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Historical Fiction books
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All 71 historical fiction books
The Lies They Told
Ellen Marie Wiseman
4.4(6.2k)416 pages · 2025Historical fiction readers — especially fans of Wiseman's earlier novels and book clubs — who want slow-burn immersion in an under-examined chapter of American history (Virginia's eugenics-era forced sterilizations) rather than a propulsive plot.
DarkTense
Behind Five Willows
June Hur
4.6(239)336 pages · 2025Readers who love Austen-style slow-burn romance and are drawn to stories where the act of reading itself becomes an act of rebellion — especially those curious about Joseon Korea or who enjoy the emotional texture of K-drama storytelling.
YAHopefulSlow-burn
America's First Daughter
Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie
4.5(26k)608 pages · 2016Readers of biographical historical fiction who want their founding-era narratives to grapple honestly with the period's moral contradictions — particularly those drawn to the overlooked women who shaped America's founding generation from behind the scenes.
TenseMelancholy
Salt to the Sea
Ruta Sepetys
4.5(17k)448 pages · 2016Readers aged 12 and up who are drawn to character-driven war fiction, particularly those wanting to discover a historically overlooked catastrophe — the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff — through intimate, multi-perspective storytelling.
YADarkHopeful
The Lion Women of Tehran
Marjan Kamali
4.6(41k)352 pages · 2024Readers who love sweeping, historically grounded friendship sagas — particularly those drawn to modern Iranian history and women's resistance narratives — who responded to Kamali's earlier The Stationery Shop and are ready to invest in a seven-decade story.
HopefulMelancholy
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
4.5(89k)544 pages · 2017Readers who love character-rich, multigenerational literary sagas — particularly those drawn to underrepresented histories — and who want a novel that uses one family's arc across seven decades to illuminate the largely unknown experience of Zainichi Koreans in Japan.
HopefulMelancholy
The Women
Kristin Hannah
4.7(347k)480 pages · 2024Readers drawn to female-centered wartime historical fiction — particularly fans of Hannah's The Nightingale or The Four Winds — who want to encounter the long-overlooked story of U.S. Army nurses in the Vietnam War told with emotional seriousness and intimate character detail.
HopefulMelancholy
James
Percival Everett
4.6(105k)320 pages · 2024Readers of literary fiction and Black American literature — particularly those familiar with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — who want to engage with one of the most awarded and critically discussed American novels of the mid-2020s.
DarkFunny
The Alice Network
Kate Quinn
4.6(98k)560 pages · 2017Kate Quinn's The Alice Network is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling historical novel that weaves together two women's stories across the World Wars — a WWI spy operating in German-occupied France and a 1947 Amer…
TenseHopeful
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Heather Morris
4.6(179k)288 pages · 2018Readers drawn to emotionally direct Holocaust fiction centred on human endurance and love who want a narrative grounded in real personal testimony — specifically the account of Auschwitz survivor Lale Sokolov — rather than a scholarly or documentary reconstruction of the camps.
DarkHopeful
An Uncharted World
Susan Storer Clark
4.7(33)406 pages · 2026Adult readers of historical fiction who want a rigorous, archivally grounded account of the 16th-century transatlantic slave trade told from the perspective of an enslaved Yorùbá woman — and who can sustain attention across a wide geographic cast rather than a contained, single-setting story.
DarkHopeful
Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood
4.3(12k)468 pages · 1996Readers who are drawn to psychologically layered historical fiction and are content to leave a central mystery permanently unresolved — particularly those interested in how gender and class shaped women's fates in nineteenth-century colonial Canada.
DarkTense
Babel
R. F. Kuang
4.3(30k)560 pages · 2022Readers who love dense, erudite fantasy rooted in academic settings and who want colonial history — specifically the lead-up to the First Opium War — treated as active moral and dramatic stakes rather than period backdrop.
DarkTense
The Undercover Bookshop
Katherine Reay
4.6(48)320 pages · 2026Readers who love Golden Age detective fiction — especially Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers — and want a cozy village mystery that quietly escalates into a Cold War spy thriller anchored in real historical events.
TenseCosy
Murder on 34th Street
Mariah Fredericks
4.3(42)288 pages · 2026Readers who love cozy historical mysteries with a richly researched sense of place — particularly those drawn to Depression-era New York, festive atmosphere, and a resourceful, institutionally savvy amateur sleuth navigating the behind-the-scenes world of a great department store.
CosyLeisurely
Dodger
Terry Pratchett
4.5(3.8k)368 pages · 2012Fans of Terry Pratchett's wit and layered storytelling who are ready to meet him outside Discworld, as well as adult readers and older YA fans with an appetite for Victorian atmosphere, historical cameos, and a coming-of-age story that is simultaneously funny and morally serious.
YAUpliftingFunny
An Echo in the Darkness
Francine Rivers
4.8(4.8k)461 pages · 1994Readers already invested in Francine Rivers's Mark of the Lion trilogy who want Christian historical fiction that explores faith, forgiveness, and early Roman persecution with genuine moral complexity rather than easy resolution.
Book 2 · Mark of the Lion SeriesHopefulMelancholy
May We Feed the King
Rebecca Perry
3.9(491)288 pages · 2026Readers who relish literary, dual-timeline historical fiction — in the vein of A. S. Byatt or Hilary Mantel — and who are drawn to novels that interrogate how history is constructed, preserved, and quietly distorted, sentence by careful sentence.
