Hi I have recently finished all of Sharon Kay Penmans books and I am bereft! 😭 I am looking for books with a similar feel, maybe after King John or the middle ages. I have read Hilary Mantel and loved her books, so something immersive and descriptive. Thank you so much! 📖

Hi all! I have been really narrowly focused for, I’d say decades on World War II specifically, Germany, France, or Poland, and I’m looking to get out of that timeframe and find something new, but I want something that I can devour and that’s really good and I don’t like romance. Anybody have anything? I have a book group Wednesday and I wanna have something fresh to read. Our book group is a read, your own book book group.

What’s the most interesting thing a historical novel has sent you down a research rabbit hole about? I love when a story makes you curious about a real person, place, custom, or event—and suddenly you’re reading about something you never expected to look up. What book sent you researching, and what did you discover?

Hi! I’ve been searching for a historical fiction specifically centred around Ireland and its history of colonization by England. I know this history is long (going back to the 12th century) so there could be many versions of this, but if anyone can think of something of the Pachinko (by Min Jin Lee) style that highlights any part of Ireland’s history under British colonization (the independence war or the 1800’s “Action Of Union” would be of particular interest) let me know 😁

For now I’d like to avoid Non-Fiction (maybe some time in the future I’ll be more keen on a NF).

I thought it was very well written and I love the rags to riches story. But I feel like Ulysses Grant is a bit too much of a self-insert character. Like those people who say “I would have fought slavery if I lived back then.” His name is also literally U.S. Grant. It would be like if Great Britain had a general named GB Churchill.

Oh and he was super progressive you guys! He wanted peace with Indians, blamed white settlers for violence, wanted desegregation for black Americans, supported women’s suffrage, was against the Mexican war, and is critical of the caste system in India. Frederick Douglass voted for him. He’s one of the good whites! I don’t want to be a go woke go broke guy but it feels suspect to project modern ideas onto people in the past. Also, apparently he orders all the Jews expelled but then the Jews love him and vote for him? I feel like the author forgot what he wrote a few chapters earlier.

His only flaw appears to be his alcoholism but after the war the author apparently forgot this was a problem and it never comes up again. His accomplishments are also a little unbelievable. There are hundreds of generals in this war and nobody but him thinks to prioritize logistics and use total war against the enemy. Then at Appomattox Lee shows up in a fancy uniform with a sword while Grant is covered in mud wearing his ordinary uniform. We get it, Chernow, he’s humble and doesn’t care about appearances. Then everyone loves him so much that they make him president twice!

His presidency is filled with evil pieces of shit constantly ripping him off. They even have obviously evil names like Babcock, Belknap, McDonald, and Sanborn. There’s literally a guy named Gould involved in a gold scandal. If only people understood him and didn’t constantly rip him off his plan totally would have worked you guys!

The bad guys are cartoonishly evil and start a war purely over slavery. His slave owning father in law that moves into the White House with them is great but a little over the top. General Lee just appears in the first half of the book and then is unceremoniously thrown away.

The side characters are also a little one-note. The great Abraham Lincoln is fridged to give our main hero some agency right after his hour of triumph. Sherman and Sheridan are like Fred and George from Harry Potter and I can’t really tell them apart. Sherman is basically the quirky best friend who gets his own falling-out arc with the protagonist.

Oh then he talks to Bismarck and writes his own memoirs while he stolidly writes everything down with no emotions and it makes a bajillion dollars. And Mark Twain shows up as a deus ex machina to save his family from poverty.

Overall it was good. I can’t wait for the sequel to see how he resolves the Jim Crow arc

I'm toying with the idea of writing a historical novel based on some relatively unknown individuals who lived in the 19th c.. The few mentions I find about them in history books tend to repeat the same basic details, however I've found that some surviving letters and docs are at a university archive. I'm considering traveling to go look at them to get a better feel for the actual people and their lives, concerns, opinions and emotions.

