Hi! I would love your favorite historical fiction recommendations!
I read “The Dance Tree” by Kiran Millwood Hargrave at the beginning of the year and it’s honestly one of my favorites of the year! After reading it I became obsessed with reading more about the 1518 dancing plague.
I just finished “London Seance Society” by Sarah Penner and it was mesmerizing! I love how at the end of her books she includes additional information about the time period she’s writing about.
I loveddddd these two novels and I need more of these vibes :>
by heisenberg4evr
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Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See (or anything by Lisa See)
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
*Homegoing* by Yaa Gyasi
*The Eight Life* by Nino Haratischvili
These two are in my TOP3 favourite books of this year! Interestingly they have a lot in common while being set around entirely different places. Both run for a hundred+ years (to this day, so they do include a contemporary aspect) and you really get a sense of their place: the area of Ghana in Homegoing, Georgia (country) in The Eighth Life even though a lot of them take place in the US/Russia respectively.
Some others I’ve liked recently-ish. They’re all set in the various decades of the 1900s though, I gravitate towards mode contemporary history.
*Half of a Yellow Sun* by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
*The Memory Keeper of Kyiv* by Erin Litteken and its sequel (though I liked the first one better) *Lost Daughters of Ukraine*
*Mornings in Jenin* by Susan Abulhawa
I’m currently in a historical fiction reading phase too! Really recommend the following:
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (set in WW2 France/Germany)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (set in 1960s to nearly present day Afghanistan)
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I’m actually still finishing this book up but it’s been amazing so far! Set in 1940/50s Barcelona)
_I, Claudius_ and _Claudius the God_ by Robert Graves
If you like some murder mystery mixed in with your historical fiction, there’s the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters.
(Coincidentally, when they were adapted for TV, both of these had Sir Derek Jacobi in the title role)
If you like supernatural/mythological elements mixed in, that’s Tim Powers’ thing. He wrote _Declare_, a Cold War spy thriller centered around genies and Noah’s Ark; _The Stress of Her Regard_, which tells how the Romantic poets Byron, Keats, and Shelley were involved with an ancient race of vampires; and _The Drawing of the Dark_, where the secret weapons Vienna has against the invading Ottoman Turks are a resurrected King Arthur and…magic beer.
The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee taught me things I never knew about American history.