MelancholySlow-burn
The Nightingale
Kristin Hannah
4.7(424k)608 pages · 2015Readers drawn to emotionally immersive, women-centred WWII historical fiction who want a dual-narrative structure that honours both dramatic Resistance heroism and quieter domestic courage under occupation.
Churchill's Secret Messenger
Alan Hlad
4.5(6.5k)416 pages · 2021Readers drawn to WWII historical fiction centred on female protagonists in espionage and resistance roles, especially those who want research-backed detail — particularly around the little-known National Pigeon Service — alongside a fast-moving spy narrative.
The Frontiersman
Charles Egbert Craddock
3.3(15)116 pages · 1904Readers with an interest in American regional and local-color fiction who want to explore an underappreciated voice of the genre — Mary Noailles Murfree — through stories engaging frontier life, settler–Cherokee encounters, and early Appalachian landscapes on their own early-twentieth-century terms.
MelancholyLeisurely
A Voice in the Wind
Francine Rivers
4.7(6k)544 pages · 1993Readers of Christian historical fiction who want the genre taken seriously — those ready to inhabit a morally complex first-century Roman world where faith is a lived, costly thing rather than a comfortable backdrop.
Book 1 · Mark of the Lion SeriesDarkHopeful
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Victor Hugo
4.4(175)496 pages · 1831Readers who know Hugo primarily through film or stage adaptations and want to encounter the full, unabridged novel he actually wrote — complete with its architectural arguments and moral complexity.
YADarkMelancholy
As Sure as the Dawn: v. 3
Francine Rivers
536 pages · 1995Readers who have already committed to the Mark of the Lion trilogy and are invested in the fates of Atretes, Marcus, and Hadassah — particularly those drawn to historically grounded Christian fiction set in the brutality of first-century Rome.
Book 3 · Mark of the Lion SeriesDarkHopeful
Showing 24 of 71
Every historical fiction book, A to Z71 titles
- A Founding Mother · Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie
- A Voice in the Wind · Francine Rivers
- Alias Grace · Margaret Atwood
- America's First Daughter · Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie
- An American Beauty · Shana Abe
- An Echo in the Darkness · Francine Rivers
- An Uncharted World · Susan Storer Clark
- Angle of Repose · Wallace Stegner
- As Sure as the Dawn: v. 3 · Francine Rivers
- Ask the Dust · John Fante
- Babel · R. F. Kuang
- Before We Were Yours · Lisa Wingate
- Behind Five Willows · June Hur
- Between Two Fires · Christopher Buehlman
- Carnegie's Maid · Marie Benedict
- Churchill's Secret Messenger · Alan Hlad
- Death Whispers of the Etherwave · C. B. Ash
- Dodger · Terry Pratchett
- Essential Novelists - Alice Duer Miller: Are women people? · Alice Duer Miller, August Nemo
- Great Circle · Maggie Shipstead
- How to Stop Time · Matt Haig
- In the Great Quiet · Laura Vogt
- James · Percival Everett
- Lady · Thomas Tryon
- Lady Tremaine · Rachel Hochhauser
- Lonesome Dove · Larry McMurtry
- March · Geraldine Brooks
- May We Feed the King · Rebecca Perry
- Murder on 34th Street · Mariah Fredericks
- Murky Overhead - Historical Fiction Book to Bring A Lifetime of Experiences, Stories, & Lessons Learned on Both Sides of the Atlantic - The Story of An Irish Immigrant Family · Michael C. Connolly
- Our Fallen Woman · Steven Habbi
- Pachinko · Min Jin Lee
- Rule Britannia: The Washingtons · Tim Holden
- Salt to the Sea · Ruta Sepetys
- Sam Time · Donna Balon
- Sold on a Monday · Kristina McMorris
- The Alice Network · Kate Quinn
- The Book Club for Troublesome Women · Marie Bostwick
- The Boy in the Striped Pajamas · John Boyne
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao · Junot Díaz
- The Bronze Bow · Elizabeth George Speare
- The Calamity Club · Kathryn Stockett
- The Color Purple · Alice Walker
- The Dictionary of Lost Words · Pip Williams
- The Downstairs Girl · Stacey Lee
- The First Witch of Boston · Andrea Catalano
- The Four Winds · Kristin Hannah
- The Frontiersman · Charles Egbert Craddock
- The Frozen River · Ariel Lawhon
- The Girl Behind the Gates · Brenda Davies
- The Girls Left Behind · Emily Gunnis
- The Good Lord Bird · James McBride
- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame · Victor Hugo
- The Iron Crossing · Gregory Scott
- The Lies They Told · Ellen Marie Wiseman
- The Lion Women of Tehran · Marjan Kamali
- The Mapmaker's Daughter · Clare Marchant
- The Medicine Woman of Galveston · Amanda Skenandore
- The Moonshine Women · Michelle Collins Anderson
- The Nightingale · Kristin Hannah
- The Phoenix Crown · Kate Quinn, Janie Chang
- The Pirate Queen · Ariel Lawhon
- The Resistance Daughter · Joanne Kormylo
- The Secret Sewing Society · Siobhan Curham
- The Tattooist of Auschwitz · Heather Morris
- The Undercover Bookshop · Katherine Reay
- The Women · Kristin Hannah
- These Tangled Threads · Sarah Loudin Thomas
- Trust · Hernan Diaz
- We Were the Lucky Ones · Georgia Hunter
- When the Jessamine Grows · Donna Everhart