Historical Fiction Bucket List

Miyamoto Musashi's road to becoming the greatest swordsman; Inoue's ink brush.

A disgraced executioner pushes his son across Edo Japan in a cart of hidden blades.

A woman's life in 14th-century Norway in three volumes; Undset's Nobel.

Four generations of the Trueba family and a coup; Allende's debut.

Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Jewish messiah, across Poland and Turkey in 900 pages numbered backwards.

A distillery family in Shandong during the Japanese invasion; Mo Yan's Nobel novel behind Zhang Yimou's film.

Four generations of a Korean family in Japan from 1910; Min Jin Lee's epic.

Warlords, strategists and the fall of the Han; the Chinese epic every game borrows.

The last day of Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, and a woman who returns; Vargas Llosa.

A lie by a 13-year-old in 1935 and Dunkirk; McEwan's best.

Two retired Texas Rangers drive cattle to Montana; the western as great American novel.

Two boys in Kabul, a kite tournament and a betrayal that follows one to America.

The Biafran war through twins, a houseboy and an Englishman.

Okonkwo and his Igbo village as the missionaries arrive; the African novel.

Thomas Cromwell rises under Henry VIII in the present tense; Mantel's first Booker.

Death narrates a girl stealing books in Nazi Germany.

Willie Lincoln's ghost and a graveyard chorus on one night in 1862; Saunders' Booker.

Two magicians in the England of the Napoleonic wars, with footnotes; Clarke's thousand pages.

A butler drives to Cornwall and considers what he gave up for a lord; Ishiguro's Booker.

A murderer with a perfect nose in 18th-century France distils the scent of girls.

Saleem Rushdie, born at the stroke of Indian independence, and a thousand children like him; the Booker of Bookers.

A murder among Ottoman miniaturists in 1591 Istanbul, told by everyone including the colour red.

A 15-year-old and a tram conductor in 1958 Heidelberg, and her trial years later.

Two women in Kabul across thirty years of war; Hosseini's second.

The first Mrs Rochester before the attic, in Jamaica; Jean Rhys answers Jane Eyre.

A boy in postwar Barcelona finds a novel in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and someone is burning every copy.

Oskar stops growing at three and drums through Danzig's twentieth century; Grass's Nobel.

Shakespeare's son dies of plague and his wife Agnes grieves; the play is named after him.

Sethe, a runaway slave, and the ghost of the daughter she killed; Morrison's masterpiece.

A poet-doctor and Lara through the revolution and civil war; smuggled out and given the Nobel.