The 100 Best Historical Novels of All Time

1. War and Peace By Leo Tolstoy | Used Price: 70% Off Published to coincide with the centenary of Tolstoy's death, here is an exciting new edition of one of the great literary works of world literature. Tolstoy's epic masterpiece captures with unprecedented immediacy the broad sweep of life during the Napoleonic wars and the brutal invasion of Russia. Balls ... More »

2. I, Claudius By Robert Graves | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D. A masterpiece. More »

3. Burr By Gore Vidal | Under $1.00 Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial ... More »

4. Life and Fate By Vasily Grossman | Used Price: 60% Off A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that ... More »

5. The Master of Petersburg By J. M. Coetzee | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling ... More »

6. The General in His Labyrinth By Gabriel Garcia Marquez | 70% Off General Simon Bolivar, â€œthe Liberatorâ€Â of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war and politics, he still dances ... More »

7. Wolf Hall By Hilary Mantel | Under $1.00 WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZEWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTIONA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLEREngland in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to ... More »

8. Salammbo By Gustave Flaubert | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 SalammbÃ´ (1862) is a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert. It is set in Carthage during the 3rd century BC, immediately before and during the Mercenary Revolt which took place shortly after the First Punic War. Flaubert's main source was Book I of Polybius's ... More »

9. Memoirs of Hadrian By Marguerite Yourcenar | 80% Off Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual ... More »

10. The Siege of Krishnapur By J. G. Farrell | Used Price: 70% Off Winner of the Booker Prize.India, 1857â€”the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrellâ€™s The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last ... More »

11. The Killer Angels: The Classic Civil War Novel By Michael Shaara | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 â€œMy favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.â€Ââ€”James M. McPherson Â In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nationâ€™s history, two ... More »

12. Quo Vadis By Henryk Sienkiewicz | Used Price: 90% Off Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, commonly known as Quo Vadis, is a historical novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Quo vadis is Latin for "Where are you going?" and alludes to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, in which Peter flees Rome but on his way ... More »

13. The Last of the Wine By Mary Renault | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 In The Last of the Wine, two young Athenians, Alexias and Lysis, compete in the palaestra, journey to the Olympic games, fight in the wars against Sparta, and study under Socrates. As their relationship develops, Renault expertly conveys Greek culture, showing the impact of this supreme philosopher whose ... More »

14. Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era By Eiji Yoshikawa The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Miyamoto Musashi was the child of an era when Japan was emerging from decades of civil strife. Lured to the great Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by the hope of becoming a samurai-without really knowing ... More »

15. The Leopard By Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | 80% Off Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. The dramatic sweep and richness of observation, the seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and the grasp of human frailty imbue The ... More »

16. Augustus By John Williams WINNER OF THE 1973 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDÂ By the Author of Stoner In Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams tookÂ on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams ... More »

17. The Ghost Road By Pat Barker | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Â The final book in the Regeneration Trilogy, and winner of the 1995 Booker Prize Â The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the ... More »

18. Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth A Novel By Naguib Mahfouz | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.In this beguiling new novel, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in the United ... More »

19. A Grain of Wheat By Ngugi wa Thiong'o | Used Price: 50% Off The best-known novel by the great Kenyan writerSet in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952â€“1960 Emergency. At the center of it ... More »

20. Raised from the Ground By Jose Saramago | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 A multigenerational family saga that paints a sweeping portrait of twentieth-century PortugalFirst published in 1980, the City of Lisbon Prizeâ€“winning Raised from the Ground follows the changing fortunes of the Mau Tempo familyâ€”poor landless peasants not unlike Saramagoâ€™s own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal ... More »

21. The Kindly Ones By Jonathan Littell | Under $1.00 â€œSimply astounding. . . . The Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.â€Â â€” Time A literary prize-winner that has been an explosive bestseller all over the world, Jonathan Littellâ€™s The Kindly Ones has been called â€œa brilliant Holocaust novelâ€¦ a world-class masterpiece of ... More »

