50 Heart-Pounding Historical Novels to Read Right Now

By Caroline Rogers
September 28, 2017
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While actual time travel isn’t always the most appealing prospect, one way we can sate our historical nostalgia is by reading— reading as broadly as possible. These historical novels transport readers across the world and across the centuries. Their pages open to a New York stop on the Underground Railroad, 1940s Dublin, the Kansas frontier in the year 1870, and 1960s Nigeria, for starters. They bring readers into the presence of George Washington during the Revolutionary War, the landscape of Ukraine just after the German invasion of 1941, and the 1866 gold rush that shook New Zealand. From England to Ghana to China and around the world again, the best historical fiction reimagines geographies and time periods long since past, drawing out the magical, the surprising, and the moving in eras that have long captivated our imaginations. Historical fiction novels bring history to life through details richly wrought. They expand our perspectives, putting the past in present tense in order to see it more clearly. These books share stories that are impossible to forget.
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The Hidden Light of Northern Fires by Daren Wang

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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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The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

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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 Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

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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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The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

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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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All Is Beauty Now by Sarah Faber

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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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Isadora by Amelia Gray

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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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Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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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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Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

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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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In the Name of the Family by Sarah Dunant

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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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Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller

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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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The Man Who Could Be King by John Ripin Miller

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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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The Diplomat’s Daughter by Karin Tanabe

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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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The Vineyard by Maria Duenas

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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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A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert

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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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Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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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 slaveholder; 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 by Hilary Mantel

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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 HallandBring Up the Bodies, are also fantastic (and Booker-winning) forays into Mantel’s historical fiction.

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

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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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Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

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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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To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey

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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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The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

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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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The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

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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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Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

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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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The Known World by Edward P. Jones

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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 slaveholder, his widow, and the world in which they live.

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Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

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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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Grace by Paul Lynch

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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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Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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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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Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

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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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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

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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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News of the World by Paulette Jiles

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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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Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

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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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A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin

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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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