10 Historical Novels NOT Set During World War II

Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian (2021)

Bohjalian’s first sentence captures the paranoia that ran through the dour piety of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1662: “It was always possible that the Devil was present.” Of course, who the devil is depends entirely on your point of view. When 24-year-old Mary Deerfield attempts to divorce Thomas — her mismatch of a husband, an abusive prosperous miller nearly twice her age — rumors of witchcraft rise. At the divorce hearing, jealous servants and other goodwives readily testify against Mary, who is beautiful, lively, and educated but childless, and thus both pitiable and suspect. Her own father maneuvers behind her back.

Grace by Paul Lynch (2017)

Lynch won last year’s Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literature award, for Prophet Song, his novel about an imagined near-future dystopian Ireland. Grace, however, brings readers back in time, to Ireland’s 19th-century famine, with wrenching detail. With hunger a constant presence, 14-year-old Grace’s desperate, pregnant mother yanks her out of bed, cuts off her hair, dresses her as a boy and charges her with going out to find work and food. Hers is a brutal journey, but in poetic Gaelic-influenced language, Lynch captures the realities of Ireland’s darkest hour.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)

The word “epic” is often overused when describing multigenerational tales, but it is truly warranted for this brilliant first novel. Gyasi starts with two half-sisters in the Gold Coast in the 1700s and follows their descendants for eight generations. Effia marries a white British slave trader and stays in Africa, while Esi is sent in chains to America.  As the stories of subsequent family members unfold, Gyasi brings the reader through Gold Coast history and to the American South and Harlem.  

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)

Saunders was famous for his short stories before this book became a bestseller and won the Booker Prize. He built this collage-like postmodern novel around a true story. In 1862, after his 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid, President Abraham Lincoln visited Willie’s crypt and opened the coffin to hold the corpse. To explore how the souls of the deceased take leave of the living, Saunders spends one night in Willie’s cemetery channeling its ghostly inhabitants stuck in the Bardo, a Tibetan concept of limbo. Interspersed with the dead talking are copious snippets of historical records about Lincoln and Willie. Some are real. Some not. The audiobook version is quite the production: It features 166 voices from stars including Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Bill Hader and Mary Karr.

Euphoria by Lily King (2014)

King found inspiration for this wonderful transporting novel in a mere sliver of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead’s biography: Mead met her third husband, Gregory Bateson, while doing field research with her second. In King’s completely fictionalized love triangle, a suicidal English anthropologist, Andrew Bankson, finds redemption when he meets American anthropologists Nell Stone and her husband Schuyler Fenwick at a Christmas gathering in a remote landing in New Guinea circa 1933. Discouraged with their work, the Americans are headed back to the States. Instantly smitten, Bankson volunteers to be the couple’s guide upriver and introduce them to tribes they had not yet encountered. “They might have needed me,” Bankson says before spiriting the two away in a motorized canoe. “But I needed them more.”

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020)

One of the best works of historical fiction in recent years, this story by O’Farrell, a beautiful writer, is so evocative that you can almost smell the freshly baked bread and hear the clopping of horses in 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon, England. This is a story about William Shakespeare’s family: Hamnet (a name that was sometimes spelled Hamlet back in the day) was, in real life, his son, who died at 11, four years before the playwright created Hamlet. History never recorded the cause, but in O’Farrell’s imagining, it’s due to the Black Death (a truly gruesome pandemic, as depicted here). The novel’s spotlight, though, is on the playwright’s wife, Agnes, an independent spiritual soul whom we meet as a young woman and follow through romance and tragedy.  

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See (2023)  

The author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan writes an absorbing story set in 15th-century China. The novel follows a wealthy woman, Tan Yunxian, from childhood through the decades as she learns and practices medicine in an era when elite women, with their tiny painfully bound feet and arranged marriages, had few freedoms. Her life story parallels that of her beloved friend Meiling, a lower-status midwife-in-training with her own limitations due to both her class and sex. This one made lots of “best books of 2023” lists, for good reason.