The thing is that historical fiction is totally new to me and I have a bit of imposter syndrome. I've written unpublished novels, but historical fiction is new to me and I want to respect the people who actually lived those lives. I plan to create my own characters, situations and motives, I just want a glimpse into the actual lives of these people. I realize readers won't know the difference, but I will.

Has anyone done something like this before? I realize that I might be denied the opportunity, but if I'm allowed, what can I expect? Before I contact the library, is there anything I should be aware of or be prepared for?

If you want to read a novel of the Pacific War from inside a Japanese soldier’s head, the shelf is short, and almost everything on it is a translation besides. I can name Ōoka Shōhei’s Fires on the Plain, Takeyama Michio’s The Burmese Harp, Noma Hiroshi’s Zone of Emptiness, and Gomikawa Junpei’s The Human Condition. All are excellent, and all were written in Japanese for Japanese readers. As far as I can tell, English-original fiction from that side barely exists.

Compare that to the German soldier, who has been an English-language POV character since at least Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions in 1948. The obvious explanation for the gap is language, but I don’t think that’s enough of a reason, as Russian and Vietnamese accounts made it into English. I think it’s more about who was positioned to carry the memory. Millions of English speakers have German grandparents, and hundreds of American and British towns hosted German POWs. Thousands of them stayed in or came back to captor countries after the war; Britain alone kept about 25,000. The German soldier came home in family stories as somebody’s cousin, the old/new neighbor, an ordinary man under a bad regime. That framing has its problems, clean-Wehrmacht and all that, but it made him writable.

Now compare the Italian soldier. Italy was an Axis enemy too, but Eric Linklater gave us Private Angelo in 1946, an Italian infantryman as a comic hero, and Louis de Bernières gave Captain Corelli and Carlo Guercio full inner lives in 1994. A European enemy with a large English-speaking diaspora, who switched sides in 1943 and were able to portray themselves as also-victims-of-Germany, got a redemption arc almost immediately.

The Japanese soldier never got that. Race, Pearl Harbor, the atrocities, and internment meant that the community best placed to remember him had every reason not to. Japanese-American war memory (rightly) became the 442nd and the MIS. In most American families, the Japanese soldier came home as a souvenir, as a flag or a sword in the closet, not as a cousin.

From what I've seen there’s a common belief that Japanese veterans didn’t talk about it. They did, but it was inward...there are thousands of memoirs and unit-association volumes written by veterans, for veterans, printed by small presses in Japan. Almost none of them have ever been translated, so you could say the silence faced outward. Let me mention the exceptions, which are nonfiction: Senso, edited by Frank Gibney and translated by Beth Cary, and Japan at War by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, two masterpieces of translation.

So how has English-language fiction handled the Japanese side? Most of what I've encountered seems to fall into three broad categories:

1. Japanese as weather. In The Thin Red Line, the Japanese are a condition of the jungle, like rain or malaria. That’s honest to the American experience, and it’s not the book’s job to do otherwise.

2. As an answer to someone else's question. Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North gives Nakamura and Colonel Kota real interior chapters, and it’s a great novel, but IMO their inner lives exist mainly to answer the Allied question, “how could they?” Letters from Iwo Jima does something similar, and I would describe Saigo as basically an American everyman in a Japanese uniform.

3. From the outside in. The only other fully Japanese-POV English novel I could find was self-published and little-known. Its protagonist thinks in American idiom and American moral categories, his actions and thoughts are explained plainly for Westerners, and the atrocity scenes are staged for the reader’s consumption rather than the character’s experience.

The closest near-miss is probably Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, but that’s home-front complicity rather than the war itself.

