Looking for More Historical Fiction

TheNomadicCircle

I enjoy reading Historical fiction and have recently finished the Conn Iggulden series about the Mongol Empire. I know he is writing more in this series, but until he comes out with more, I want other reading material. So far I've read:

Conn Iggulden

Wolf of the Plains
Lord of the Bow
Bones of the Hills
Empire of Silver

Bernard Cornwell

The Last Kingdom
The Pale Horseman
The Lords of the North
Sword Song
The Burning Land

David Gemmell

Lord of the Silver Bow
Shield Of Thunder
Fall of Kings

Anybody know anymore Historical Fiction that I could read?

KalTorak

It's closer to the "fiction" part, but I really enjoy "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell". Insert an enigmatic system of magic into the British side of the Napoleonic Wars and surrounding time period.

Janson

I really enjoy Edward Rutherfurd's work

Link to amazon page

They're very well researched - and considerably accurate for fiction - and also highly entertaining. Russka is one of my favourite books.

TychoCelchuuu

I really liked Crofton's Fire and you can read that in a day, easy.

John Matrix

You've read all that Cornwell and not any Sharpe? I know it's set as far back at the rest, but very early 1800's can be just as entertaining.

Start with Sharpe's Rifles or Sharpe's Eagle. Many of the books are prequels so it's a little difficult deciding where to start. Often reading them in published order is just fine if you have a little timeline of the peninsular war.

benholio

Pillars of the Earth and World Without End by Ken Follett are two historical novels that I really enjoyed.

Fireflash

Currently about halfway through Pillars of the Earth. It's pretty good so far.

Continental_Op

I'm going to second Cornwell's Sharpe series and add both his Grail Quest series and his retelling of Arthurian legend. The Grail Quest books, which focus on an archer during the Hundred Years War starts with either Harlequin/The Archer's Trail (depends on what market you are in), followed by Vagabond and Heretic.

The Arthur books, which are very similar to his Saxon stuff in the best way possible starts with The Winter King.

If you want outside of medieval historical fiction I'd also recommend Gene Wolfe's Latro in the Mist series. He mixes in Greek and Roman mythology into a story following the Persian advance into Greece. Extremely well done with a couple sequels that are equally as good.

I'd also recommend Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, starting with Master and Commander, which shares nothing, but the title with the plot of the move, well aside from being totally awesome. If you want more naval stuff C.S. Forrester's Horatio Hornblower stuff is good too, but I personally prefer O'Brian's stuff long term. I'm going to second Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell here as well because it is the same time period and a great read.

For me recent historical fiction I'd recommend Caleb Carr's The Alienest, Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, and stretching the boundaries of historical fiction Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. Carr's book is about the growth of psychological profiling in law enforcement in late 19th century New York City where Teddy Roosevelt has a supporting role. Child 44 is the true story of Russia's first documented serial killer after the Russian Revolution, where crime did not exist (according to propaganda). Deals with the KGB, secret police, gulags, death camps, and good old detective work. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a fictional account of he pulp authors of The Shadow and Doc Savage uncovering their own pulp adventure and running in H.P. Lovecraft and L. Ron Hubbard before Dianetics.

CroakerBC

C.J. Sansom's 'Shardlake' series - starts with Dissolution - is an extremely good, and well researched, series of historical murder mysteries set in England in the reign of Henry VIII.

The Cadfael series by Ellis Peters is also very good, though set in an earlier period.

Robert Graves I, Claudius has been the standard for classicla historical fiction for years.

Jack Hight's Siege covers the fall of Constantinople to the Turks - think Kingdom of Heaven.

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzch, is a recently translated german work about a town executioner who investigates a murder in the midst of a witch hunt - the translation is excellent, and the material unique

Heresy by S.J. Parris and Sacred Treason by James Forrester are both well researched historical conspiracy/mystery pieces in the DaVinci code mold, in a historical setting. Good fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Elin

Have you read anything by James A. Michener? That's pretty much his thing. I started with Centennial, about Centennial, CO. Hawaii is also very good. I like everything I've read by him.

Karnack

if you're looking for a bit more classical historical fiction you could go with Hadji Murat by Tolstoy. Or Taras Bulba by Gogol. I'd recommend War and Peace but most people get turned off by the authorial essays on history and philosophy, but give that a shot if you don't mind some dirt in your otherwise delicious steak

Artereis

Temeraire by Naomi Novik: The Napoleonic Wars with an air force consisting of dragons.

Shogun

The Asian Saga by James Clavell.

Shogun: Set in feudal Japan 1600
Tai-Pan: Hong Kong 1841
Gai-Jin: Japan 1862
King Rat: Japanese POW camp + Singapore 1945
Noble House: Hong Kong 1963
Whirlwind: Iran 1979

My favorite are Shogun and Noble House. If you're going to read anything start with Shogun. You will not be disappointed.

LaOs

benholio wrote: »

Pillars of the Earth and World Without End by Ken Follett...

