The best novels featuring controversial historical heroes

This book became my ultimate escapism at a low point in my life. It’s a wonderfully written, well-researched epic novel about the eleventh century Scottish king, Macbeth, based on the bold premise that he and Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, were one and the same man. Most of us—especially those who went to school in Scotland!—are familiar with the Macbeth of Shakespeare, but Dorothy Dunnett brings him alive in his own time, no guilt-ridden villain but a complicated warrior of great depth and humanity, true to his beliefs, his people, and his wife who is nothing like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth either! This is a rattling good read by any standards—engrossing, exciting, humorous, and moving. Even knowing the tragedy was coming, I cried. Each time.

I first read this in my teens and was utterly blown away. It tells the story of the young Prince Rupert of the Rhine, most famous for fighting for his uncle, King Charles the First in the English Civil Wars. I knew little about “Roundheads and Cavaliers” at the time but had the vague idea that cavaliers were silly dandies with long hair who deserved to lose, and that Rupert was a mere mercenary desperate to make money out of someone else’s war. The Rupert of this beautifully written and impeccably researched novel is so much more—dashing, yes, and fascinated by war, but also skilled, thoughtful, honourable, loyal, and unexpectedly vulnerable to those he loves. I believed in Ms. Irwin’s Rupert utterly. After my own studies, I still do.

I discovered this in my early teens, which perhaps explains why I didn’t bat an eyelid that the heroine is only fifteen years old when she marries our hero. It’s based on the true story of Harry and Juana Smith during the Peninsular war and is a very appealing novel, brilliantly researched and written in Georgette Heyer’s inimitable, light-hearted style. Harry shines as the brave and lovable young officer. Both main characters, their friends, and Wellington himself, leap off the pages fully formed. I’d probably blackball a book written now about a 25 year old man marrying a fifteen year old, yet I can still easily buy into this one, accepting the different customs of their time and simply enjoying their story. 

Yes, I know Bram Stoker’s Dracula didn’t really exist! But it is thought that Stoker based him on the fifteenth century Wallachian prince, Vlad III, known as Dracula (son of the dragon), of whom a thousand tales of cruelty and atrocity are still told in Romania today. My interest in the historical Vlad Dracula actually began with this book (and in fact I once took off with three friends to follow Jonanthan Harker’s route through Transylvania!), but I love it in its own right because it is such a wonderful Gothic horror story, deliciously atmospheric, and full of suspense, emotion, bizarre characters, and understated sensuality. What could be better?

I was drawn to this book because it is set in a part of Turkey that I love. There is such charm to the characters who live simple lives until they’re upended by other people’s wars and political decisions. I felt I could relate to them through people I’d actually met, even more so when I visited the “ghost village” of Kayakoy, which inspired de Berniere’s village. The stories of the fictional villagers, alternately touching, funny, brutal, and tragic, are mingled with that of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern, secular Turkey, a man of great vision and leadership, who yet oversaw the removal of ethnic Greeks from their homes. I found the novel thoroughly haunting and thought-provoking.