16 Best Historical Fiction Books That Never Feel Like Homework

Sunja is the daughter of a woman who runs a boarding house on an island near Busan when Korea is a Japanese colony. She gets pregnant by a rich man who turns out to be married, and a sick young minister offers her a way out by marrying her and taking her to Osaka. From there the book follows her sons and grandsons through war, poverty, the Korean ghettos of Japanese cities, and the pachinko parlours that were one of the few businesses open to people with Korean names. It moves fast for a book that covers eighty years.

Liesel arrives outside Munich carrying one stolen book she cannot read, at the house of a couple who are paid to take her in. The man of the house teaches her to read at night in the basement, and later that basement hides a young Jewish man whose life depends on the household staying ordinary. The narrator is Death, which sounds like a gimmick until you notice he is bored, kind and busy, and that he tells you who dies well before it happens so you spend the book dreading it. Written for teenagers and read mostly by adults, which tells you something.

Effia and Esi never meet. One is married to the British governor of Cape Coast Castle and lives above the dungeons. The other is sold through them. After that the book gives every descendant a single chapter, alternating between the Ghanaian line and the American one, from the Asante wars and Fante slave raiding down through plantations, convict leasing in Alabama coal mines, the Great Migration, Harlem and a university lab in the present. Fourteen chapters, fourteen lives, one bloodline.

The famous man is never named in this book. It belongs to Agnes, his wife, a woman with a way with plants and a reputation in the town, and to the household in Stratford where the son falls ill while his father is away in London. O'Farrell writes the domestic world with unusual attention: the glover's workshop, the herbs, the illiterate servants, the way a fever moves through rooms. There is a chapter that follows the plague itself from a flea in Alexandria to a Warwickshire street, and it is the best thing in the book.

Marie-Laure leaves Paris with her father, a locksmith at the natural history museum, and ends up in Saint-Malo with a great uncle who has not left the house in twenty years. Werner grows up in a mining town, teaches himself radio repair, and is taken into a brutal Nazi school because the skill is useful. The chapters are two or three pages long, the timeline jumps back and forth from 1944, and the whole thing is engineered to bring two people into one street.

Count Rostov is declared a former person by a Bolshevik tribunal and confined to the Metropol Hotel, where he is moved from a suite to an attic room and told he will be shot if he steps outside. He becomes a waiter, a friend to a child who knows the building's secrets, and an observer of everyone the new regime sends through the dining room. The book is warm, funny and formally clever, since the world has to come to him for thirty years.

Griet is sent to work in the Vermeer household when her father, a tile painter, goes blind. She cleans the studio without moving anything, which is how she starts to understand what he is doing, and she is gradually pulled into mixing colours and then into sitting for him. The tension is entirely domestic: a jealous wife, a mother in law running the money, a patron with appetites, a butcher's son who wants to marry her. Under 250 pages and it never drags.

On the eve of the first Opium War, the Ibis picks up a cargo of people instead of opium. Among them: a widow from a Bihar poppy village escaping her husband's pyre, a bankrupted raja convicted of forgery, a mixed race American sailor passing as white, and a French orphan girl raised in a Calcutta botanist's house. Ghosh writes the sailors in lascar English, the villagers in Bhojpuri rhythms and the Company men in their own cant, so the first fifty pages feel like standing in a port and hearing six languages at once.

A twelve year old girl is married to a widower more than twice her age and sent by boat to a house in the Kerala backwaters, where she becomes the matriarch of a Saint Thomas Christian family carrying an inherited condition that kills by water. Verghese is a physician, and the medicine is the best part: a Scottish surgeon's training in Madras, hands ruined and rebuilt, leprosy treated when treatment barely existed. It runs past seven hundred pages and earns most of them.

Blackthorne arrives with a Dutch ship, a Protestant grudge against the Portuguese Jesuits already established there, and no idea that the small courtesies he keeps getting wrong are matters of life and death. He is picked up by Lord Toranaga, who is modelled on Tokugawa Ieyasu and is playing a much longer game than anyone around him. Over a thousand pages you get sieges, earthquakes, a translator named Mariko who does the real work of the novel, and politics conducted entirely through manners.

A builder wants to raise a cathedral in a fictional town called Kingsbridge, and the novel follows the prior who funds it, the family who builds it, and the nobles who would rather it failed. Around them is the Anarchy, the war between Stephen and Matilda, and the church and crown quarrel that ends with a murder in Canterbury. Follett is not a stylist, and the villains twirl their moustaches, but nobody has ever made vaulting, wool prices and quarry rights this exciting.

Mehrunnisa, later called Nur Jahan, is born to a Persian family so poor that her parents almost leave her behind on the road to Agra. She sees Prince Salim at court as a child, decides on him, is married off to a soldier, widowed, and finally becomes the emperor's twentieth wife at thirty four. Sundaresan writes the harem as a political institution rather than a fantasy, with women running networks, finances and access to the throne.

Thomas Cromwell has been history's villain for four centuries, and Mantel puts you behind his eyes as he rises from a beaten child in Putney to the man who manages Henry's divorce, the break with Rome and the fall of Anne Boleyn. It is written in the present tense, and the pronoun he almost always means Cromwell, which is the wall readers hit on page one. Push through and it becomes the most immediate historical novel in English: the deals, the money, the letters, the timing.

Sethe lives in a house outside Cincinnati eight years after the war with her surviving daughter and a ghost that everyone in the neighbourhood knows about. Then a young woman arrives at the gate with the name of the dead child and no history of her own. Morrison tells it in fragments, circling the event at the centre and refusing to explain it until you have earned it. The prose does things English does not usually do, and the book is short, which makes the density hit harder.

William of Baskerville arrives at a wealthy abbey to prepare for a theological meeting and finds a body. Seven days, several more deaths, and a young novice narrating it all fifty years later. Eco was a scholar of the medieval period and he does not simplify: there are pages on whether Christ owned his clothes, on the politics between pope and emperor, on heretical movements and the Inquisition that hunted them. There is also a first rate murder mystery in there, and a burning library.

Claudius pretends to be a fool because fools survive, and from that safe corner he narrates the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula as a family history: marriages arranged and dissolved, adoptions used as weapons, heirs dying at convenient moments, and his grandmother Livia at the centre of it. Graves wrote it as a memoir found long after the fact, and the voice is gossipy and dry rather than grand. Once you have the family straight it reads like the best group chat in history.