22. The Kingdom of This World By Alejo Carpentier | Used Price: 70% Off A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri-Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. ... More »

23. Conversation in the Cathedral By Mario Vargas Llosa | Used Price: 80% Off A Haunting tale of power, corruption,and the complex search for identity Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who ... More »

24. A Tale of Two Cities By Charles Dickens | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles ... More »

25. Missing Person By Patrick Modiano Winner of the Prix GoncourtIn this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.For ten years Guy Roland has lived without ... More »

26. Brooklyn By Colm Toibin | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 â€œOne of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literatureâ€Â (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile ... More »

27. Pharaoh By Boleslaw Prus Pharaoh (Polish: Faraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer BolesÅ‚aw Prus (1847â€“1912). Composed over a year's time in 1894â€“95, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of ... More »

28. Pure By Andrew Miller | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an engineer of modest origin, arrives in the city in 1785, charged by the Kingâ€™s minister with emptying the overflowing cemetery of Les Innocents, a ancient site whose stench is poisoning the neighborhoodâ€™s air and water and leaving a vile taste in its inhabitantsâ€™ food. At ... More »

29. Andersonville By MacKinlay Kantor | Used Price: 80% Off "The greatest of our Civil War novels."â€”The New York Times. The 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the Andersonville Fortress and its use as a concentration camp-like prison by the South during the Civil War. More »

30. The Blue Flower By Penelope Fitzgerald | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his father's permission to wed his true philosophy -- a plain, simple child named Sophie. The attachment shocks his family and friends. This brilliant young man, betrothed to a ... More »

31. In Praise of Hatred By Khaled Khalifa | Used Price: 70% Off 1980s Syria, our young narrator is living a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents in Aleppo. Her three aunts, Maryam the pious one; Safaa, the liberal; and the free-spirited Marwa, bring her up with the aid of their ever-devoted blind ... More »

32. The Iron King By Maurice Druon | Used Price: 80% Off ‘This is the original game of thrones’ George R.R. MartinFrom the publishers that brought you A Game of Thrones comes the series that inspired George R.R. Martin’s epic work.“Accursed! Accursed! You shall be accursed to the thirteenth generation!”The Iron King – Philip the Fair – is as cold ... More »

33. Germinal By Emile Zola | Used Price: 70% Off Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! ... More »

34. The Year of the French By Thomas Flanagan | Used Price: 80% Off In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, ... More »

35. Restoration By Rose Tremain | Used Price: 90% Off The Booker shortlisted novel that â€œrestored the historical novel to its rightful place of honorâ€Â (New York Times). Robert Merivel, son of a glove maker and an aspiring physician, finds his fortunes transformed when he is given a position at the court of King Charles II. Merivel slips ... More »

36. The Overseer's Cabin By Edouard Glissant | Under $1.00 With Ã‰douard Glissantâ€™s The Fourth Century, the Village Voice observed, â€œwe get the full effect of his overarching project: a literary exorcism of Martiniqueâ€™s scarred psyche and past, a lingering cry against the â€˜black hole of time and forgetting.â€™â€Â Glissant, â€œone of the most significant figures in Caribbean ... More »

37. Man's Fate By Andre Malraux | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 As explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to life the profound meaning of the revolutionary impulse for ... More »

38. Freedom and Death By Nikos Kazantzakis Freedom and Death is Kazantzakis's modern Iliad. The context is Crete in the late nineteenth century, the epic struggle between Greeks and Turks, between Christianity and Islam. A new uprising takes place to rival those of 1854, 1866 and 1878, and the island is thrown into confusion yet ... More »

39. Half of a Yellow Sun By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 70% Off With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, ... More »

40. Iron in the Soul By Jean-Paul Sartre | Used Price: 70% Off June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralized, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul unfolds what men thought and felt and did as France fell. Men who shrugged, men who ran, men ... More »

41. Property By Valerie Martin | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Valerie Martinâ€™s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slaveryâ€™s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his ... More »

