Fiction/Fantasy with Historical Characters

[RandomReadershi]

Hi all,

i'm looking for books of fiction where historical characters are involved,
by which i mean:
a) novels set against an actual historical background (i know its a big list,
but please share your recommended choice).
b) completely fantastic tales where historical personages are involved

thanks for reading

[Danik 2016]

Sorry, double post.

[Danik 2016]

War and Peace-Tolstoy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace
Crimes in August-Rubem Fonseca
http://www.upne.com/1933227580.html

[bounty]

fun question randomreader---I trust some more will come to mind but the first thing that did was the three book zane grey "ohio river" series: Betty Zane, The Spirit of the Border, The Last Trail.

I have betty zane but haven't read it yet, but the spirit of the border was one of the first zane grey books I read and I loved it.

http://www.amazon.com/Zane-Grey-Ohio-River-Trilogy/dp/1480220795

[Scheherazade]

"The Alienist" by Carr

[Diggory Venn]

A handful that immediately spring to mind:

R.D.Blackmore - Lorna Doone (the Monmouth Rebellion)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Kidnapped (the Jacobite Uprising)
Thomas Hardy - The Trumpet Major (the Napoleonic Wars, on the `home front`)
Charlotte Bronte - Shirley (the Luddite Riots)
Rosemary Sutcliff - The Eagle of the Ninth (Roman occupation of England)
Alison Uttley - A Traveller in Time (Elizabeth the 1st)

[Danik 2016]

"The Alienist" by Machado de Assis
http://pdfs.mhpbooks.com/Alienist.pdf
History as a miniature.

[WyattGwyon]

Neal Stephenson's Baroque Triology is full of historical characters, including Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Leibniz and countless others. The original three books were Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004) and The System of the World (2004). Apparently they have since been broken up into smaller units to increase revenues.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate includes an account of the Battle of Stalingrad as observed by the author, who was there.

[ennison]

"Kidnapped" has several real people fictionalised: Allan Breac Stewart, James of the Glens, Cluny, Robin Og Macgregor and the real murder of Am Balgair Ruadh is at the centre of the novel.
Solzhenitsyn's "Lenin in Zurich" is a very good attempt to examine real people and real events through fiction

[Calidore]

Parke Godwin's historically-focused retelling of the King Arthur story, Firelord, was fantastic. I also enjoyed the sequel, Beloved Exile, which follows Guinevere after Arthur's death.

[desiresjab]

Subject is a little too wide--like tens of thousands of books too wide.

Straight historical fiction should be accurate even with fictional characters walking around in it. Lincoln or Charlamagne met and spoke with all kinds of people not in the historical record.

Then there is alternative historical fiction. This one can be great fun too.

I wrote an historical trilogy which began in 1860 and follows one character's life. The first book takes place entirely in my home county where a 19th century Indian massacre occurred. I knew so much detail that all history from the local level to the national level was represented almost exactly, down to the names of soldiers and ships, and the previous names of streets and hills.

The second book took place in numerous widespread locales, so the local history in this volume was more heavily fictionalized, though regional and national history was kept dead on.

The third volume followed the same principle.

* * * * *

Historical novels are often sweeping sagas of three or four hundred thousand words, but there are some briefer examples. All of the greatest authors capture the periods with wonderful feeling, it is just that the period Flaubert chose with Salambo was so much more inherently difficult than a period like the Russian revolution, where the way of thinking is quite familiar to the author. And then Flaubert went ahead and did something inherently original with it--he captured ancient consciousness as something different from modern consciousness, both in delivery and texture. To create moods as powerful as Baudlaire, Falubert only needs a few lines of moon, stars and perfume. The power of his technique can easily be overlooked it is so fine. Somehow it consists of the eclipsed interval between thought and action of the characters. A sense of duty and of fate drives them, which is foreign to us. Like Saul Bellow, he is not an author who ever shows his technique on purpose, either, never performing for you on the page the way a Faulkner sometimes might. To me this medium sized volume stands as one of the peaks of historical literature in my experience.

But I also loved I Claudius and its two companions for their charm and fullness of imagination, though Graves' characters show no basic difference in consciousness with moderns.

For pre-historical fiction, William Golding's The Inheritors does everything just right, and sets the standard for me in that genre. No known characters in that one.

[ennison]

The Inheritors is terrific and the strangeness is created by a few tricks of grammar. I was young when I read it and found it very moving