The Best Historical Fiction to Transport You Through Time

Good historical fiction is a time machine that runs entirely on empathy rather than on gears or plutonium. A history textbook can tell you, accurately and usefully, that a plague once swept through a crowded city or that a proud queen lost her head upon a cold scaffold; a great historical novel, by contrast, makes you smell the smoke drifting through the narrow streets, hear the roar and jeer of the gathered crowd, and feel the raw animal fear tightening in one ordinary, frightened person's chest. It does the one thing that dates, treaties, and statistics never can manage on their own: it makes the distant past feel like the vivid, urgent present tense of somebody's actual, breathing life.

The genre spans practically the whole of recorded human experience, from the marble intrigues of ancient Rome to the mud and terror of the world wars, and the very finest examples are as rigorously and lovingly researched as they are beautifully written. They send you rushing to the encyclopedia the very moment you turn the final page, suddenly and urgently hungry to know how much of what you just read was real, which is perhaps the surest possible sign that a novel has truly done its deep work on you. Here are the historical novels that transport their readers most completely and most convincingly across the centuries, along with how best to choose your own first doorway into the living past.

History you can feel

The real magic of historical fiction, the thing no dry documentary quite manages to pull off, is a trick of scale. It takes an entire era that we otherwise know only distantly, as a chapter heading or a date to be memorized for an exam, and patiently shrinks all of it down to a single beating human heart, so that the fall of a mighty dynasty becomes one anxious family's whispered argument over dinner, and a vast, faceless war becomes one young soldier's cold, cracked, trembling hands. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall does precisely this, and does it better than almost anyone before or since, placing us so intimately close inside the sharp, watchful mind of Thomas Cromwell that Tudor England abruptly stops being a stiff, remote costume drama and becomes instead a breathless matter of daily survival, calculated carefully hour by dangerous hour.

The historical fiction shelf

• Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel: the ruthless rise of Thomas Cromwell in the treacherous court of Henry VIII. A dazzling masterclass in perspective that makes centuries-old Tudor politics feel as tense and immediate as a modern thriller.
• The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett: the building of a single great cathedral in twelfth-century England, across decades of war, ambition, faith, and love. Sprawling, hugely addictive, and enormous of heart.
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr: a blind French girl and a gifted German boy whose separate lives inch slowly toward one another amid the rubble of the Second World War. Luminous, intricate, and deeply tender.
• Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar: the aging Roman emperor Hadrian reflects, in one long letter to his heir, on power, love, art, and his own quietly approaching mortality. Stately, wise, and quietly profound.
• The Book Thief, Markus Zusak: a young girl steals books and helps shelter a hidden man in Nazi Germany, in a story narrated, unforgettably, by Death itself. Heartbreaking, wholly original, and profoundly humane.
• I, Claudius, Robert Graves: the murderous intrigues of imperial Rome told from the inside by its stammering, limping, endlessly underestimated survivor. Wickedly entertaining and very nearly impossible to put down.
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco: a medieval monastery, a chilling string of murders, and a labyrinthine forbidden library. A rare novel that fully satisfies as history, as mystery, and as philosophy all at once.
• Pachinko, Min Jin Lee: four generations of a Korean family struggling, enduring, and quietly triumphing in Japan across the whole brutal sweep of the twentieth century. Epic in its scope and profoundly moving throughout.

Where to start by era

By far the easiest and most enjoyable way into historical fiction is simply to follow your own existing curiosity across the great map of time, rather than dutifully starting wherever a list happens to begin. Are you already drawn, for whatever private reason, to the marble and blood of ancient Rome? Then begin confidently with I, Claudius or Memoirs of Hadrian and let them carry you straight there. Have you always been quietly fascinated by the Tudors and their endless, deadly scheming? Wolf Hall is simply unmatched and unrivaled on that ground. Do you feel yourself pulled instead toward the enormous human dramas of the twentieth century? Then All the Light We Cannot See and Pachinko will both wreck you thoroughly, in the very best possible way. Let the specific period you already wonder about choose your first book for you, and the deep immersion will quietly take care of absolutely everything else from there.

Fiction that sends you to the facts

One of the great and slightly unexpected joys of reading historical fiction is the enormous amount of further reading it quietly inspires in you afterward. A genuinely good historical novel leaves you almost desperate to know how much of what you just lived through actually happened, sending you happily tumbling down long midnight rabbit holes about real cathedrals, real emperors, real battles, and real, long-dead people whose names you had never once heard just a week before. In exactly this way, the whole genre works as a kind of gateway drug to the serious study of history itself; readers who have always insisted, quite sincerely, that they find history unbearably dull very often simply needed one gripping story to carry them bodily inside it. The dry facts finally stick, and stick permanently, precisely because you first met them as feelings rather than as dates. A reader who wept through The Book Thief will remember the human shape of the Second World War far longer than one who merely memorized its timeline for a test. Emotion, it turns out, is the quiet glue that memory has always secretly run on.

“History tells you what happened. Historical fiction lets you stand in the room while it was happening.”

How to spot the great ones

The very best historical novels, the ones truly worth your limited reading time, always wear their considerable research lightly and gracefully, weaving hard-won period detail seamlessly into the living story instead of stopping the whole book to show it off like a proud, anxious student. You should be able to feel the full texture of the vanished past all around you, the food laid on the table, the weight and itch of the clothes, the strange and genuine beliefs people once held as obvious, without ever once feeling that you are being lectured at or quietly educated against your will. Just as importantly, the characters themselves should think, fear, and hope like real people of their own particular time, rather than like modern minds awkwardly dressed up in period costume for our easy comfort. Start with any single title on the list above and you will get the whole rich illusion done exactly right: an entire vanished world, rebuilt with such loving care that you can simply walk into it and live there for a while.