Historical Fiction Books Bucket List

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

One ordinary day in a Siberian labour camp; the book that told the USSR about the Gulag.

Three generations of the Trotta family and the last decades of the Habsburg empire.

The Glanton gang scalp their way across the border in 1849 and the Judge dances; McCarthy's violent Bible.

D Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis against the Cardinal; all for one.

A Roman patrician and a Christian girl under Nero; Sienkiewicz's Nobel.

Jean Valjean, a loaf of bread and nineteen years; Hugo's Paris from the sewers to the barricades.

Quasimodo, Esmeralda and the cathedral Hugo wrote the book to save.

London and Paris during the Terror; "it is a far, far better thing that I do".

Hester Prynne and the letter on her dress in Puritan Boston.

Umberto Eco's labyrinthine medieval murder mystery, set in a doomed monastery library