If you could travel back in time, where would you go, and when? For readers of historical fiction, there’s no need to settle on just one place or period when journeying into the past. At their best, these works are deft and authentic—rigorously researched but effortlessly executed. They introduce you to figures whose concerns feel immediate and true, their individual stories carving channels into history. Allow yourself to be transported by 18 of the best historical fiction books of the last several decades.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
This stunning debut novel follows a single family over eight generations and numerous settings, from colonial Ghana to Jazz Age Harlem. Gripping and emotionally resonant, theirs is a story of hope, sacrifice, and heritage, as the plans and promises made by characters in one chapter become the lived realities of those characters’ descendants many pages later.
Funny Girl by Nick Hornby
Brisk and engaging, this 2014 novel invites readers to the set of a popular sitcom in 1960s London. Hometown beauty queen Barbara Parker is plucked from obscurity and rebranded as Sophie Straw, the star of the BBC’s latest hit comedy. Hoping to channel her hero Lucille Ball, Sophie navigates newfound funny-girl fame with an amusing group: two bantering TV writers, an admiring producer, and a self-absorbed costar. With humor and sensitivity, Hornby brings out the color and chaos of TV comedy and the unusual people it throws together.
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Exquisitely rendered, Michaels’s 2007 novel is told in two sections. The first half begins in Poland, where seven-year-old Jakob Beer is the sole member of his Jewish family to survive the Nazis’ brutal slaughter. Hiding in the woods in dirt up to his neck, Jakob is discovered by a Greek geologist, who helps him escape to a life haunted by those he lost. The book’s second half follows Ben, the son of Holocaust survivors, who finds himself suddenly caught up in Jakob’s life and writing.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro’s Booker Prize–winning 1989 novel is told in the first person by Stevens, the longtime butler to one Lord Darlington of Darlington Hall, a stately English country home. Stevens’s reflections on his years of service reveal what’s pulsing beneath his composure: the choice to look away from troubling secrets and repress personal desires. A stunning feat of narrative divulgence, the novel was also adapted into a Merchant Ivory film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Currents of violence and devotion coalesce around Marie de France, a 17-year-old sent to be the new prioress of a 12th-century English abbey. In her new role, Marie must reckon with the stakes of her leadership and embrace the chance to reimagine what’s possible for herself and her community. In sharp, lucid prose, Groff explores mystical elements and existential threats, as well as roiling internal conflict.
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
In 19th-century Philadelphia, Alma Whitaker, the daughter of a wealthy quinine merchant, studies the phenomena of the natural world as a talented botanist. Emergent theories of evolution, questions of science and mysticism, and an illuminating romance are at the heart of Gilbert’s sprawling historical tale, one of her more underappreciated works of fiction.
Time and Again by Jack Finney
History and time travel blend together in Finney’s 1970 novel about Si, an advertising artist enlisted to help with a secret government project. When a strange experience takes him from the 1970s to 1880s New York, he uncovers long-lost secrets within the streets of the city. Filled with real historical photographs and illustrations, the novel offers an absorbing look at the history (and architecture) of an earlier time; don’t be surprised when you find yourself looking more carefully at the structures that endure.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
With her latest novel, Smith uses a Victorian setting to probe the relationship between England and colonial Jamaica. The result is a fictionalized spin on the real-life Tichborne case, a 19th-century criminal trial involving a man who insisted he was heir to a large fortune. The story is told by Eliza Touchet, a housekeeper and would-be writer who becomes invested in the trial and its main witness—a formerly enslaved man named Andrew Bogle. Smith’s first work of historical fiction reevaluates the 19th-century novel and the social concerns of its time.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
This moving epistolary novel from 2005 earned Robinson the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and inspired three of the author’s subsequent novels. Told from the perspective of a minister, John Ames, in 1950s Iowa, Gilead traces the path of Ames’s abolitionist, guerilla-fighting grandfather; his Christian pacifist father; and Ames himself as he wrestles with faith and fatherhood.
Quarantine by Jim Crace
This 1997 novel follows Jesus during his 40-day ascetic retreat to a desert cave. The Judean wilds are full of others seeking clarity, plus a wicked merchant named Musa sent to test and torment the young ascetic from Galilee. Crace transports readers two thousand years into the past to a stark Biblical landscape full of visceral encounters, violence, self-denial, and possible miracles.
James by Percival Everett
Percival Everett earned top literary prizes including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for this 2024 bestseller. His reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn foregrounds James, a man trying to deliver himself and his family from a life of enslavement in the antebellum South. Every sentence of James’s first-person account is charged with the stakes of his survival, as he undertakes a harrowing journey to earn his freedom and keep his family together. Everett’s daring reinvention of a literary classic teems with secrets of language and lineage.
Sula by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison’s suite of stunning historical novels includes Beloved, A Mercy, and this 1973 tale of a friendship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright. Set in a Black community in rural Ohio known as the Bottom, the story begins in 1919 and follows the town and its inhabitants through a series of personal and social upheavals. At the center of the narrative are the two girls, who become women with interwoven lives marked by staggering violence, fierce loyalty, and heartbreaking betrayal. Sula makes leaps in time and perspective, all packaged in a short, propulsive novel from one of the form’s great practitioners
The Girls by Emma Cline
Emma Cline’s engrossing debut novel draws inspiration from the Manson family, the hippie-era cult that carried out a series of murders and other disturbing crimes in 1960s and ’70s California. The novel begins in the summer of 1969, when 14-year-old Evie Boyd finds herself drawn to the group of mysterious young women who inhabit the cult’s decrepit ranch. Cline’s stylish prose proves similarly alluring, inviting readers to revel in language that feels both tense and indulgent.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The first title in Elena Ferrante’s beloved Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend introduces readers to Lila and Lenù, whose decades-long friendship captures the intensity of finding one’s identity alongside another person. The novel brings to life the disorder of its 1950s Neapolitan setting, where the working-class concerns and crimes of the girls’ families and neighbors shape their adolescence. Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, My Brilliant Friend and its brilliant sequels explore the beauty and perils of an intimate bond beginning in childhood.
Isola by Allegra Goodman
A teenage noblewoman must summon unimaginable strength and courage when she and her lover are left for dead on a desolate island off the coast of Canada. Based on the real-life, 16th-century story of Marguerite de La Rocque, it’s a tale both gripping and moving, engaging readers in the survival of a character with the odds stacked against her.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Michael Cunningham follows three women in moments of personal reckoning: the writer Virgina Woolf, in 1920s England; Laura Brown, a housewife in 1950s suburban Los Angeles; and Clarissa Vaughan, who lives in New York at the end of the 20th century. Drawing inspiration from Woolf’s famous novel Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham’s lustrous prose resembles Woolf’s in its bright, tumbling relation of consciousness. He writes in the present tense, conveying the sense of life unfolding. The novel was adapted into a star-studded 2002 film, for which Nicole Kidman received an Oscar, as well as a more recent opera.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Starting in 1910 and ending in 1989, Pachinko has an ambitious premise: mapping one Korean family’s journey across borders, generations, and moments of crisis. Min Jin Lee’s success lies in her ability to anchor each major event in a specific emotional reality. The novel became an award-winning Apple TV+ drama series in 2022.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
It has been 65 years since Harper Lee introduced readers to six-year-old Scout Finch, the narrator of this now iconic American novel. Set in Depression-era Monroeville, Alabama, the coming-of-age tale doubles as a legal drama: Scout’s father, lawyer Atticus Finch, makes waves in their racially segregated town when he defends Tom Robinson, a Black man, against wrongful accusations of assault. Like others on this list, the novel earned its author the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961.
Source link
