Historical Fiction

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1
Katabasis
Katabasis
Rebecca F. Kuang
What if the only way to save your future was to journey into Hell? Alice Law has sacrificed almost everything to become a brilliant scholar of analytic magic at Cambridge University. But when her formidable academic advisor, Professor Jacob Grimes, dies in a magical accident, Alice faces the possibility of losing the career she has worked so hard to build. Determined to retrieve his soul, she descends into the underworld, accompanied by Peter Murdoch, her gifted—and deeply resented—academic rival. Guided by ancient myths and philosophical texts, the pair must navigate a Hell that defies everything they have been taught. As their dangerous journey exposes buried secrets and forces them to confront their complicated relationship with their mentor, Alice begins questioning the ambitions that have defined her life. Blending dark academia, mythology, intellectual rivalry, and biting humour, R. F. Kuang’s fantasy explores the brutal demands of academic ambition and the price of pursuing greatness.
United Kingdom 2025
2
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Julia Alvarez
What happens to the stories we never tell? When celebrated novelist Alma Cruz retires, she returns to her family’s homeland, the Dominican Republic, and creates an unusual resting place for her unfinished manuscripts: a cemetery where forgotten characters can finally be laid to rest. But the stories refuse to remain buried. As their characters begin speaking back to their creator, hidden histories, family secrets, and forgotten lives emerge from the pages. Blending magical realism with Dominican history, Julia Alvarez explores who gets to tell a story, whose voices are silenced, and whether we ever truly own the stories we create. A moving celebration of the power of storytelling, this novel reminds us that even the tales we try to bury can find their way into the light.
Dominican Republic 2025
3
Murjana
Murjana
Ghada Karmi
Baghdad, 830 CE: a city of dazzling scholarship, artistic brilliance, and dangerous political divisions. When the Abbasid caliph falls gravely ill, his physician discovers that the cause is an overwhelming passion for Murjana, a beautiful young woman from a Shia family. Their marriage promises to unite two hearts, but threatens to ignite conflict in a society divided by religious loyalties and competing ambitions. As palace intrigue, jealousy, and vengeance gather around the couple, Ghada Karmi brings medieval Baghdad to life in a richly imagined historical novel about forbidden love and the destructive power of sectarian hatred. Inspired by the intellectual and cultural world of the Abbasid era, Murjana asks whether love can overcome the divisions that history keeps creating.
Iraq 2025
4
The Lord
The Lord
Soraya Antonius
In British-ruled Palestine, a charismatic young man named Tareq becomes a figure of mystery and resistance. After leaving school, he travels from village to village as a magician, performing astonishing feats that earn him a devoted following. But beneath his extraordinary reputation lies a growing defiance of British colonial authority. As unrest spreads across Palestine and the 1936 Arab Revolt approaches, Tareq’s influence attracts the attention of Challis, a ruthless British police chief determined to crush the resistance. Decades later, amid the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, an English missionary recalls the young man whose fate became intertwined with the history of a nation. Rich in historical detail and vivid depictions of Palestinian society before the Nakba, The Lord explores resistance, colonial power, and the lives of people caught in the struggle for their homeland.
Palestine 2025
5
The Slightest Green
The Slightest Green
Sahar Mustafah
When Intisar Jaber receives news that her estranged father is dying, she leaves her life in Chicago behind and returns to Palestine, a land she barely remembers but has never entirely escaped. Her father, Hafez, abandoned her family decades earlier to join the resistance, only to spend the rest of his life imprisoned. Now, standing in her ancestral village, Intisar must confront the complicated legacy he left behind and the unfamiliar feeling of being a stranger in her own homeland. Meanwhile, her grandmother Sundus fights to protect the family home from those seeking to take it away. As the two women navigate grief, fractured family ties, and the enduring struggle to preserve their inheritance, Intisar faces a difficult choice between the life she has built in America and the history calling her back. The Slightest Green is a moving multigenerational novel about Palestinian identity, displacement, and the powerful connection between people and the land they call home.
Palestine 2025
6
The Courtesan, Her Lover, and I
The Courtesan, Her Lover, and I
Tarana Husain Khan
In the historic North Indian town of Rampur, two women separated by more than a century discover an unexpected connection through literature, history, and the struggle to have their voices heard. In the nineteenth century, Munni Bai Hijab, a gifted courtesan and poet, captures the heart of the celebrated Urdu poet Dagh Dehlvi. Yet as her lover immortalises her in his verses, her own literary achievements risk being overshadowed by her role as his muse. In contemporary Rampur, Rukmini, an aspiring writer whose family has returned from Dubai after her husband’s business collapses, rediscovers her long-abandoned ambitions. While researching the town’s past at the Rampur Raza Library, she encounters Dagh’s letters and becomes fascinated by Hijab’s forgotten story. As Rukmini uncovers the poet’s life, she begins to recognise parallels with her own struggles as a wife, mother, and woman seeking creative independence. Blending historical fiction, romance, and cultural history, Tarana Husain Khan’s novel explores women’s literary legacies, the complexities of desire, and the power of reclaiming stories that history has overlooked.