42. Kristin Lavransdatter By Sigrid Undset | Used Price: 60% Off The turbulent historical masterpiece of Norwayâ€™s literary masterIn her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political ... More »

43. The Unvanquished By William Faulkner | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, THE UNVANQUISHED focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions. More »

44. Darkness at Noon By Arthur Koestler | Used Price: 80% Off Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and ... More »

45. The Glass Palace By Amitav Ghosh | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the ... More »

46. For Whom the Bell Tolls By Ernest Hemingway | Used Price: 90% Off In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls.The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International ... More »

47. Alone in Berlin By Hans Fallada | Under $1.00 Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the ... More »

48. The Parisian By Isabella Hammad | Used Price: 80% Off A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle ... More »

49. The Age of Innocence By Edith Wharton | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Edith Wharton (1862â€“1937) wrote carefully structured fiction that probed the psychological and social elements guiding the behavior of her characters. Her portrayals of upper-class New Yorkers were unrivaled. The Age of Innocence, for which Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, is one of her most memorable novels.At ... More »

50. Girl With a Pearl Earring By Tracy Chevalier | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 The New York Times bestselling novel by the author of Remarkable Creatures and The Last Runaway Translated into thirty-nine languages and made into an Oscar-nominated film, starring Scarlett Johanson and Colin FirthTracy Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly-imagined ... More »

51. The Armies of the Night By Norman Mailer | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 One of the first examples of "new journalism" daringly combines reportage with a novelistic style and garnered Mailer his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Armies of the Night centers on the March on the Pentagon, the most famous anti-Vietnam ... More »

52. The Known World By Edward P. Jones | Used Price: 80% Off One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, The Known World is a daring and ambitious work by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones.The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the ... More »

53. The Inheritors By William Golding | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Eight Neanderthals encounter another race of beings like themselves, yet strangely different. This new race, Homo sapiens, fascinating in their skills and sophistication, terrifying in their cruelty, sense of guilt, and incipient corruption, spell doom for the more gentle folk whose world they will inherit. Golding, author of ... More »

54. Kidnapped By Robert Louis Stevenson | 70% Off 'Your bed shall be the moorcock's, and your life shall be like the hunted deer's, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.'Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous ... More »

55. The Sorrow of War By Bao Ninh | Used Price: 80% Off Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originaly published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has ... More »

56. Ivanhoe By Walter Scott | Under $1.00 In Ivanhoe Scott fashioned an imperial myth of national cultural identity that has shaped the popular imagination ever since its first appearance at the end of 1819. With the secret return of King Richard and the disinherited Saxon knight Ivanhoe, Scott confronts his splendid and tumultuous romance, featuring ... More »

57. Les Miserables By Victor Hugo | Under $1.00 Now a major musical film from Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway, and also featuring Amanda Seyfreid, Helena Bonham-Carter and Sacha Baron-Cohen, Victor Hugo's Les MisÃ©rables is one of the great works of western literature. Now in ... More »

58. Bomber By Len Deighton | Used Price: 80% Off Bomber is a novel about the realities of war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of 24 hours in the summer of 1943, portraying all the ... More »

59. Storm of Steel By Ernst Junger | Used Price: 60% Off The memoir widely viewed as the best account ever written of fighting in WW1 A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the ... More »

60. The Red Badge of Courage By Stephen Crane | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.The Red Badge of Courage ... More »

61. Love, Anger, Madness By Marie Vieux-Chauvet | Used Price: 70% Off Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed ... More »

62. Before the Dawn By Toson Shimazaki | Used Price: 80% Off An historical novel portrays the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the changes in Japanese life after the arrival of Commodore Perry. More »

63. Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War By Karl Marlantes | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 An incredible publishing storyÂ—written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, a New York Times best seller for sixteen weeks, a National Indie Next and a USA Today best sellerÂ—Matterhorn has been hailed as a Â“brilliant account of warâ€Â (New York Times Book ... More »

64. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich By Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn | 80% Off The first published novel of controversial Nobel Prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn- now in trade paperback. First published in 1962, this book is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a ... More »

