Historical Fiction for Everyone

A Barcelona youth survives his troubled childhood by taking refuge in stories until — at the age of seventeen — he gets the chance to begin writing his own.

During World War II in Germany, a foster girl learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

Salman Rushdie's sweeping and masterfully-written historical novel is set in sixteenth century Florence and Sikri, the seat of the Mughal Empire of the East and orbits the fortunes of a young adventurer with many names and the enchantress Qara Koz.

Flint and Silver is the first in a series of prequels John Drake is planning to the much loved Treasure Island. This rollicking tale of pirates and buried treasure is not a children's book, however.

Boston, 1918. The Boston police are contemplating an historic strike, and everyone is looking for the “Red Menace” who, it is believed, will encourage unionization and blow up the city.

Opening in Shanghai in 1937 and ending some 20 years later in Los Angeles, Lisa See's Shanghai Girls is themed around the duality between a reverence for tradition and the pull of the modern world.

By Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a story of the unconquerable spirit of a people seen through the eyes of two indomitable women.

Eggers illuminates the history of the civil war in Sudan through the eyes of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese Lost Boy now living in the United States.

T. C. Boyle reincarnates Frank Lloyd Wright in this richly imagined novel that tells the architect’s story through the lens of the women he loved.

Follett is terrific at drawing characters who are compelling, funny, sexy, dramatic, and very human. Although the book is set in the fourteenth century, modern readers will immediately identify with the emotions and goals of its characters.