The 10 Greatest Historical Books That You Haven't Read
Diego Pineda has been a devout storyteller his whole life. He has self-published a fantasy novel and a book of short stories, and is actively working on publishing his second novel.
A lifelong fan of watching movies and talking about them endlessly, he writes reviews and analyses on his Instagram page dedicated to cinema, and occasionally on his blog. His favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky and Charlie Chaplin. He loves modern Mexican cinema and thinks it's tragically underappreciated.
Other interests of Diego's include reading, gaming, roller coasters, writing reviews on his Letterboxd account (username: DPP_reviews), and going down rabbit holes of whatever topic he's interested in at any given point.
The historical fiction genre has been one of literature's most important and prolific since time immemorial, having granted the world several of the greatest and most foundational books in history. However, for every historical masterpiece that goes on to be showered with every bit as much praise as it deserves, there are at least a few other books from the same genre that don't receive nearly as much love as they should. Over the years, these have gone down in history as some of the most underread historical fiction masterpieces of all time.
Whether they're the work of a relatively lesser-known author, such as Ahdaf Soueif's In the Eye of the Sun, or one of the most underappreciated gems of a well-known writer, like James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere, these are some absolutely remarkable pieces of historical fiction even if it's statistically quite unlikely that you've actually read them. For any true fan of the genre, they should be considered essential reading.
'The Blue Flower' (1995)
Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most remarkable British authors of her generation, a late-blooming legend who published her first novel at nearly 60 years old. Her final novel was The Blue Flower, based on the early life of the 18th-century German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, one of the most foundational figures of German Romanticism.
Both a moving love letter to the Romantic era and a powerful study of Novalis' fascinating life, it's one of the best historical fiction books of all time. It's stunning how Fitzgerald achieves an almost unbelievable emotional and intellectual depth in just a little over 200 pages,proving that historical fiction doesn't need to be overly elegant or grandiose in its prose in order to be exceptional. Indeed, The Blue Flower is one of the most stunning literary achievements of '90s English-language literature, underappreciated though it may be.
'In the Eye of the Sun' (1993)
Novelist and political and cultural commentator Ahdaf Soueif is one of the most acclaimed Egyptian writers of modern times, and her incredible debut novel, the historical epic In the Eye of the Sun, is arguably one of the best debut novels of the '90s. It's a coming-of-age story that follows the journey of Asya al-Ulama, a young Egyptian woman reflecting on her past in 1979.
Around 800 pages in length, In the Eye of the Sun is The Blue Flower's polar opposite in terms of narrative economy, but that expansive length is crucial to its study of themes of postcolonial politics, female sexuality, and modernity as a whole. Casual readers may be deterred by its density (which is perhaps one of the reasons why the book still remains so underread), but for people who love long historical fiction, it's a must-read. It's such an exceptional debut that it earned Soueif comparisons to the likes of Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert, which is no small compliment.
'The Siege' (2001)
Set before and during the Siege of Leningrad by German forces in World War II, The Siege focuses on an ordinary household trying to endure the catastrophic event. It's the first of a two-book series that was followed by The Betrayal, but in terms of quality, there's no beating The Siege. It's one of the best books of the 2000s, an elegant epic that understands that when its subject is as naturally horrifying as this, a historical fiction book doesn't need to be overly sentimentalistic in order to create tension or sympathy.
Claustrophobically intimate and deeply committed to depicting its subject matter with as much respectful realism as it deserves, The Siege remains unjustifiably underread outside certain niche circles over two decades after its publication. It's unforgivingly bleak yet beautifully humanist, bolstered greatly by Dunmore's background as a poet and its effect on the book's prose. It's emotional, thematically complex, and favors character development over war-related spectacle.
'The Custom of the Country' (1913)
Edith Wharton was a massive critical and commercial success during her lifetime, but she also wrote some brilliant works that have become undeniably lesser-known over the years—works like the classic tragicomedy of manners The Custom of the Country. In it, an attractive but ruthless young woman from Midwest America moves to New York City to conquer high society. Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921 for The Age of Innocence, and though it's just as high-quality, The Custom of the Country is somehow not nearly as well-known.
Regardless of why it has gone underread as the years have passed, this historical novel remains one of the most timeless and riveting character studies of its time, focusing on one of the best-written antiheroines in the history of American literature. Potently satirical, beautifully written, and massively ambitious, Custom of the Country is still absolutely incredible and a cornerstone of early-20th-century American literature over a century after its publication.