65. Sword of Honor By Evelyn Waugh (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)This trilogy of novels about World War II, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of Evelyn Waughâ€™s career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new ... More »

66. The Raj Quartet By Paul Mark Scott | Used Price: 80% Off Â The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years, has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and Â Proustian in detail Â but completely individual inÂ effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals ... More »

67. The Radetzky March By Philip Roth | Used Price: 80% Off The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta family, encompasses the entire social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I. The author's greatest achievement, The Radetzky March is an unparalleled portrait of a civilization in decline, and as such, a universal ... More »

68. Romola By George Eliot | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 'There is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood' Wrote George Eliot of Romola, the novel which argues her most profound and utopian vision of the position of women. ... More »

69. Death of Virgil By Hermann Broch | Used Price: 70% Off It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian ... More »

70. The Man on a Donkey: A Novel of England in the Reign of Henry VIII By H.F.M. Prescott | Used Price: 60% Off A powerful novel of England during the reign of Henry VIII. When the King's men despoil the monasteries and divide the wealth among the royal favorites, rebellion begins to brew in the north--and for a few weeks, the leader held the fate of a nation in his hands. More »

71. All Quiet on the Western Front By Erich Maria Remarque | Price: $0.01 Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarqueâ€™s masterpiece of the German experience during World War I.I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous ... More »

72. Goodbye to Berlin By Christopher Isherwood Isherwood's classic story of Berlin in the 1930s - and the inspiration for Cabaret - now in a stand-alone edition. First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood ... More »

73. The Bruce Trilogy By Nigel Tranter | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 This trilogy tells the story of Robert the Bruce and how, tutored and encouraged by the heroic William Wallace, he determined to continue the fight for an independent Scotland, sustained by a passionate love for his land. More »

74. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc By Mark Twain | Under $1.00 Regarded by many as the most luminous example of Twain's work, this historical novel chronicles the French heroine's life, as purportedly told by her longtime friend â€” Sieur Louis de ContÃ©. A panorama of stirring scenes recount Joan's childhood in Domremy, the story of her voices, the fight ... More »

75. The Charterhouse of Parma By Stendhal | Used Price: 70% Off Headstrong and naÃ¯ve, the young Italian aristocrat Fabrizio del Dongo is determined to defy the wrath of his right-wing father and go to war to fight for Napoleon. He stumbles on the Battle of Waterloo, ill-prepared, yet filled with enthusiasm for war and glory. Finally heeding advice, Fabrizio ... More »

76. Blood Meridian By Cormac McCarthy | Used Price: 80% Off An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes ... More »

77. Sagittarius Rising By Cecil Lewis A memoir by a WWI fighter pilot, with the adventurous spirit of War Horse and the charm of The Little Prince A singular, lyrical book, Sagittarius Rising is at once an exuberant memoir from the Lost Generation and a riveting tale of the early days of flight during ... More »

78. The Road to Jerusalem: Book One of the Crusades Trilogy By Jan Guillou | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 For power. For passion. For glory. The epic story of the Knights Templar. Born in 1150 to a noble Swedish family and coming of age at a monastery under the tutelage of a Cistercian monk and a former Knight Templar, young Arn Magnusson is sent to fulfill his ... More »

79. All the King's Men By Robert Penn Warren | Used Price: 70% Off Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power. New Foreword by Joseph Blotner for this fiftieth anniversary ... More »

80. The Last of the Mohicans By James Fenimore Cooper | Under $1.00 The second of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, this is the one which has consistently captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826. It's success lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial hostility, and ... More »

81. Tipping the Velvet By Sarah Waters Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen. A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the ... More »

82. Birdsong By Sebastian Faulks | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters ... More »

83. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem By Maryse Conde | Used Price: 60% Off This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse CondÃ© brings Tituba out of historical silence ... More »

