Best Historical Fiction for Beginners

A girl in Nazi Germany steals books, learns to read and shelters a Jewish man in her foster family's basement — all narrated by Death. The unusual narrator makes a familiar period feel new.

Mary Boleyn becomes Henry VIII's mistress before her sister Anne sets out to become his queen. Fast, gossipy and easy to follow — the most accessible way into the most famous court in English history.

One caveat: It takes liberties with the historical record. Enjoy it as a novel.

The building of a cathedral in twelfth-century England, and the builders, monks and nobles whose ambitions tangle around it for decades. Very long, and plotted like a thriller.

One caveat: Very long, with some graphic violence.

The death of Shakespeare's young son, told largely through the eyes of the boy's mother. Shakespeare himself is never named; it is about a family's grief, and it is extraordinary.

The story of Huckleberry Finn retold by Jim, the man escaping slavery beside him. Sharp, funny and furious, and it changes the original once you have read it.

A champion racehorse and the enslaved groom who trained him in the 1850s, braided with a present-day story about a painting of the horse. It moves between centuries in a way that makes the history feel close.

A mother leaves the drought-stricken Texas Panhandle for California in the 1930s to save her children, and finds the promised land far harder than promised. Big, emotional and easy to read.

A count sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel in 1922 builds a whole life inside it across three decades of Soviet history. Witty and warm; the history arrives through the hotel's windows.