I fell in love with historical fiction as a kid when I spent a week sick in bed reading the entire Horatio Hornblower series. I got hooked on history while studying the French Revolution in college. I remember thinking: these people are absolutely bonkers! I loved it. As a historian, I study the history of identity: the tools people had to craft a self-definition, and how those tools were themselves created. As a novelist, I draw on my research so that I can – like the authors in this list – recreate not just the settings and events of the past, but also the weird and wonderful world inside people’s heads.
The Middle East in 1158 is a land riven by civil war and infighting. Two kings sit uneasily on their thrones: Baldwin in Jerusalem and Nur ad-Din in Aleppo. War between the kingdoms is inevitable. It is a world balanced on a knife’s edge, where one man can be the difference between victory and defeat.
That man is Saladin. Arriving at court as a young warrior, he will navigate webs of intrigue, survive epic battles, and form a lasting friendship with John, the Saxon slave who becomes his best friend. This is one man’s incredible journey, set against the backdrop of world-changing events. Great leaders are not born. They are made. This is the story of the making of Saladin.
I picked up Eco’s novel in the campus bookstore one afternoon while I was in college and finished it as the sun came up the next morning… even though I had a half-written paper due in a few hours. It’s that good. The murder mystery cracks along, but the real magic comes from the way Eco vividly recreates the medieval mindset. This isn’t just Sherlock Holmes in a medieval monastery, although William of Baskerville could definitely give Sherlock a run for his money. William and the other characters think like medieval people. It’s strange, compelling, and baked into the plot in a way that makes this, for my money, the best fictional recreation of a historical mindset ever.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
I love books that dig into how strange people were in the Middle Ages. They weren’t more or less like people today only with different clothes and feudalism, any more so than people in the US are just like Indonesians but with a different language and toilet paper. No book I have read brings this home better than Ginzburg’s history. Layer by layer, he peels back the mental world of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller who believed that the world began as a cheese-like mass in which angels appeared, like maggots emerging from rotting meat. This book literally changed my life: both the subject of my historical research and the way I write historical fiction.
The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what…
This novel is a bit of a cheat, as it takes place in Restoration England, but I couldn’t help myself. I picked it off the shelf at random at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and it was like having the good fortune to sit down in a pub next to a future friend for life. I’m a sucker for murder mysteries, historical fiction, and unreliable narrators, and this book has all three! Pears narrates the murder from four different perspectives, with each one adding compelling details to a conspiracy that just keeps growing in scope and import. The star of the drama is Marco da Cola, a worthy successor to Eco’s William of Baskerville both in his devotion to science and in his pitch-perfect evocation of a historical mindset.
'A fictional tour de force which combines erudition with mystery' PD James
Set in Oxford in the 1660s - a time and place of great intellectual, religious, scientific and political ferment - this remarkable novel centres around a young woman, Sarah Blundy, who stands accused of the murder of Robert Grove, a fellow of New College. Four witnesses describe the events surrounding his death: Marco da Cola, a Venetian Catholic intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion;Jack Prescott, the son of a supposed traitor to the Royalist cause, determined to vindicate his father; John Wallis, chief cryptographer…
Davis’s history of the crafty peasant Arnaud du Tilh is another reminder that when it comes to history, truth is stranger than fiction. It’s also the book that confirmed my desire to do microhistory. Davis digs into trial documents to narrate the tale of Arnaud, who after being mistaken at an inn for the disappeared Martin Guerre, learns everything he can about the missing man before taking over his life. The real mystery here is not how Arnaud manages to fool the villagers in the small French town of Artigat, but why even those who couldn’t possibly have been fooled – like Martin’s wife Bertrande – go along with the ruse.
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer's day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago.
Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French…
If you’re a fan of historical fiction, then you probably don’t need me to tell you to read Bernard Cornwell. If you’re not a fan, this book might well make you one. Cornwell is great at narrating the bloody heroism and terror that occurs when two shield walls meet, but what sets him apart are his insights into how people thought, like when a Saxon warrior is sent to scout the enemy and runs into trouble because he can’t count past ten because, well… the Middle Ages. The Winter King is probably the least historic of Cornwell’s novels – mixing history and Arthurian legend – but it’s the first one I read and has remained my favorite.
Uther, the High King of Britain, has died, leaving the infant Mordred as his only heir. His uncle, the loyal and gifted warlord Arthur, now rules as caretaker for a country which has fallen into chaos - threats emerge from within the British kingdoms while vicious Saxon armies stand ready to invade. As he struggles to unite Britain and hold back the Saxon enemy, Arthur is embroiled in a doomed romance with beautiful Guinevere.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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