India 2025
7
Great Eastern Hotel
Great Eastern Hotel
Ruchir Joshi
Set in Calcutta (now Kolkata) during the Second World War and the turbulent years that follow, Great Eastern Hotel is an expansive historical novel about a city caught between colonial rule, political upheaval and the promise of independence. The story begins in August 1941, on the day of Rabindranath Tagore’s death, when thousands gather to mourn the celebrated poet. Against this backdrop, the lives of four central characters begin to intertwine: Nirupama, a history student and Communist Party volunteer; Imogen, the English daughter of a British colonial official; Kedar, an aspiring painter from a wealthy family; and Gopal, a young pickpocket drawn into a dangerous underworld. Their paths cross with those of soldiers, artists, revolutionaries and secret agents who gather at the city’s famous Great Eastern Hotel. Through interconnected stories of love, ambition, espionage and political struggle, Joshi captures a society on the brink of transformation. The hotel becomes a symbol of Kolkata itself—a meeting place for cultures, conflicting loyalties and people whose lives are swept up in the currents of history.
India 2025
8
Capitalists Must Starve
Capitalists Must Starve
Park Seolyeon
Set in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, Capitalists Must Starve reimagines the life of Kang Juryong, a real-life labour activist who challenged the exploitation of workers in the early twentieth century. Born into poverty, Juryong dreams of becoming a modern, educated woman, but financial hardship and restrictive social expectations repeatedly obstruct her ambitions. After her husband’s death, she refuses to accept her family’s plans for her future and leaves for Pyongyang, where she finds work at a rubber factory. There, she becomes involved in the labour movement, confronting factory owners over their treatment of workers and joining the struggle for collective rights. Her determination culminates in a daring act of protest that makes her a symbol of resistance. Blending historical events with feminist storytelling, Park explores the intersections of gender, class and colonial oppression. With a sharp-tongued heroine, dark humour and emotional depth, the novel celebrates the courage of working-class women who refuse to remain silent in a society designed to suppress them.
South Korea 2025
9
Fall, Bomb, Fall
Fall, Bomb, Fall
Gerrit Kouwenaar
On 10 May 1940, seventeen-year-old Karel Ruis learns that Nazi Germany has invaded the Netherlands. Bored with his sheltered, bourgeois existence, he initially welcomes the upheaval, imagining that the war might bring the adventure and excitement he has been craving. But as German bombs fall and his familiar world begins to collapse, Karel is forced to confront the terrifying reality of war. After undertaking a secret mission to deliver a letter to his uncle’s Jewish mistress, he falls in love with her daughter and dreams of escaping with the two women. His romantic hopes, however, collide with the desperate choices people must make to survive. Drawing partly on Kouwenaar’s own experiences during the Nazi occupation, this poignant novella traces the painful passage from adolescent naivety to adulthood. With understated humour and emotional precision, it reveals how quickly war can destroy illusions and transform ordinary lives.
Netherlands 2025
10
The Letter Carrier
The Letter Carrier
Francesca Giannone
In June 1934, Anna arrives with her husband, Carlo, in the small southern Italian village of Lizzanello, in the sun-soaked region of Salento. An outsider from northern Italy, she stands apart from the village women: she reads unconventional books, refuses to follow traditional expectations, and believes women deserve the same rights as men. When the local post office begins hiring, Anna seizes the opportunity to become the village’s first female letter carrier—a decision that challenges deeply rooted social conventions. As she delivers letters carrying news of love, separation, longing, and loss, Anna gradually becomes an essential thread connecting the community. Yet beneath the village’s familiar rhythms lie forbidden desires, old resentments, and family secrets that threaten to change several lives forever. Inspired by the author’s own great-grandmother, this sweeping historical novel explores a woman’s determination to shape her own destiny in a world that expects her to conform.
Italy 2025
11
Alice, or The Wild Girl
Alice, or The Wild Girl
Michael Robert Liska
In 1856, Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird, an aging officer in the United States Navy, makes an extraordinary discovery on a remote Pacific island: a young, speechless girl living alone in the aftermath of a shipwreck. Naming her Alice, Bird takes her aboard his ship and eventually brings her to San Francisco, where he presents her to the public as the “Wild Girl of the Pacific.” To the crowds, Alice is a scientific curiosity and a spectacle; to Bird, she is both a responsibility and an opportunity to restore his fading reputation. But Alice is not content to remain an object of fascination or a prisoner of someone else’s ambitions. As she struggles to reclaim control over her life, she must navigate the unfamiliar world of nineteenth-century America, where freedom can prove as elusive as it was on the island. Blending historical fiction, maritime adventure, dark humour, and social satire, Liska explores exploitation, loneliness, and the power of storytelling. The novel asks who has the right to define another person’s identity—and whether true independence is ever entirely within our grasp.
United States 2025
12
The Silver Bone
The Silver Bone
Andrey Kurkov
Kyiv, 1919. The city is caught in the turmoil of revolution, with Soviet forces controlling its streets while White armies threaten from the west. Amid political violence, shifting loyalties, and widespread lawlessness, young Samson Kolechko witnesses the brutal murder of his father by Cossacks. He survives the attack but loses his right ear, becoming an orphan in a city where survival is increasingly uncertain. When Red Army soldiers take over his apartment, Samson inadvertently uncovers their secret plans. His attempt to expose their activities draws him into a dangerous world of murder, espionage, and political intrigue. Soon recruited into the local police force, he begins investigating crimes that reveal the bizarre contradictions of life under revolutionary rule. The first novel in Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries series, The Silver Bone blends historical crime fiction with magical realism and dark humour. Through Samson’s investigations, Kurkov portrays a society where political upheaval has transformed ordinary life and the boundaries between justice, absurdity, and survival have become dangerously blurred.
Ukraine 2025