The best historical fiction about the nineteenth century (from a specialist on the American Revolution)

In this amazing mystery/whodunit, Sara Collins tells the story of Frannie Langton, a Jamaican woman brought to London by her enslavers in the 1820s.

First and foremost, this book is a great story, with all the joys of fantastic fiction. When Frannie is put on trial for double murder, Collins opens up the complex world of plantation households—in the Caribbean and in London—to her readers. I study the dynamics of empire from a birds-eye view; Collins makes them personal, real, human, and intimate.

At the book’s core is Frannie’s searching, propulsive intellect and desire for human connection within a toxic world she cannot ultimately control. Through Frannie’s eyes the reader learns about the history of science, politics, class, race, and gender, but Collins’s storytelling makes it all utterly engrossing.

I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand, and I picked this up mostly because of that desire. (Also, TBH, because a reviewer said this was a book people would either be too scared to start or would never put down, and I took that as a challenge.)

Despite these pretty simple reasons for starting—and finishing—the book, The Luminaries has become one of my all-time favorite novels.

Set in the mid-1860s, Catton tells the story of Scotsman Walter Moody. He travels to New Zealand’s southern island and finds himself immediately intertwined in more than one mystery. He serves as the reader’s guide to the numinous web of lies, swindles, murders, and ambitions that surround the town of Hokitika.

Catton weaves the place into a muddy and pungent microcosm of Britain’s global empire. Her characters, especially the suicidal prostitute Anna Wetherell, take the reader into a more diverse, beautiful, and intriguing Antipodes than I ever imagined. Global politics gracefully become the stuff of personal interactions.

The writing is lovely, but so too are the mix of men and women—British, Māori, and Chinese—who people this world. Though answers to many mysteries await at the books end, they feel less important than the timeless truths interrogated along the way.

This is probably the most famous book on my list, but I first read it just a couple years ago. I was so engrossed in it that I gave my husband almost scene-by-scene updates on our vacation. The story Butler weaves is so compelling that he even started asking for them. 

Books about time travel abound, but few of them make the past come alive like this one. Butler takes the modern reader back to the antebellum South when her protagonist, a Black writer living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, is transported over a century back to Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the time of slavery.

While there, Diana grapples with the personal connections and moral dilemmas she finds in this foreign world. As she returns over succeeding years, her story, and that of her white husband who also time jumps with her, makes the impossible truths of American slavery both real and wrenchingly relatable.

With all due respect to Harper Lee, if I had to pick one book of fiction for all Americans to read in order to understand US history, this would be it.

Readers probably know Pulley best through her amazing best seller, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. That’s how I first encountered her work too, but she became my favorite writer with Bedlam Stacks.

It is the story of Merrick Tremayne, an experienced wilderness traveler whom British colonial authorities hope can help discover new troves of quinine, a material essential for the British colonization of India. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, the story follows Tremayne as he reluctantly journeys into Peru’s distant and remote forests. 

Once there, he enters a magical world that retains just enough realism to make the truths of European colonization vividly clear. Violence and self-interest create unexpected and far-reaching consequences. Peoples at the fringes of empire guard their borders at the peril of those who intrude.

At the same time, Pulley’s deft imagination counterbalances harsh historical realities with magical threads. She brings Tremayne into a place of humanity and connection. While every one of Pulley’s books invites the reader into an utterly new world peopled with striking characters, after reading Bedlam Stacks, I am sure to pick up every one.

Gappah’s book starts with a startling fact: when Scottish doctor and missionary David Livingstone died in Zambia in 1873, his large party of fellow travelers—almost all African—carried his body over a thousand miles to Zanzibar so it could be transported to Britain for burial. 

Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah recreates this amazing journey through a series of overlapping voices, bringing the reader into the perspectives, motivations, and experiences of people usually portrayed as objects rather than actors in the colonial process. Her characters, especially the young cook, Halima, are both fascinating and entertaining.

The book prompts readers to take a fresh look at colonialism’s hero mythologies, but just as important it immerses one in a beautiful and graceful world with its own goals and imperatives. Rather than replacing “European myths” with an equally simplified “African perspective” (both categories are too large to be encapsulated in a single readable narrative), Out of Darkness offers a specific and relatable story about a vivid series of places.