The best historical fiction to immerse you in unusual time periods and places

The very name “Zanzibar” has a sort of magic to it—and I certainly fell under its spell when I read M.M. Kaye’s book for what would be the first of many, many times back in the 80s.

I had never heard of Zanzibar; I knew nothing of the ruling family, the Sayyids of Muscat and Oman, but by the time I was a hundred pages into M.M. Kaye’s epic story of an American woman who plunges into intrigues she thinks she understands but doesn’t, I felt I knew them all intimately. This book is a coming-of-age story, a brilliant evocation of place, and so much more.

One of my favorite things about historical fiction is getting to feel like I’m living in another time and place.

Weina dai Randel’s book took me to 7th century Tang Dynasty China with a woman forced to learn the dangerous intrigues of the Emperor’s court. You can feel the silk beneath your fingers and hear the whispers of the courtiers as you navigate the palace with Mei. Bonus: This is book one of two, so you will get to visit the Tang Dynasty again!

England is hardly an unusual place for historical fiction, but 7th-century England is entirely different. Wolf takes you to an England where the Saxons are holding court at Winchester while the remnants of Romanized Britain are desperately trying to organize resistance from their decaying villas. It’s a view of an England in flux, broken into small, warring kingdoms—told from the viewpoint of a British princess, Nan, married off to a Saxon prince. But Nan is no wilting violet and her story is one I still re-read again and again.

Born of the Sun is a beautiful interweaving of place and character and a bold attempt to reconstruct lives that have left little mark on the historical record.

Fun fact: in college, my specialty was 16th-century Scotland, which meant I spent several months living in Edinburgh doing research for my senior thesis. In this book, Susanna Kearsley brings to life a Scotland we seldom see in novels but which brings back the Edinburgh I lived in and studied more vividly than anything else I’ve encountered.

There are so many books about the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, but this book tackles the precursor to all that, the tangled politics of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, from the fall-out of the Glorious Revolution and the exile of James II to the ferment around the 1707 Act of Union in all its glorious complexity, through the life of one woman who finds herself—as one does—a normal person buffeted by larger events. Every time I open this book, I feel like I’m back in Edinburgh again. 

I don’t know about you, but when I learned history in elementary school, we skipped straight from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Norman Conquest with the briefest of nods at Byzantium to acknowledge there was something in between. It was all very simple and straightforward—and completely left out the crumbling kingdoms left behind in the wake of the fall of Alexander the Great’s Empire.

I can still remember opening Gillian Bradshaw’s Horses of Heaven for the first time and thinking, “What’s Ferghana? Or Bactra?”  Gillian Bradshaw wrote a number of books set in the wake of Alexander’s empire, but this one is the one that really stuck with me, told through the eyes of a girl picked to go as attendant to a Greek aristocrat from Bactra being married to King Mauakes of Ferghana (now Afghanistan).