Fiction-Historical Books

Daniel Easterman crosses boundaries never before visited with this awesome novel of politics, fundamentalism and kidnapping.In an idyllic Northumberland village, the locals prepare for the Harvest Festival as they and their ancestors have done for generations. They are ordinary men, women and children, as...

From the author of the existential thriller 'The Execution' comes 'Colony', a novel set in French Guiana as the age of Empire draws to a close and anarchy beckons.The year is 1928. Sabir - petty criminal, drifter, war veteran - is on a prison...

George Washington's slave Caesar escapes to fight for the British against his former master - in this action-packed historical adventure set against the spectacular background of the American Revolution.In 1773 a new slave arrives at George Washington's Virginia estate and is given the name...

A family is divided when its favourite daughter is forced to flee rural Ireland and to seek her living in war-torn Birmingham.Bridie McCarthy loves her family's farm in the remotest part of Donegal, even though she's forced to work hard when all of her...

The story of John Franklin's doomed 1845 attempt to discover a Northwest Passage, from the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central Vaulting through time to another flashpoint in the long struggle between Indians and Europeans, William T. Vollmann's visionary fictional history now focuses...

Few first novels garner the kind of powerful praise awarded this epic story that takes place on the dusty, remorseless Oklahoma frontier, where two brothers are deadlocked in a furious rivalry. Fayette is an enterprising schemer hoping to cash in on his brother's talents...

T. C. Boyle's seventh novel transforms two characters straight out of history into rich mythic figures whose tortured love story is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in...

I could not but admire my lady's spirit, and was proud to see Castle Rackrent again in all its glory Thady Quirk is the ever-present steward to four generations of a dying dynasty in Castle Racrent, hilariously flattering and encouraging his hapless masters on...

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public, first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England. In his funeral oration the spokesman...

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was among the greatest writers of the Enlightenment, and in Jacques the Fatalist he brilliantly challenged the artificialities of conventional French fiction of his age. Riding through France with his master, the servant Jacques appears to act as though he is...

Perhaps the strangest--and most strikingly modern--work to survive from the ancient world, The Satyricon relates the hilarious mock epic adventures of the impotent Encolpius, and his struggle to regain virility. Here Petronius brilliantly brings to life the courtesans, legacy-hunters, pompous professors and dissolute priestesses...

One of the most forceful indictments of colonialism ever written and a masterpiece of Dutch literature, in an esteemed translation by an award-winning translator Max Havelaar--a Dutch civil servant in Java--burns with an insatiable desire to end the ill treatment and oppression inflicted on...

The Penguin Classics list of medieval sagas grows ever more impressive with these two thrilling Norse sagas One of the best-loved works of Icelandic literature, this stirring tale of war and romance follows three generations of strong women, wise leaders, and hotheaded warriors. The...

A huge, riveting, deeply imagined novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo in 1836--an event that formed the consciousness of Texas and that resonates through American history--The Gates of the Alamo follows the lives of three people whose fates become bound to...

In the summer of 1864, sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong lives in the Lumbee Indian settlement of Robeson County, North Carolina, which has become a pawn in the bloody struggle between the Union and Confederate armies. The community is besieged by the marauding Union Army as...

A classic of Italian literature, this epic and unforgettable novel recounts one man's long and turbulent life in revolutionary Italy At the age of eighty-three and nearing death, Carlo Altoviti has decided to write down the confessions of his long life. Throughout, Carlo has...

The first great Lost World action-adventure, a precursor to Indiana Jones H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines has entertained generations of readers since its first publication in 1885. Following a mysterious map of dubious reliability, a small group of men trek into southern Africa...

A remarkable novel that uniquely melds journalism with fiction, by Elena Poniatowska, the recipient of the prestigious 2013 Cervantes PrizeJesusa is a tough, fiery character based on a real working-class Mexican woman whose life spanned some of the seminal events of early twentieth-century Mexican...

Ross King's delightful, Rabelaisian novel recounts the adventures of young George Cautley, an aspiring artist who, as he makes his way through London's high society, finds that nothing is as it seems and everyone wears a disguise. Moving from masquerade balls in London to...

Hailed as "an extraordinary novel of men at war" (The Washington Post) this is the book that inspired the TNT television series starring Eric Dane, Rhona Mitra, Adam Baldwin and Michael Bay as Executive Producer. The unimaginable has happened. The world has been plunged...