Recommended Historical Novels?

[Bastet]

Hello! I love historical novels and I'm trying to find some new ones to read. Any suggestions? Thank you!

[ShoutGrace]

"To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research).

We also consider the following styles of novel to be historical fiction for our purposes: alternate histories (e.g. Robert Harris' Fatherland), pseudo-histories (eg. Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before), time-slip novels (e.g. Barbara Erskine's Lady of Hay), historical fantasies (eg. Bernard Cornwell's King Arthur trilogy) and multiple-time novels (e.g. Michael Cunningham's The Hours)."



I may be off on the idea of what a historic novel is, but I really enjoyed 'Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc' by Mark Twain. I also liked 'Trinity' 'The Caine Mutiny' 'Shike' and 'Shogun'.

"I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none." - Mark Twain

[Chava]

I know lots of great Danish ones, but i have a friend who's reading .. "The highlander series"? i think that's what it's called, by Diana Gabaldon. She's crazy about them, bt personally i wasn't all that impressed. It's about the Scott's war against the english back in the days of Prince Charles.

[Manfred]

I enjoyed the "Flashman" novels by George MacDonald Fraser, but they may not be to everyone's taste, and they're certainly not "great" literature, if that's what you're looking for.

[Bastet]

Hello Manfred, as far as the 'great' literature thing, I'm keeping an open mind when asking for suggestions, so I appreciate ideas of any type. Yours seem interesting indeed :)

To everybody else, thank you for your suggestions so far, please keep going! ;)

[PeterL]

In addition to the Flashman series, already mentioned, you might want to look at Thomas Costain's Plantagenet books, which are actually history, and the Arundel series by Kenneth Roberts are excellent. They tell of a family in Maine from the 1770's until some time in the 1820's; "Arundel" and "Rabble in Arms" deal with the American Revolution very nicely.

[genoveva]

ShoutGrace, where are you quoting that definition of a historical novel?
I recently read Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune (Chile to CA history esp. gold rush days) and Sandra Benitez's Bitter Grounds (El Salvador revolution). I thoroughly enjoyed both of these.

[papayahed]

How about Caleb Carr? He wrote the Alienist and something else, both pretty good books.

[ShoutGrace]

ShoutGrace, where are you quoting that definition of a historical novel?

Just some random website. Can't really remember which one . . . I might have done something simple like Google 'historical novel'.

Did anybody read the Dorothy Dunnett series? That series is something of a cult classic. It's fans are quite feverous.

[Boris239]

Historical novel is very general. Are you interested in something concrete(like country or time period)?

Here is what I enjoyed:
Maurice Druon "Cursed Kings" - series about France in the first half of the 14th century before 100 years war.
Leon Feihtvanger- I like a lot of his novels especially "Spanish ballad", "Success", "Judaic war"
Raffaelo Giovagnoli "Spartacus"
Arthur Conan Doyle "White Company"
Victor Hugo "93rd year"

[grace86]

I heard Caleb Carr was pretty good..and that was from someone who doesn't normally read...she wore the covers out! I borrowed the Alienist and Angel of Darkness, but I never had the chance to read them.

Sarah Dunant recently came out with some historical Novels. They are kind of love story history novels. I read The Birth of Venus...I had recently studied Italy and the Renaissance so I thought it was wonderful. I am not sure what her new one is about: In the Company of the Courtesan.

Good luck with your search Bastet.

[bazarov]

Anything from Alexandre Dumas Jr., it's on authors list.

[Boris239]

I heard Caleb Carr was pretty good..and that was from someone who doesn't normally read...she wore the covers out! I borrowed the Alienist and Angel of Darkness, but I never had the chance to read them.

Sarah Dunant recently came out with some historical Novels. They are kind of love story history novels. I read The Birth of Venus...I had recently studied Italy and the Renaissance so I thought it was wonderful. I am not sure what her new one is about: In the Company of the Courtesan.

Good luck with your search Bastet.

Love story historical novels? So are the novels about Angelica historical? I was always a bit skeptical about this kind of history

[Boris239]

Anything from Alexandre Dumas Jr., it's on authors list.