84. The Hunger Angel By Herta Muller | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg ... More »

85. His Bloody Project By Graeme MaCrae Burnet | 70% Off MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2016 BY NEWSWEEK, NPR, THE GUARDIAN, THE TELEGRAPH, AND THE SUNDAY TIMES A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE "THOUGHT PROVOKING FICTION"?THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW A brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish farming ... More »

86. The Enchantress of Florence By Salman Rushdie | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery, attempting to command her own destiny in a manâ€™s world. It is the story of two cities at the height of their powersâ€“the hedonistic Mughal ... More »

87. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade By Assia Djebar | Used Price: 80% Off In this stunning novel, Assia Djebar intertwines the history of her native Algeria with episodes from the life of a young girl in a story stretching from the French conquest in 1830 to the War of Liberation of the 1950s. The girl, growing up in the old Roman ... More »

88. The Game of Kings By Dorothy Dunnett | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 For the first time Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles are available in the United States in quality paperback editions.The first book in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, Game of Kings takes place in 1547. Scotland has been humiliated by an English invasion and is threatened by machinations elsewhere beyond its borders, ... More »

89. Shogun By James Clavell | Used Price: 80% Off A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in an extraordinary saga of a time and a place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power... More »

90. Napoleon Symphony By Anthony Burgess | Under $1.00 Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called â€œelephantine funâ€Â to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleonâ€™s life into a pattern borrowedâ€”in liberty, equality, and fraternityâ€”from Beethovenâ€™s Third â€œEroicaâ€Â Symphony, in this ... More »

91. All Souls' Rising By Madison Smartt Bell | Used Price: 90% Off "A serious historical novel that reads like a dream." --The Washington Post Book World"One of the most spohisticated fictional treatments of the enduring themes of class, color, and freedom." --San Francisco ChronicleNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTPEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST This first installment of the epic Haitian trilogy brings to life ... More »

92. Memoirs of a Geisha By Arthur Golden | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the ... More »

93. The Three Musketeers By Alexandre Dumas | Used Price: 80% Off Alexandre Dumasâ€™s most famous taleâ€” and possibly the most famous historical novel of all timeâ€” in a handsome hardcover volume.This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings, queens, cavaliers, and criminals in a ... More »

94. Daughter of Fortune By Isabel Allende | Used Price: 80% Off An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, vivacious young Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Entering a rough-and-tumble world of new arrivals driven mad by gold fever, Eliza moves in a society of single ... More »

95. An Ice-Cream War By William Boyd | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 "Rich in character and incident, An Ice-Cream War fulfills the ambition of the historical novel at its best." --The New York Times Book ReviewBooker Prize Finalist"Boyd has more than fulfilled the bright promise of [his] first novel. . . . He is capable not only of some very ... More »

96. A Long Long Way By Sebastian Barry | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01 Praised as a â€œmaster storytellerâ€Â (The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his â€œflawless use of languageâ€Â (Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years ... More »

97. Three Kingdoms By Luo Guanzhong | Used Price: 50% Off Three Kingdoms tells the story of the fateful last reign of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), when the Chinese empire was divided into three warring kingdoms. This decisive period in Chinese history became a subject of intense and continuing interest to historians, poets, and dramatists. Writing some ... More »

98. Jazz By Toni Morrison | Used Price: 80% Off In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joeâ€™s wife, Violet, attacks the girlâ€™s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings ... More »

99. Doctor Zhivago By Boris Pasternak | Used Price: 60% Off First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself ... More »

100. Measuring the World By Daniel Kehlmann | Used Price: 80% Off Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmannâ€™s brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment.Â Â Â Â Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. ... More »

The 100 Best Historical Novels of All Time is a book list for those who enjoy a taste of history in their fiction. The three giants of historical fiction are of course Tolstoy, Graves, and Vidal. Yet there are many other names worthy of note, especially Marguerite Yourcenar, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Mary Renault, and the twice winner of the Booker prize, for the first two parts of her trilogy on Cromwell, Hilary Mantel. These are to name but a few. If any great works or authors are missing from the list, please let us, and other readers, know in a comment below.