It was about this time last year I discovered this genre and I’m in love with it. I especially like fictionalized books about real people or events.
Some of my favorites:
Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue. It’s the fictionalized true story of a prostitute who left that life to become a maid but ended up killing her employer.
Suzannah Morrow by Megan Chance. It’s about a woman caught up in the Salem Witchcraft Trials, accused by her neice. (There’s a bit of romance stirred in this one, but it’s not too annoying.)
Jean Plaidy’s books. They’re fictionalized biographies of the kings and queens of England. I used to scour used bookstores for them, but they’re now being republished. I just finished the one about Queen Victoria. It was pretty good.
Phillipa Gregory is becoming one of my favorite authors. I lovedThe Other Boleyn Gir.l It was told from the perspective of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, and was an excellent picture of the sexual politics of the Tudor court. Her next book The Queen’s Fool was the story of Bloody Mary Tudor told from the perspective of her servant, her “holy fool”, a girl who has visions of the future. (If you don’t like a touch of the supernatural, you may not like this one, but it doesn’t get annoying.) I didn’t like the one about Elizabeth, The Virgin’s Lover. (I don’t think Gregory much likes Elizabeth. She paints her as a ruthless, amoral woman, as the lover of Robert Dudley and the murderer of his wife.)
So, any suggestions, fellow lovers of historical fiction?
Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon. It will take you a few pages to get used to the late-18th-C writing style, but once you get into it, you’ll love it. Parts of it are LOL hilarious.
Richard Sharpe is a soldier in the British army around the turn of the 18/19th centuries. The stories follow him up the ranks from private to (IIRC) Major and feature most of the major battles of the Peninsular wars and a few others too.
Lots of historical events and personalities, and some meaty battle scenes as well.
Right now I’m halfway through The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, by M.G. Vassanji. Fascinating, epic look at Kenyan independence through the eyes of an Indian settler. It won the Giller (Canada’s Man Booker, in a loose sense) in 2003.
I’ll second the Gabaldon books, and thank you for letting me know Gregory had a new book about Elizabeth. I figured she’d get around to it sometime.
If you like historical mysteries, I highly recommend Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and its sequel The Angel of Darkness. They’re completely fascinating from both a criminal and psychological perspective, as a disparate group of people try to catch murderers using the unheard-of method of psychological profiling.
Bernard Cornwell’s series of books on the English archer Thomas of Hookton are absolutely wonderful. Cornwell has really done some homework on the use of archers in English warefare: Vagabond, The Archer’s Tale, Heretic, etc.
Also, Parke Godwin has some really good retellings of the Arthur and Robin Hood legends: Firelord/Beloved Exile, and Sherwood/Robin and the King.
I’ve read every one of those except for Pillars of the Earth. I must have re-read Crimson Petal at least a dozen times.
Another book about the plague that I liked was The Plague Tales by Anne Benson. It’s set both in modern times and during the Black Death. (A researcher accidently sets loose a hybrid version of the plague in modern times.)
Another one dealing with the plague is Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book. A historian sent back through time to research the Middle Ages is plunked down in the wrong year and sees the plague decimate those who took her in.
I cannot recommend highly enough a pair of books written by Nicholas Guild. The Assyrian and The Blood Star follow the wanderings of an Assyrian prince throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Excellent in every way.
The problem is that only the first book was ever reissued in paperback. The second book is extremely difficult to find, but well worth the read.
I quite enjoyed Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play about a fourteenth century theatrical troupe investigating a murder against the complicated social and political background of the times, and I’m told some of his other works are even better.
For those of you who wish you could see Rome as it once was allow me to recommend Steven Saylor. He writes a series of historical fiction novels set in Ancient Rome. You follow the life of Gordianus the Finder, a detective in ancient Rome. There’s a whole series of books following Gordianus, my favorite has been The Venus Throw.
The late, great Dorothy Dunnett has two historical series, The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo. I think I gave up about two years of my life in total to reading these books, and I don’t regret a moment of it.
If you feel like poking around thift stores, there’s a romance writer by the name of Elswyth Thane who wrote something called The Williamsburg series. The first title is Dawn’s Early Light. Each book takes place during a war, starting with the Revolutionary War, and follows a family from colonial Williamsburg days up to WWII. As far as I know, they are in print, although the only available version seems to be a very pricey collector’s type edition. You can usually find them in second hand stores for about a buck. The romance plots are firmly shored up by very decent historical settings.
Mary Higgins Clark’s first published book “Mount Vernon Love Story.” It was originally published as “Aspire to the Heavens,” didn’t sell, and went out of print and was remaindered very quickly. It is an excellent book about George & Martha Washington’s life that has fortunately been reissued.
Mary Renault’s Alexander Trilogy is exceptional: Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games. The definitive novels about Alexander the Great.
The first three or four books of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series is riveting, before she lets her omgsquee!Caesar!liekwhoa fangirliness get the better of her. After Sulla dies, just give up the books entirely.
Maria McCann’s novel As Meat Loves Salt takes place during the English Civil War, a time period not often written about. A young servant named Jacob Cullen joins Cromwell’s New Model Army after fleeing some rather violent happenings back at his old estate.
The problem with historical fiction, IMHO, is that the genre is rarely more than workmanlike – a plain recounting of events, with some dialogue and such inserted. Not every enthralling. There are a few rare authors, however, who write with passion and manage to get inside the heads of their subjects and make them live and breathe like a true person of their time.