Jr? I know only about "La Dame aux Camelias". You probably meant Dumas Sr

[Bastet]

Thank you Grace86 :) Everybody's doing a great job with their suggestions. Everything sounds interesting! I think I'm gonna be reading for a loooong time! ;)

Boris 239, I'm not really interested in anything specific. There are two books that I enjoyed that I can remember at the top of my head: London (Edward Rutherfurd) and The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follet). The Illuminator (Brenda Rickman Vantrease) was also entertaining. Like I said before, I'm keeping an open mind to suggestions though because I wanna know different things from what I'm used to. And they don't even need to be novels about something that happened (historic non-fiction) but they can also be fiction set on a different time (like the ones I mentioned before), that is, historical fiction.

Once again, thank you so much to everyone! :)

[crazefest456]

How about Devil in the White City ? It's set around the columbian expo in chicago...

[grace86]

Anytime. You are very welcome Bastet.

[Idril]

I know lots of great Danish ones, but i have a friend who's reading .. "The highlander series"? i think that's what it's called, by Diana Gabaldon. She's crazy about them, bt personally i wasn't all that impressed. It's about the Scott's war against the english back in the days of Prince Charles.

Those are a good choice if you like a healthy dose of smut along with your historical fiction. ;) :lol: Eventually, the action moves to the Americas around the time of the Revolution, a different tone but still a good amount of smut.

I really thought of War and Peace as great historical fiction, it gives you a very intimate look at Napoleon's attempt at taking Russia. Q by Luther Blisset is a great look at the Reformation, not necessarily the actual Reformation but reprecussions of it and the many divisions within the church it caused, it focuses primarily on the Anabaptists which is a group I didn't know a lot about before I read the novel. Turns out, they were a fairly violent bunch.

[genoveva]

"To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research)."
-from ShoutGrace's definition

...is this uniformly accepted as what defines a historical novel? It seems like the author could be alive when the events described took place and still be considered a historical novel. ??

[genoveva]

How about Devil in the White City ? It's set around the columbian expo in chicago...
I have heard that this is an excellent book!

[slipperyyoke]

Get your hands on some works by James A. Michener. Titles such as "Poland", "Alaska", "Caribbean", "Chesapeake", "Iberia", etc.

[Asa Adams]

churchills collection on world war 2. They were all very well written, however they arent fiction, unless you dont mind.

[SmokeBellew]

How about Valerio Massimo Manfredi???

I have 2 books of his Alexander trilogy:
Sands Of Ammon
The Ends Of The Earth

both of them are worth reading indeed.
I'm planning soon to get his "The Last Legion" and finish it till the end of this summer. People say it's a nice read too.

He has other historical novels but I yet have to save some money and buy them. Maybe in a few months, but not now.

[Fray]

Some historical fiction novels that I like are:

The Scourge of God
Hadrian's Wall
D'Artagnan Cycle
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Ten Thousand

[grace86]

Love story historical novels? So are the novels about Angelica historical? I was always a bit skeptical about this kind of history


Boris, were you asking me this question? I am not quite sure what you meant to ask me...Angelica?

[Reason is a cow]

The best historical novel that I've ever read was The Three Musketeers (Dumas), if you consider that historical. :)

[mono]

Odd that I never noticed this thread, but if I could recommend any historical novel, I would definitely choose The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio - a novel, but also collection of short stories, reminiscent of the times in Europe (particularly Italy) during the Black Bubonic Plague.
Others worth reading: A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (some may consider this historical fiction), and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

[Bastet]

Hello everyone! Once again thank you for your suggestions :)
Fray, who is Hadrian's Wall by? Is there a lot of warfare included in the novel?

[Cormeister37]

I, Claudius by Robert Graves!

[Robert Jordan]

James Clavell has written the best historical fiction I've ever read. Just read Shogun. If you like historical fiction then this will probably end up being your favorite book of all time. After that read his entire Asian Saga. You will not be let down!

[Redzeppelin]

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose was brilliant - a kind of medieval who-done-it taking place at a monastery with a really cool Sherlock Holmes style monk trying to solve mysterious murders at the monastery.

[JBI]

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose was brilliant - a kind of medieval who-done-it taking place at a monastery with a really cool Sherlock Holmes style monk trying to solve mysterious murders at the monastery.

Yeah, he also did another medieval one entitled Baudolino, though it met with far less success (I still enjoyed it, though I know many who didn't).

I would toss in there Sir Walter Scott's Histories (most notably Rob Roy and Ivanhoe) and of course Salman Rushdie's work, more specifically Midnight's Children (though not really historical fiction, it deals a lot with the history of India).

