Best Historical Fiction of All Time

The building of a cathedral in twelfth-century England, and the lives, loves and feuds around it across decades. It asks no prior knowledge and gives a whole century in return.

One caveat: Long, with violence including rape.

An Australian sheep station across fifty years, and a love between a woman and a priest neither can escape. The template for the multigenerational bestseller.

A girl in a German town steals books during the war, narrated by Death. The device sounds like a gimmick and is not; it is what makes the ending bearable.

A blind French girl and a German boy conscripted for his skill with radios move toward the same walled city. Short chapters, and the most beautiful writing on this list.

Two sisters in occupied France take very different risks, one in the resistance and one at home. Unashamedly emotional, and the reason the recent wave of wartime fiction exists.

One caveat: Sentimental where the history was not.

A formerly enslaved woman in Ohio is haunted by the daughter she killed rather than see taken back. It won the Pulitzer Prize and it is the novel that shows what the genre is capable of.

One caveat: Non-linear and harrowing.

Thomas Cromwell's rise in Henry VIII's court, told in a close present tense that puts you inside a famously opaque man. It asks the most of any book on this list and repays it.

One caveat: The pronouns are deliberately hard. Give it fifty pages.

An English boy raised as an Indian in the nineteenth century grows up between two worlds and in love with a princess. Enormous, old-fashioned and completely absorbing.

One caveat: Very long, and of its time in places.

Mary Boleyn becomes Henry VIII's mistress, then watches her sister take her place. Fast, gossipy, and freer with the record than it admits — which is part of why it sold so well.

One caveat: Takes real liberties with the history.