Double++:^:

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rocketshipready

Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon is probably one of my favorite books. Definitely on the fictiony side rather than historical, but it goes into a lot of the tall tales surrounding them

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is a great two-book series, about a young black boy growing up in Revolutionary Boston, with some weird twists. It's technically a young adult series, but it's extremely well-written and thought-provoking

finral

I really enjoyed The Last King: Rome's Greatest Enemy by Michael Curtis Ford. It is pretty well researched historical fiction about Mithridates the Great and his pretty much endless fight against Rome.

Another one is Aztec by Gary Jennings. You guessed it, it's about the Aztecs. It is also pretty meticulously researched, but has some bizzare sex things in it, so be warned.

Sir Carcass

My absolute favorite book is the first book in this series (though they're all great):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stewart%27s_Merlin_Trilogy

Aurora Borealis

For Celtic/Roman Britain YA novels, get thee to some Rosemary Sutcliff. Super prolific, high quality, good stuff.

I went on a Pearl S. Buck kick in HS. I particularly enjoyed Imperial Woman as I recall.

Echoing calls for Cadfael, Sharpe, and I, Claudius.

Tomanta

There's the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson (starts with Quicksilver).

Stephenson loves his details, which has made it hard for me to get into them, though.

Bagginses

There's always period stuff like HG Well or Wilkie Collins.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the Rashi's Daughters series by Maggie Anton, A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

Beasteh

Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser is one of my favourite series of all time

you might be interested in:

Flashman and the Dragon (1985): 1860. China: the Taiping Rebellion and the Peking Expedition.
Flashman and the Mountain of Light (1990): 1845-46. The First Anglo-Sikh War; the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

Captain Marcus

The Mosaic of Shadows by Tom Harper. Detective novel set in 1st Crusade era Constantinople. First in a trilogy.

Kate of Lokys

Aurora Borealis wrote: »

For Celtic/Roman Britain YA novels, get thee to some Rosemary Sutcliff. Super prolific, high quality, good stuff.

I love you for knowing about this author. Her books are all fantastic, and they span a wide range of age groups: the shorter ones like Sun Horse, Moon Horse are very obviously intended for younger readers, but she has a couple of explicitly adult books as well, most notably Sword at Sunset, which is the single best version of the Arthur story that I've ever read, bar none. Even Sutcliff's young adult stuff, though, is extremely well-written and highly enjoyable: The Eagle of the Ninth is a classic, but I've always loved The Shining Company the best.

OP, for something a bit different, try Guy Gavriel Kay. He writes a sort of historical fantasy, set in somewhat fictionalized versions of real-world settings. The Sarantine Mosaic, for example, tells of the rule of Justinian I, Emperor of Byzantium, through the eyes of a Roman mosaicist; The Lions of Al-Rassan describes the Spanish Reconquista from the perspectives of El Cid, a Jewish physician, and a Muslim nobleman from the Caliphate of Cordoba. Most relevantly to your interests, his latest book, Under Heaven, presents an altered version of the An Lushan Rebellion during the Tang dynasty in China.

CroakerBC

Can't believe I forgot Kay, particularly 'Under Heaven'; depends on your definition of Dark, I suppose. But Under Heaven, recommended below, is excellent, and so is the deliciously complex (and occasionally unpleasant) Sailing to Sarantium/Lord of Emperors by the same author.

On the Rosemary Sutcliff note (and I defy any child in the UK of a certain age not to have delighted in her Eagle of the Ninth[), there is a slightly more adult version done by the fabulously prolific Lindsey Davis - the 'Falco' novels, which start with The Silver Pigs. They cover the rise, and fall, and rise, of a 'private informer' (P.I.) in the reign of Vespasian, investigating a variety of crimes across the entire Roman Empire - including the East, for the OP. Well worth it, and also wonderfully performed on audio, if you like that sort of thing...

JacksWastedLife

I am a huge Alexandre Dumas fan. The musketeer stuff is alright, but the unabridged Count of Monte Christo is amazing

SammyF

Dumas is outstanding when translated well. Even when translated poorly, he's still better than most writers.

My favorite historical novels are the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brien, starting with Master and Commander, which focus on life in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars. In my opinion, his writing style is so much better than C.S. Forrester's handling of the same subject matter, although some might criticize him as not being as immediately accessible as Forrester (primarily because Forrester doesn't actually understand sailing well enough to write in detail about it, as near as I can tell).

I also want to second the love shown in an earlier post for James Clavell. I picked up a copy of Shogun randomly at a used book sale a few years back for a couple bucks and spent a blissful month of my life with it (it being such a long-assed book). Clavell has a way of capturing and portraying respectfully the nuanced differences of a foreign culture in a level of detail that's usually reserved for the best of fantasy writers - had the Japanese never existed as a people, they'd still come alive in your imagination through Clavell's prose the same way we all owe to J.R.R. Tolkien a common understanding of what exactly an Elf or a Hobbit is.