[mtpspur]

Rafael Sabatini is my hands down favorite. Captain Blood, St Martin's Summer, Chilvary are personal favorites. Scaramouche seems to get all the attention though.

C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblover series and Bernard Cornwell for the Napoleonic wars are excellent especially Forester.

[ennison]

The Heart of Midlothian - Scott
Patrick O Brien's series of novels
August 1914 - Solzhenitsyn

[quasimodo1]

Have mentioned this one before; The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguritte Yurcannar although historical fiction is the genre if you have any knowledge of this period of Roman history, she really gets it spot on, in my view. Another book which is real history, also previously mentioned, is The Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, about the 14th century. Great stuff. RJS

[Niamh]

bernard cornwalls grail quest trilogy

[Chell53]

Have you read anything by Margaret George? She does kind of autobiographical novels of historical figures like Mary Queen of Scots, Henry VIII, Cleopatra etc. She's really good because it's fact but it reads like an ordinary novel.

[Litfan]

Hi All,
Can some post the URL for Historical Novels.

Regards

[ejarg7]

Like mtpspur mentioned earlier, the Hornblower series on the Napoleonic wars are good. I would also suggest A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens (on the French Revolution).

[Niamh]

jean plaidy did a lot of historical novels also.

[Most Deadly]

Hi everyone

I have just published my first book and wondered if you would read the sample chapters on the website and leave some feedback for me?

Decision Most Deadly follows the life of Sir Charles Berkeley as he lives through the pivotal year of 1641, and mixes an exciting and intriguing plot with rich historical details which allow you to fully experience the era. While England is on the brink of civil war, the book shows how Sir Charles's life is affected by the twists and turns of a stormy period in our history.
I deliberately picked the time because England was heading for civil war, and I wanted to show how this affected the country, and just what events sparked it. I felt there were already books out there about the war itself, so enjoyed writing the plot around the intrigues of such a tense period.

{edit}

Kind regards

Mark Turnbull :)

[miyagisan]

I also HIGHLY recommend Shogun, along with the rest of the series (particularly Taipan and Noble House). They're just fantastic.

[Chilly]

I love reading James Michener's books. The Source, which is the history of Isreal and the Jews through all of history, is great; Chesapeake, which is about the colonization and life in Maryland, is also good; Hawaii, is also fantastic. He has a bunch of other cool-looking books, like one about South Africa (the covenant) and some about Poland, Alaska, the wild west and the Caribbean.

I'm also going to throw in Leon Uris because Mila 18 was an amazing book.

Ps: To Most Deadly, your book looks fascinating.

[Most Deadly]

Thanks for the feedback Chilly - did you read the sample chapter?

[blithe_spirit]

One of my favourite historical novels is 'King Hereafter' by Dorothy Dunnett. It is extremely well researched and tells the story of the historical MacBeth as opposed to Shakespeare's character.

More recently, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Kate Grenville's novels, 'The Secret River' and 'The Lieutenant' both of which start in London but tell the story of the early settlers sent out to colonise Australia. Her description of the Australian landscape and of the relationships that existed between the British and the Aboriginal people at this time makes extremely good reading.

[Diane Havens]

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres. Beautifully written, well told tale.

[prendrelemick]

Jean Plaidy is the queen of the Historical Novel, mostly concerned with Kings and Queens from the Plantagenets onwards. She weaves her stories around historical events and is a very engaging storyteller.

She has also been published as Victoria Holt and Phillippa Carr.

[Jozanny]

Under the influence of Professor Coletta's weighty thesis, Plotting The Past, I have just started Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873). I Promessi Sposi.

This is considered the first historical novel out of Italy as a genre, and she compares this famous work to both Lampedusa's and Eco's radical reinvention of fictional historical narrative in The Leopard and The Name of The Rose, which upend the conventions of the genre.

I am not an expert on said conventions, but by the time I get through all this, I might be.

[Whifflingpin]

I don't think anyone has mentioned RLS, A C-D or John Buchan, all of whom wrote some excellent historical novels. Doyle, in fact, rated his historical novels far higher than his Sherlock Holmes stories.

Alfred Duggan wrote, I think, exclusively historical novels. Some revolved around Roman history, some Saxon England and some Mediaeval. Notably, his characters are not modern characters in historical settings, but people who have the attitudes and motivations of the times in which the stories are set.

