100 books like A Booke of Days

This book is both future fiction and historical. An Oxford historian journeys back in time and ends up by accident in a plague-filled village in the Middle Ages.

What I love about this novel is the bravery of the characters and their commitment to the good. Willis makes me a believer that humans have not changed much in a thousand years. Ties of love, faith, and humor are the stronghold for confused humans in the past, present, or future, and Willis’ universe is a benevolent one that responds to reward those acts of faith.

Although this book could be classified as science fiction, it is lovingly historical with a deeply researched and rich experience of our past. I absolutely love this book. 

Mystery, quest, treasure, and historical adventure, this novel has it all.

Labyrinth links a twelfth-century French heroine in a land of legends, castles, and knights with a present-day heroine who finds two ancient skeletons at an archaeological dig and is drawn into a quest for the Holy Grail.

I love mystical, historical quests, and mysterious symbols, especially when the setting is so real you feel you are there. This one kept me reading far into the wee hours and I enjoyed learning more about medieval France.

The Lake House was recommended to me because the style of writing and the themes of the story have been compared to my own books. I especially enjoy the techniques of interweaving present-day stories with tales from the past and employing multiple perspectives. Kate Morton’s characters are always well-developed, and her descriptions provide atmospheric depth. The country lake home, Loeanneth—beautifully described in its prime—is an abandoned, crumbling estate decades later. Family secrets abound and having two unrelated mysteries at work brings texture to the story. As a writer, I do appreciate when one of the main characters is an author, and I enjoyed observing Alice Edevane's approach to her writing life. Be patient as the mystery twists and builds. You won’t be disappointed!

Arguably the landmark novel of the time-slip genre. Using hypnosis and the idea of a previous life lived, this story transports Jo, a woman of the 20th century back into the past with all its horrors and disease in a believable ride across the barriers of time to the reign of King John. As Matilda, her life is plagued by treachery and a cruel death as two lives become bound to each other. It begs the question as to whether reincarnation and past life really exist and, if so, is hypnosis the way to establish the truth and enter that other world. I find the concept intriguing as there are many accounts in other countries, especially India, of children speaking of their previous life and death as another person.

The subtitle gives it away—this is my (and, I’m guessing, most other medieval military historians’) go-to book for that most famous of crusades. France masterfully combines a captivating narrative with abundant historical detail, keen tactical/operational/strategic analyses, and expert interpretation. Each chapter is a delight, but not to be missed is France’s discussion of medieval generalship, his close study of army sizes, and especially the three full chapters on the fighting in and around Antioch in 1097-1098—which still constitute the best scholarly treatment of the events there. Despite a rash of newer works on the First Crusade over the last three decades, this remains the standard treatment for those interested in the war’s martial contours.

Morton is quickly making a name for himself in military history circles, and this book won the 2022 Verbruggen Prize for best medieval military history book (awarded by De Re Militari: the Society for Medieval Military History). On the heels of his successful 2018 book on the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119, here Morton examines the size, structure, and deployment of military forces in the four Crusader States. Along the way, he sketches a military narrative of Levantine events from the end of the First Crusade through Saladin’s triumph at the Battle of Hattin. Concluding with two thought-provoking chapters on the interpretation of battles and cross-cultural exchanges between Christian and Muslim combatants, this book updates the subfield of crusading warfare in interesting ways.

There has been an explosion of interest in the Crusades since 9/11, with many medieval historians working hard to push back against over-simplified and often inaccurate depictions of Christian holy war and Christian-Muslim relations. This impressively researched book adds a fascinating new dimension to the story of the Crusades, examining relations between newly arrived European Catholics and the many and varied indigenous Levantine Christian communities in the decades following the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. MacEvitt rejects the dominant narrative, which held that the Frankish conquerors, imbued with the rigid prejudices of an intolerant European Christendom, had little interaction with or understanding of the local populations. Instead, he paints a portrait of a surprisingly practical and flexible Crusader regime, characterized by extensive Frankish-local social, religious, and legal interactions. MacEvitt's nuanced model, which he dubs "rough tolerance," avoids both idealization and demonization, and offers a fruitful way to approach relations… show more.

Will we ever be free of the Crusades and how it shaped our modern world? Not according to the author, who brings this idea to the forefront with a new perspective on the role that the Byzantine Empire and the fall of Constantinople in the 11th Century at the hands of western Christian crusaders wrought at the time. Personally, since this story unfolds less than a century after when my own focus on Byzantine history has been the past two years, I was fascinated by Holmes’ thoughtful interpretation of how the fading empire sitting at the center of three diverse cultural centers and their burgeoning religions, all dedicated to overt expansionism, has so often been neglected or overlooked entirely by later historians, even into the present. The Crusades were truly a “World War” at the time, and the author’s ability to connect so many diverse and related pieces of… show more.

Warriors of God is an up-close and very personal deep dive with two legendary players during the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart and Saladin as they battle for the Holy Land. We dive headfirst into each ruler’s accession to power and how they clashed over the sands of the Levant. The novel is as gripping as it is profound, and I would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to further their knowledge and understanding of the crusades and their impact on our world today. However, it should be noted that while “history” tends to cross the line into fiction at times. Warriors of God is the only non-fiction history novel on this list. I feel that the narrative and story are strong enough to be read for knowledge and entertainment.

This book is an absolute “must” for anyone seriously interested in understanding how the crusader states fit into and impacted the Middle East in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Hidden behind this dry title, is the most significant book about the crusader states of the last fifty years. This book by an Israeli archaeologist based on data mining and archaeological surveys completely discredited the theories on the social structures and demographics of the crusader states which had dominated crusade historiography since the Second World War. It started an avalanche of new research that has led to a generation of revisionist historians, whose works collectively have revolutionized our understanding of the Middle East in the era of the crusades.