

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Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West reimagines the classic Western novel as only McCarthy can. It takes place on the border between Texas and Mexico in the 1850s.

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In 19th-century Ireland, with the Great Famine looming, a young girl named Grace embarks on a journey and comes of age across a landscape rife with suffering and flashes of beauty.

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A young Korean woman named Sunja leaves her home to start a new life in this generational epic that begins in early-20th-century Japan. Her choices engender consequences that echo through the decades.

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The microcosm of the Sandvoort household—including merchant Cornelis, his wife, Sophia, their staff, and a visiting portrait painter, Jan van Loos—is thrown into tumult when passions and betrayals arise, mirroring the frenzy of 1630s Amsterdam, a decade in which the tulip trade takes intoxicating hold.

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In Kindred, Octavia E. Butler combines history with science fiction to create a visceral, terrifying, and heart-wrenching vision of time travel when Dana, a young African-American woman, is transported to the antebellum South.

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Travel alongside Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd and an orphan named Johanna in 1870s Texas as they embark on a 400-mile journey through dangerous terrain toward an unknown end.

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Drop into old New York in the year 1746 as the arrival of a heretofore-unknown Mr. Smith sets the community atwitter with distrust and curiosity.

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In this gleaming novel by Mark Helprin, an Italian man named Alessandro Giuliani recounts his life story to a companion as they walk together. In his story are truths, beauty, the years he spent fighting in World War I, his family, and an unending search for grace.

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James McBride’s National Book Award-winning novel follows a young boy named Henry Shackleford who escapes slavery in 1857 by disguising himself as a girl and joining the peripatetic adventures of abolitionist John Brown.

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Brothers Francis and Michael escape to late-1930s New York City from Ireland—with a stolen bounty from the IRA in tow. What follows is an epic populated with memorable characters moving across vivid and varied metropolitan geographies.

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Embark on an adventure in the midst of New Zealand’s gold rush alongside treasure-seeker Walter Moody in Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Set in 1866, The Luminaries is a layered, gorgeous, compulsively readable book dense with thrilling history and poetic prose.

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Post-World War II England finds the main character of this novel, a butler called Stevens, questioning the purpose of his life, which was once the unshakeable service of Darlington Hall and its patriarch, Lord Darlington.

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Toni Morrison’s haunting 2008 novel is set America in the 1680s. Multiple narrators describe life on a rural farm through spare and suspenseful prose; they struggle with life, disease, slavery, and gender, a microcosm of the world’s strife encapsulated in Jacob Vaark’s New York farm.

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Barren Island is set on a factory island, one situated in New York’s Jamaica Bay, which operated from the mid-1800s to the 1930s; it tells the stories of the people who lived and worked there, including the fraught and fascinating lives of the Eisenstein family and their neighbors.

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Marlon James sets his 2015 Booker Prize-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, in late-1970s Jamaica to explore a time of political and social upheavals. James examines life in Kingston through a thrilling web of stories connected by the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley; the stories cross continents, spinning out through the decades.  

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Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s debut novel delves into three generations of a New Orleans family. It follows Evelyn, her daughter, Jackie, and grandson, T.C., over 70 years, through decades in which family bonds are tested and in which society's racial inequalities continue unchecked.

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In The Miniaturist, Jessie Burton introduces readers to 18-year-old Nella Oortman, a young married woman living in 17th-century Amsterdam, whose dull new life sparks with excitement when her husband, Johannes, gifts her a replica of their home, but in miniature.

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Ian McEwan’s haunting novel begins in the English countryside in 1935 when young Briony Tallis makes a choice—a choice with consequences that affect her life and the lives of members of her family throughout the century.

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Set during the Gilded Age in New York City, The Alienist unravels a mystery of murder and psychology set against the backdrop of the gritty and gleaming city.

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This engaging novel by Amor Towles finds Count Alexander Rostov under house arrest in The Metropol, a hotel neighboring the Kremlin. He is confined within the walls (and surrounded by fascinating characters) while the era’s conflict and change clamor outside.

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In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood introduces readers to Grace Marks, a young woman living in Canada in 1843 who is convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. When a doctor attempts to recover her memories of the crime, new troubles emerge. 

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Edwidge Danticat’s powerful 1998 novel is set in the Dominican Republic in 1937. In it, a young Haitian woman named Amabelle Desir must flee political and genocidal violence and return to Haiti, a place that is both home and not home to her.

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Geraldine Brooks’ March reimagines the Alcott classic Little Women by bringing to life Mr. March, the absent father who leaves his home and family in Massachusetts in order to fight in the Civil War.