And how about John Barth's Sotweed Factor. I think there could be a nice essay comparing & contrasting that with, say Buchan's Salute to Adventurers.

[pagebypage]

Most of mine have already been suggested but:

Since you like Rutherford, I suggest Sarum--IMO his best one;
Gary Jennings' Aztec is excellent;
Colleen McCullough's The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown are good. She has others in the Rome series not quite as good (e.g. Caesar: A Novel) but you still may like.

BTW: I ditto Whifflingpin's Barth suggestion, The Sotweed Factor. Best of Barth I'd say.

[A Snowy Evening]

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. American Civil war. great stuff.

[Don Quixote Jr]

If you aren't "blockbusterphobic" try Shogun, Tai-Pan & Noble House by James Clavell; and/or just about anything by James Michener.
I also highly recommend The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas and The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.
Finally, any of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels as they are all based on famous historical events.

[Mad Rider]

My tip: Valerio Massimo Manfredi's entire ancient Rome/Greece themed collection of historical novels.

[kev67]

What counts as an historical novel? Is it a book written by a recent author set in the past, or a book written by a long dead author set in his present? Does it include books that might come under different genres, such as westerns or arthurian legend? Does it include literature from classic antiquity or the Mediaeval period? How far back does it have to be set to count as historical, fifty years, a hundred years? Is there some cut off point where it stops being considered historical, e.g. books set in the Stone Age?

[mona amon]

You may well ask, Kev! I've heard Jane Eyre described as an historical novel because it is set in a pre-railway/stage coach age, while the author was accustomed to make all her long journeys by rail.

[Paulclem]

I really liked Robert Harris' Pompeii - which is a historical murder mystery and very well written - and his 2 books on Cicero, Imperium and Lustrum.

I Claudius and Claudius The God by Robert Graves are also pretty good.

[Prince Smiles]

'Ninety-Three' (Victor Hugo) is the number for some Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, Georges Jacques Danton.

'The Black Tulip' - Alexandre Dumas, père
Black tulips, William of Orange, Rosa. A colourful read.

I'll give you the money-back guarantee with the Black Tulip.

[Eiseabhal]

Kev has asked a pertinent question. "Historically" the historical novel was set in a period sometime before the writer was alive. Some of these contained pretty accurate real events but these were there just to provide background flavour to a swashbuckling romance. Others were an examination of a country's past in order to arrive at a well-that-is-why-we-are-as-we-are point. Others are really examining today but the setting is the past. (Some of these attempts are fraudulent from an intellectual and or moral point of view.) Others are a provocative reinterpretation of the past. But there is a valid point being made that any novel dealing with what was the present to the novelist but is very much the distant past to us could be called historical. I however don't go with that idea. I would suggest Tremaine, Faber, Drummond, Barke, Boyd, TC Boyle and Carey as worthwhile modern practitioners of the historical novel

[ennison]

It is about time that more awareness was aroused of how T C Boyle is an amazingly good American novelist.... Well consider this my tiny blurb!

[luhsun]

I grew up reading ivanhoe, waverly, rob roy or even robert louis stevenson's kidnapped. Back then there was no internet and my school library has these old section with old, musty,dusty books which dated from probably when my old school was built 80 years before. It was a missionary school and some of those books were donated to the library, probably by the english planters back then, some with english names scribbled in them, which no one has touched/borrowed out for the past 20+ years before me. That was a wonderful time, reading of robin hood, king john, the jacobites etc..ahh..the wonders that could be felt by impressionable youths..
Perhaps romance of three kingdoms or the water margin also qualify, albeit from another culture.

[duke-one]

I have enjoyed I,Claudius & Claudius the God from R. Graves. Also the works of John Dos Passos. I'm not sure if these are "exactly" historical but does a story have to be point by point accurate to be historical? War & Peace, Tale of Two Cities, at least part history.
Duke Masters

[Seasider]

Hilary Mantel's books about Thomas Cromwell. Both Booker prize winners!

[mal4mac]

Sir Walter Scott - Waverley, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe...

[Snowqueen]

I think War and Peace and The Count of Monte Cristo are great.

[kev67]

I Claudius and Claudius the God have been my favourite historical novels for about twenty-five years, although I have not re-read them since.

