25 Best Historical Fiction Books – Novels Inspired By History – GoodHousekeeping.com

Reading the best books can feel like time travel, no matter when the story is set. Most bookworms have experienced the unique disorientation of sitting down to read and only emerging from their book-induced reverie hours later, having let the world pass by while they explored whole new worlds in those pages. Historical fiction can compound this effect, especially when it's based on real-life events. History buffs may already know the joys of learning about the past through a fictionalized retelling, but even those who fell asleep during that class in high school may want to give the genre another try. The best historical fiction doesn't read like a textbook at all, but a gripping account of a moment in time through another person's eyes. And especially in the case of books about women, BIPOC and other marginalized or underrepresented voices, reading historical fiction can broaden your mind with fresh perspectives on historical happenings or even accounts of entire events that aren't taught in the classroom. There's also a great read for every time period, from the very earliest blush of human history to the very recent past. Give these wonderful reads a try and then hop on over to the GH Book Club for more literary standouts.

1The Poisonwood Bible

$26.00

Evangelical Baptist Nathan Price moves his wife, four daughtersand all the contents of their householdto theCongo in 1959, during a calamitous fight for independence from Belgium. The historic turmoil sets the backdrop for a powerful story of a family struggling to survive across three decades in a tale that feels both epic and familiar.

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2The Underground Railroad

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National BookAward and all of our hearts, this gripping novel chronicles a young enslaved woman's struggle toward freedom. In Colson's telling, the underground railroad is no metaphor, but an actual railroad that Cora has to travel through space, time and the horrors of the antebellum South.

3The Book of Longings

Ana, the daughter of a wealthy Galilee man and sister to a man named Judas, has always been ambitious and creative. So when she's promised to an older widower, she can't stand the thought. She meets a young Jesus and the two flee to his mother Mary's house in Nazareth. What follows is a reverential tale of a woman who survives against the odds, introducing us to a different side of a very familiarcast of characters.

4In the Shadow of the Banyan

The story of a girl who comes of age during the Cambodian genocide, this istale of hope and perseverance amid staggering loss. As the Khmer Rouge brutalizes the populace and her world is thrown into turmoil, seven-year-old Raami finds solace in the folk stories her father taught her even as her world is enveloped in horror.

5Atonement

When 13-year-old Brionny witnesses a flirtation between her sister Cecilia and her childhood best friend and Robbie, she doesn't fully understand what she's seen. And as a result,she sets in motion a devastating crime that reverberates through all of their lives. Set before, during, and after WWII, it's a meditation on family, class, love and jealousy that's masterfully timeless.

6Girl with a Pearl Earring

Even if you haven't read the book, you probably know the Vermeer painting. This classic takes readers inside the relationship between the Dutch painter and anonymous girl who was his muse in a stirring portrait of a bygone era.

7How Much of These Hills Is Gold

When their father dies unexpectedly,siblingsLucy and Sam are left orphaned in their dicey Gold Rush-era mining town. They steal a horse, grab the body, and take off on a journey to find a safe place to lay him and their own pasts to rest. This gorgeous novel marries Chinese symbolism with a uniquely American sensibility and the timeless force of familial love.

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8The Name of the Rose

$12.00

A highly secretive monastery in the year 1327. Suspected heresy within the Italian elites. Seven mysterious deaths and a monk-turned-detective following symbolic clues that become increasingly sinister the more he learns. This is part historical fiction, part delicious mystery and totally absorbing.

9The Night Watchman

It's 1953 andThomas Wazhashk works as a night watchman at a jewel factory near the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Patrice works there too, saving up to follow her sister Vera off the reservation to the big city, but she gets more than she bargained for when she travels to find her. All the while, there's a bill working its way through Congress that threatens the Chippewa's rights to their land, as well as the very identity of this memorable cast of people.

10Things Fall Apart

Told through the voice of an Igbo warrior in the late 1800s, this first in a series of three explores his community's resistance to British colonialism and the European presence on the continent as a whole. It vividly captures life in a pre-colonial African village, as well as takesa hard look at the tragedy of whatis lost under imperialism.

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11A Long Petal of the Sea

With Spain in the throes ofcivil war, two refugees embark for Chile on a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to start a new life in exile. A story of hope, of finding love amidst horrible circumstances and the promise of home, this one is poetically beautiful.