'The King Must Die' (1958)
The bildungsroman genre is defined as focusing on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist as they progress from childhood to adulthood, and as far as bildungsroman novels from the 20th century go, it doesn't get much better than Mary Renault's South African classic The King Must Die. It's one of the best books of the 1950s, retelling the early life and adventures of the classic Greek hero Theseus in locations throughout Ancient Greece. Its sequel, The Bull from the Sea, is also fantastic, but The King Must Die is on a tier all of its own.
Taking mythological tales from the ancient world and stripping them of their supernatural elements in order to explore their underlying historical elements is something that historical fiction has done for years. Rarely has it been done in a more fascinating way than in The King Must Die. Renault, a serious scholar of archaeology and history, imbues her novel with such thematic layeredness and gorgeously realistic worldbuilding that anyone who loves Greek mythology needs to check out this book at least once.
'Flashman' (1969)
George MacDonald Fraser brilliantly framed Flashman, the first book in the series of the same name, as the real memoirs of the eponymous character. Though the book and its sequels were significant bestsellers back in their day and earned Fraser international acclaim, Flashman is the sort of subversive anti-heroic tale that's pretty much designed to be a cult classic. Indeed, since the book's original publication, this whole series has garnered a substantial cult following within historical fiction fan circles.
But while it's practically structured to not necessarily appeal to mainstream tastes due to its unapologetically anti-heroic protagonist and its often-misunderstood satirical attitudes, Flashman nevertheless deserves more love. It's a devastating yet immensely entertaining deconstruction of old imperial myths full of delightful narrative irony and meticulous historical realism, making it one of the best historical books of the 1960s.
'The Big Nowhere' (1988)
Essayist and crime fiction writer James Ellroy was a towering figure in modern crime fiction who proved that, if done right, pulp noir and hard-boiled detective tales could be highly artistic examinations of different facets of American society and politics. His oeuvre is full of almost universally acclaimed masterpieces, but also some awfully underappreciated ones; and among them, The Big Nowhere stands out as one of the very best, following three morally compromised lawmen whose separate investigations collide in 1950s LA.
It's one of those forgotten books that are real page-turners from start to finish, a hugely original subversion of the sorts of tropes that this specific subsection of historical fiction built up throughout its history. It takes the hard-boiled fiction traditions of authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and injects them with a sweeping commitment to historical realism, a sprawling narrative structure, and radical twists on what the genre often offered in the past.
'Dreamland Burning' (2017)
Having worked in places like a morgue and a maximum-security prison, it should perhaps come as no surprise that when she decided to try her hand at writing, Jennifer Latham opted to write crime novels like Dreamland Burning. It's a mystery story loosely based on the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, following a multiracial teen who discovers a human skeleton hidden beneath the floorboards of her family's guesthouse.It's one of the most awfully underrated and underread YA novels of the 2010s, a special kind of historical novel that's actually structured as a dual timeline—one set in the present day, and the other in 1921. Though more snobbish historical fiction readers may dismiss YA as a "lesser" form of the genre, Dreamland Burning is proof of how catastrophically wrong that perception is. It's an urgently timely, perfectly paced piece of historical writing that's unlike anything else the last decade has offered.
'The Game of Kings' (1961)
The first book in Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles series is The Game of Kings, about Francis Crawford of Lymond, a disgraced Scottish nobleman who returns home as an outlaw to clear his name of a six-year-old treason charge. It's one of the best historical adventure books of the latter half of the 20th century, a debut novel that reads sort of like a high-stakes political chess match which is tough to put down over the course of its nearly 600 pages.
Francis Crawford of Lymond is one of the most fascinating protagonists that any historical fiction book series has ever seen, an enigma of a man whose use of his sharp intellect to hide his deep trauma makes for some deeply engaging character-driven reading. Add to that Dunnett's incredibly smart plotting and lush prose, and it shouldn't be surprising that readers often compare The Lymond Chronicles to the works of authors like George R. R. Martin and Guy Gavriel Kay.
'Creation' (1981)
Far more than just a writer or a public intellectual, Gore Vidal was a major American figure throughout his lifetime, a man known for his razor-sharp wit and how he used it to constantly challenge cultural norms. From that wit came Creation, a philosophically charged book where a blind Persian diplomat narrates his memoir to his young nephew in 5th-century BC Athens. But though the physical act of narration occurs in Athens, Creation sets its sights on the entire civilized world of the time.
It's a hugely ambitious premise crafted by a hugely ambitious author. Rather unsurprisingly, it results in one of the most admirable pieces of historical fiction that bookstore shelves have ever seen. It's such a dense, sprawling, subversive epic that it's perhaps not hard to understand why it has gone underappreciated throughout all these years; but if history were fair, Vidal's Creation should see an immense raise in popularity at some point in time.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.