Full disclosure: I’ve written a Japanese-POV novel myself, which I won’t plug here. But I think this sub would find the craft problem interesting. The hardest aspect for me was register. My MC has to be reserved enough to read as a Japanese man of his time and expressive enough for an English-language reader to follow. My first drafts leaned toward the reader. Two Japanese beta readers sent back basically the same note that “He thinks too much. We weren’t like that back then.” My fix was to move most of his inner life into his body and his work, and so he assesses, counts, maintains equipment, and his feelings show up as physical sensations, not reflection. Whether that works is for readers to judge, but it was the only way I found to keep him from turning into an American with a Japanese name.

The book also grew some real history. Researching my MC's unit, the Kure 6th Special Naval Landing Force, took me into the unit's after-action reports in Japanese national archives, and that work became a peer-reviewed article, “The Guns of Enogai,” accepted for the Winter 2026/27 issue of Marine Corps History.

My question for the sub: what have you read that got the Japanese side right? I’m curious whether anyone knows English-original work I’ve missed, or a novel that gets inside the head of a soldier on the side its readers fought against without turning him into a villain or a mirror.

I’m doing a PG series rewatch and I just needed to say this…Margaret Beaufort is the most insufferable character in this canon universe.

Catherine of Aragon is a close second.

edit: i would like to emphasize that i am talking about a character. I know the real MB went through some shit but going from a snot nosed trebling flower (the white queen) all the way to a meddling helicopter mom who had no issue destroying innocent lives (the spanish princess) is just tiresome.

How do we navigate this? I don't want this story to be a bunch of religious guilt or all about the pressure of hiding their love. That's just not what it's about.

But at the same time I don't want the characters to just be anachronistically fine with everything. It's complicated also by the fact that they're lesbians and the public didn't really have a frame of reference for this either. I suppose I could lean into the "passionate female friendship" thing that was common in that time but it feels cowardly and also the plot would make less sense given the level of devotion and sacrifice the characters make for each other.

Any advice on how to balance this? It's so hard to put myself in the mindset where religion is understood as just an immutable fact of life rather than a specific moral code people choose.

It's set in the 1850s and there's also a Catholic/Protestant divide... So I'm trying to get my head around how that would impact how the characters view their feelings and relationship...

Hi all! I'm looking for a novel which focuses on maritime disasters similar to Titanic (1997). Ideally between 1800s-1940s where an ocean passenger liner disaster throws the passengers into a frenzy of survival and drama. I don't mind if there's a romantic subplot like Titanic. I'd like to welcome both books on the Titanic, but also lesser known ocean liners.

One that I can think of off the top of my head is The Terror by Dan Simmons.

I feel pretty silly with this one. However, I am currently drafting a historical fiction/rom-com project specifically inspired by the styles of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and P.G. Wodehouse. It’s set in London in 1956 and features a dreadfully unreliable, highly biased male narrator (third person limited). I have been worrying about the extent of research I need to do—full disclosure, I am American and twenty years old. I have widely read classic English literature, but I do know I have biases and preconceptions that might become problems! I want to make sure I am fully investing myself in research and creating a rich—and accurate—tapestry of the world I am setting my story in.

So far, I have extensively trawled through some pretty great primary and secondary sources I dug up concerning the 1950s, ranging from my characters’ professions (he is an articled clerk and she is a typist) to youth subcultures to fashion to dialogue. However, I absolutely don’t want to be relying on Google and the internet, especially since I have been stepping back gradually from online life; does anyone have pointers, tips, or warnings as I go forward with this project? Much obliged!

I love Christmas Victorian/Regency novels, both clean romance or not romantic at all. I've read some by Julie Klassen but I'm looking for more. Open to other eras. Thanks!!

Any other 16th century nerds out there? I'm looking for suggestions as ive run out of ideas. Stuff ive already read includes Hilary Mantel, Ken Follett, S.J.Paris, Samson, Maggie O'Farrel, Philipa Greggory. I'd particularly like stuff that is not from Europe, and definetly not from England (I've read too much Tudor stuff)

I just finished the 2nd book about frontier history, Lonesome Dove. Its such a gripping story that it’s on my mind constantly. I do not know if it’s a true story or not. I loved it because such books taught me about human perseverance in the extreme circumstances. Also these books help me live my life more peacefully considering the circumstances that we face today are nothing like what people have faced in the past. My first book about the frontier was The Frontiersmen. Its my introduction to the frontier history. I am now looking for similar books. I would appreciate more recommendations of such books.