12The Sympathizer

Part spy novel, part page-turning historical fiction, this Pulitzer Prize-winner follows a man who comes to Los Angeles after the Fall of Saigon to build a new life among other Vietnamese immigrants. But the former army captain issecretly a communist double-agent.

13The Rose Code

Three very different women arrive towork as code breakers at Bletchley Park, untangling German messages to help Britain fight the Nazis. But as the war grinds on, their bond frays with it. Years later, the friends-turned-enemies arereunited by an encrypted letter, a mysterious traitor and the thrilling, dangerous work ofbreaking one last code.

14Vera

Vera Johnson has grown up between two worlds: The corruptglamour of her bordello-owner mother and the squalor and danger of the family paid to raise Vera in her stead. But after the great earthquake of 1906 levels San Francisco, Vera has to assemble some unlikely allies to build a new kind of life from the rubble.

15Pachinko

This sweeping epic that spans four generations of a Korean immigrant family starts with a pregnant teenage Sunja making the difficult choice to reject her son's powerful but duplicitous father in favor of a sickly but kind minister. Her decision ripples through the ages in this stunning story of sacrifice, loyalty and ambition.

16Half Life

In a time when many of us are more tuned in to scientific advances than we've ever been before, this reimagining of what might happen if pioneering scientistMarie Curie had taken a different path is just what the doctor ordered. In parallel timelines, the book explores Curie's actual path and an alternate lifetime, as well as its consequences for the world.

17One Hundred Years of Solitude

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, this expansive work follows the rise and fall of the fictional Macondo. Alive with vibrant characters, the tragedies and triumphs of human life and everything that comes with it, this is a must-read.

18The Four Winds

Eerily resonant during the COVID-19 pandemic, this story set during the Great Depression is a testament to women's resilience. Elsa marries a man she barely knows to escape a spinster's uncertain future.But when drought devastates the Great Plains, she has to make difficult choices not only in the face of arocky marriage, butthe threat toher family's very survival.

19Swimming Back to Trout River

During the tumultuous years of China's Cultural Revolution, 10-year-old Junie receives a letter from her parents in the United Statespromising to come retrieve her before her 12th birthday, but Junie doesn't want to leave her grandparents or the Chinese countryside. Her reluctance could derail her parents' plan, especially sincelong-buried family secrets and their individual struggles have already driven them apart.

20Beloved

Sethe was born an enslaved person and escaped to Ohio, but she's still haunted by the hideous things that happened on the farm that she left. Not to mention the ghost of the baby who died there, whose grave is marked with one word: Beloved.

21The Orphan Collector: A Heroic Novel of Survival During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Set during the spread of the 1918 flu epidemic, this book feels especially resonant today. Pia ventures out into a Philadelphia under quarantine to seek supplies for her family, and finds herself in St. Vincent's Orphan Asylum after collapsing in the street. Meanwhile, neighbor Bernice sees Pia leave and makes a decision that will have long repercussions for them all.

22Homegoing

In the 1800s, two half-sisters are born in two different Ghana villages. One grows up to marry an Englishman and lead a comfortable life, while the other gets sold into slavery after a raid on her village. This story follows their lineage through eight generations from Ghana to the plantations ofMississippi, to Jazz Age Harlem.

23The Dovekeepers

Almost 2,000 years ago,900 Jews held off Roman armies on the ancient mountain of Masada, but only a handful survived.This breathtaking story follows four women who got there by very different paths, all keeping both doves and secrets about where they came from and where they hope to go.

24The God of Small Things

After their young cousin Sophia arrives, the world of 7-year-old twins Estha and Rahel changes forever. Set in the growing unrest of 1960's India, this is a piercing story of family conflict, illicit liaisons and political drama.

25The Mountains Sing

Trn Diu Lan flees herfamily farm in Vietnam with her six children as the Communist government rises in the North. Years later, her youngest granddaughter comes of age as her parents and uncles take to theH Ch Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore both her family and their beloved country apart.Sweeping, epic and beautifully lyrical, this book is as poetic as it is stirring.

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25 Best Historical Fiction Books - Novels Inspired By History - GoodHousekeeping.com