The best historical books to make you feel the power of hope against impossible odds

In The Inheritors, William Golding brings to life a creature from the distant past: Lok, a hairy, barely verbal hominid whose small band is the last of their kind. New words and thoughts confuse him, flashes of logic slip out of his grasp, and he discovers the existence of mysterious Others; invaders with the formidable technology of bow and arrow. But The Inheritors is much more than an exciting adventure. The story stays with me because Lok is a mirror of us—of the human urge to try, to fail, to push on despite the odds. We have no idea what the next thousand years will hold. Neither did Lok. But just like him, we can’t help moving forward.

If Owen Meany is the most unlikely hero you’ll ever meet, he’s also the one that made me think the hardest about whether we make our own fate. I first read this book over twenty years ago, and just the mention of Owen’s name conjures images of a small boy, his broken voice, and his unshakeable faith that he will fulfill a noble destiny. Set during the years around the Vietnam War, the story touches on the odd turns in life that we often put down to chance—or are they something more? A Prayer for Owen Meany is both irreverent and achingly sad. Long after you’ve put it down, you’ll still be saying a prayer for the boy, and the man, with the broken voice.

This book is a gut punch of straight-up prose that reads like pure poetry. The story begins during the convulsions of the American Civil War, and tracks a line directly from the 1860s to the 1950s. This is no dry history lesson though. Presidents and generals don’t rate a mention and the heroes are ordinary people. And that’s where the novel shines: it proves that profound thoughts can be expressed in plain language, and the author delivers them here with powerful simplicity. A Shout in the Ruins is an absolute gem of a story that should not be missed.

The story sounds like legend: three young girls flee their captors and survive a thousand-mile trek across the Australian desert. Sadly, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is all too true. It traces the real-life journey of Molly, Gracie, and Daisy, three Aboriginal Australian children forcibly removed from their families in 1930, part of a racist government strategy to wipe out Aboriginal culture. It’s an amazing tale of survival, but what really inspires me is Molly’s story after that fateful journey: her refusal to give in to a system bent on crushing her. Remarkably, almost a hundred years later, her fight for human rights still echoes in the headlines of today.

Sarah’s Key keeps us hoping in spite of ourselves—and despite the terrible odds facing a Jewish family in Paris, 1942. When the police come knocking one night, ten-year-old Sarah has no idea that her family is being rounded up for transport to an internment camp. She locks her little brother in a closet to save him, certain she’ll return the next day. That fateful choice will echo from WWII into the present, where the apartment’s new occupant uncovers long-ago choices and secrets in her own family. For me, though, the real question isn’t whether Sarah can rescue her brother. It’s about the many ways we justify our own ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and the hope that we can learn from history’s lessons.