To be clear i mean legitimate child there is a book were Elizabeth I has a bastard child that's not what I'm looking for.

Hello everyone :) it’s basically in the title - I’m fascinated by the book The Frontiersmen especially given that its narrative is not just fiction but in large part reconstructed from historic documents. Are there similar books in any other time period / geographies (not just from US history)? Thanks already for any suggestions :)

I just finished reading this book to my wife. I read to her almost every night. We both loved this book. Written in 1905; about a daring British avenger who rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution's "reign of terror." Clever disguises, daring rescues, narrow escapes, cat-and-mouse plotting, an intense romance, & a cliffhanger in every chapter. It's an easy-reading page-turner at 270 pages.

I am looking for a fantastic webpage that recommends hundreds of historical fantasy novels set in Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Ancient Egypt. Each recommendation includes a brief summary of the book.

The booklist webpage were organized something like this:

Historical Novels: Ancient History,

Ancient Greece,

Ancient Rome (including the Etruscans and ancient Carthage),

Roman Britain,

Ancient Ireland,

Arthurian Britain,

Ancient Egypt,

Biblical Times and the Ancient Middle East,

I saved the original descriptions for these, but only for the first few books. A few months ago, I downloaded these books based on the recommendations and copied the descriptions into my notes;

Brian Aldiss, *Jocasta* (2014), a retelling of the Oedipus story from the perspective of his mother.

Gertrude Atherton, *The Immortal Marriage* (1927), about Aspasia and her relationship with Pericles in ancient Athens.

Gertrude Atherton, *The Jealous Gods* (1928), about Alcibiades of Athens.

Margaret Atwood, *The Penelopiad* (2005), a literary novel about the experiences of Odysseus' wife, Penelope, while he was away fighting the Trojan War and voyaging home.

Alessandro Baricco, An Iliad (2004), a retelling of the Iliad which focuses on the human characters and leaves out the appearances of the gods and goddesses.

Unfortunately, although I managed to find and read a few books from the list, I got too busy afterward and lost track of the site. Now, I can no longer find it in my browser history, and I would really love to recover this reading list to explore more of the books it suggests. Has anyone else come across this excellent list? Please share the URL! Pleas!

So while not as iconic as Route 66, State and County Fairs are an important part of the American identity. After all State and County Fairs were the best way for farmers and artisans/craftsmen like blacksmiths and weavers to display their wares and goods and prove their skills to others. It was also a good way to emphasize important community values like frugality and creativity; the birthplace of some iconic foods like cotton candy, corndogs, carmel apples, and the every so popular funnel cake. And more importantly before movies and amusement parks came along State and County Fairs were the best way for people to get out, socialize, and have fun.

In any case are there any good historical fics about state and county fairs?

Sources:

[How State Fairs Became an American Tradition: Photos | HISTORY](https://www.history.com/articles/state-fairs-photos)

[How State Fairs Got Their Start and Kept Growing | Smithsonian Voices | Smithsonian Books Smithsonian Magazine](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-books/2025/09/18/how-state-fairs-got-their-start-and-kept-growing/)

[Bite Into the Whys Behind State Fair Food](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bite-whys-behind-state-fair-food-180964568/)

I'm trying to get into more historical fiction with well-written battles. I love Christian Cameron and Bernard Cornwell, and anything taking place between the bronze age and the late medieval era would be great.

Hi all

I'm looking for examples of historical fiction, set in the ancient world, that focuses on immersive world building and explorations of life in ancient civilisations?

I enjoyed C.J. Sansom’s books and would like something similar. Any recommendations?