Historical Fiction Books To Learn From the Past

Amid a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian presents a “rare and astonishing” (The Observer) portrait of political unrest and the universal struggle for justice. An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.

Ghana, eighteenth century: Two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations. It is an extraordinary novel that illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed — and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

A sweeping novel about a correspondent trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean War, and the women who help her find her way home, from the national bestselling author of Daughters of Shandong. Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on a “Forgotten War,” the resilience of love within our darkest history, and the indefatigable determination of mothers to protect their children.

Based on historical people and real events, the book explores the history of the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, while painting a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the introduction to the classic play, Miller writes, “I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history.” And while the book itself was written in 1953 as a reflection of the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “witch-hunts” in the United States, the book is also a haunting examination of groupthink that very much still plagues our society today.

A debut novel by the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days, following two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them.

Bestselling author of The Boy In The Striped Pajamas (another powerful book about the Holocaust that sold millions of copies around the world), Boyne returns with a devastating, beautiful story about a woman who must confront the terrible sins of her past and show it is never too late for bravery. In the gripping book, you follow Gretel Fernsby, who lives a quiet life in London, despite her deeply disturbing and dark past. Gretel doesn’t discuss her escape from Nazi Germany or her grim post-war years in France. But most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, who was the commandant of one of the Reich’s most notorious extermination camps. An exploration of guilt, grief, and remorse, you won’t forget this emotionally layered novel.

This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother’s gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children and piece her family back together is a “celebration of motherhood and female resilience” (The Observer).

From the author of The House of the Spirits, this epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home.

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a searing and compassionate new novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible injustice done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench.

Otsuka’s debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps, both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times. When The Emperor Was Divine is a commanding story, set in 1942, that depicts what it was like for the thousands of Japanese Americans who were reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and uprooted from their homes to be sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert. This evocative tale of injustice is one that USA Today called “a gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you’ll ever learn.”

Set in Jaffa between 1947 and 1951, this “fable-like historical novel of young love … darkly humorous and touching” (Oprah Daily) is based on a true story during the beginning of the destruction of Palestine and displacement of its people.

Four decades after the war, Vietnam’s flavors of clove and cinnamon have been re-created by a close-knit refugee community in a Virginia suburb. But the lives of Minh and Mai, father and daughter, are haunted by ghosts, secrets, and the loss of their country. During the disastrous last days in Saigon, in a whirl of military signals and helicopter evacuations, Mai never had a chance to say goodbye to so many people who meant so much to her. What happened to them? How will Mai cope with the trauma of war — and will the thay phap, a Vietnamese spirit exorcist, be able to heal her?

A searingly original debut about two sisters and their flight from genocide — which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to San Francisco’s Cannery Row — each haunted along the way by the ghosts of their murdered friends, who are not yet done telling their stories. Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of the classic A Little Life — a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss, and the elusive promise of utopia.

From acclaimed author Malinda Lo comes a gripping, tender coming-of-age novel exploring identity, queerness, and historical upheaval set in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1950s. Meticulously researched, emotionally stirring, and startlingly brave, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a standout work of historical fiction that has taken the world by storm.

Widely acclaimed as the most extraordinary war novel of all time, All Quiet On The Western Front is the tale of a young German soldier’s harrowing experiences in the trenches. Remarque’s classic novel vividly portrays the combatants’ physical and mental trauma and dramatizes the tragic detachment from civilian life that was felt by many upon returning home. The story also pulls from Remarque’s own experience as he was drafted into the German army during World War I. Now, more than a century after the conflict’s end, the story remains as powerful — and essential — as ever. (And it is now a Netflix film.)

Inspired by the author’s own family history, and spanning the past hundred years of Chinese history, this multi-generational family saga explores how women survive the tsunamis of history. Nothing to My Name is a braided history of suffering and dignity, of loss and reckoning, and of the unexpected joy that sustains family bonds.

Black Rain centers on the story of a young woman caught in the radioactive “black rain” that fell after the bombing of Hiroshima. The basis of the book comes from real-life diaries and interviews, and the result is a book that reveals the vast and true magnitude of the human suffering caused by the atomic bomb. Ibuse tempers the horror of this moment in history with the gentle humor he is famous for. It is, in part, thanks to his sensitivity to the complexity of this historical event that has made Black Rain one of the most acclaimed renditions of the story of Hiroshima. As John Hersey, author of Hiroshima, puts it, “this painful and very beautiful book gives two powerful messages — of drastic warning, yet also of affirmation of life.”

The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.

Emergency is a pastoral novel about the interconnectedness of all life on earth. In the book, our narrator is at home during the lockdown, pondering both past and present. While not based centuries — or even decades — back, this important book explores the dissolution of boundaries between the self and our earth as we approach ecological catastrophe. Emergency asks us to look at what’s essential and consider what the slow disappearance of Hildyard’s (and our own) native environment might mean for humanity. As Clare Pettitt of Times Literary Supplement puts it, “Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible.”

A gripping and uplifting novel based on the true story of the Jane Collective and the brave women who worked in the shadows for our right to choose, from the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller. In this historic moment, when the personal was nothing if not political, three women risk it all to help mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. With an awe-inspiring story and appealing characters, All You Have to Do Is Call celebrates the power of women coming together in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

To end this list with a dose of hope, we have Caleb’s Crossing, which brilliantly captures the triumphs and turmoil of two brave, openhearted spirits who risk it all in a search for knowledge at a time of superstition and ignorance. Inspired by a true story, Caleb’s Crossing follows Bethia Mayfield, a curious young woman whose father is a Calvinist minister, and Caleb, the young son of a chieftain. Set in Martha’s Vineyard in the 1660s, the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other as Bethia’s father seeks to convert the native Wampanoag. The real Caleb, on which the book is based, eventually becomes the first Native American graduate of Harvard College.