[mal4mac]

I enjoyed the "Flashman" novels by George MacDonald Fraser, but they may not be to everyone's taste, and they're certainly not "great" literature, if that's what you're looking for.

I tried the first in the series, but didn't like it at all. For me it was a bad history lesson combined with awful undergraduate humour.

Try Dickens: "Tale of Two Cities" and (even better!) "Barnaby Rudge".

I don't like the genre in general. One of the cardinal rules of literature is "write about what you know at first hand". Maybe the greatest writers can dodge this rule, now and again, and produce something spectacular. For instance, Dickens knew London so well that he seems to be able to imagine a slightly earlier London being torn apart by riots, as if he had been there. Scott was so steeped in Scottish history, and was "living it", to some extent, so could cast himself back into the period of Rob Roy and the Waverley novels. But it's a difficult act to pull off, and even the best usually feel a bit stilted, a bit like a history lesson. Nothing wrong with a history lesson, of course, but then why not read a history book? I quite liked Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall", but it was a bit of a history lesson, and I preferred the real thing as put forward in Peter Ackroyd's "Tudors".

I think the advantage of "being there" comes out when you think of the best second world war novels, they are all by people who were in it - Kurt Vonnegutt "Slaughterhouse V", Heller "Catch 22", Ballard, "Empire of the Sun",...

[Rebecca Brooks]

"March" by Geraldine Brooks. Some people think it's nothing more than fan fiction, and perhaps it is, but I loved it and it also won a pulitzer

[kev67]

The Patrick O'Brien Aubrey-Maturin books are pretty good. I have read them all except for the one he was working on when he died.

I am not sure what to think about historical fiction. Can a modern writer write a convincing portrayal of a character from the past? Wouldn't a modern author have a tendency to make their heroes have too modern an outlook. Books from even sixty years ago have a power to surprise me, for example the amount of smoking and drinking in Lucky Jim, the casual racism in A Town Like Alice, the total absence of female characters in The Hobbit, the figures of speech from The Catcher in the Rye. Although I did not think it is a particularly great book, I was most surprised by the attitudes expressed in Tom Brown's School Days. Those authors did not even realise when they wrote something which today would be controversial. Occasionally a passing detail is mentioned that would not occur to a modern author. It is like reading a science fiction book actually written by someone from the future. Nevertheless, I think a piece of historical fiction can be worth reading for three reasons: 1) it's a very good book anyway, 2) the story is set in an era from which not much literature survives, 3) the authentic literature of the period is difficult for modern readers to get into.

[Seasider]

The novels of Mary Renault are regarded as being as near to experiencing what it was like to live in Athens as no other writer. The King Must Die and The Last of the Wine are 2 of my favourites and she also wrote several about Alexander the Great

[Kafka's Crow]

I have read every single of the Flashman novels and rate them very high. Hilarious romp through the 19th century as they are, in Flashman we see a character taken from a bland Victorian novel (Tom Brown's School Days) and well and truly immortalized for future generations. I am reading Bernard Conrnwell's Sharpe novels now (have read the first 3 so far) but already need a break as I am getting fed up. I need to go through all of them. My favorite historical novels in no particular order:

War and Peace (Tolstoy) about Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the disastrous Retreat at Borodino
l' debacle (Zola) about the Battle of Sedan and the Paris Commune
Alamut (Bartol) about The Old man of the Mountain, Hassan Sabah, and his struggle against the mighty caliphate of Baghdad
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) about the American Civil War
The Tin Drum (Grass) about the 2nd World War through Polish/ German eyes
The Name of the Rose (Eco) about Medieval books and Aristotle's lost treatise on Comedy
Bring up the Bodies (Mantel) about Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn
Wolf Hall (Mantel) 1st part of Bring up the Bodies featuring Cardinal Wolsey and the rise of Thomas Cromwell
I Claudius and Claudius the God (Graves) about Tibarius Claudius the Stutterer and Messalina, his powerful wife
Crabwalk (Grass) about the sinking of Wilhelm Gustlof, the biggest maritime disaster and the loss of 10,000 lives.
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) about French Revolution
A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) about WWI
All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque) about WWI
The Native Son (Wright) about racism in 1930s America
The Agony and Ecstasy (Stone) about Michelangelo
The Last World (Ransmayr) about Ovid in exile