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I have become a big fan of historical novels in the last dozen or so years, before that I seldom paid them much attention. Now I'm constantly on the lookout for good authors and decided to launch this thread to learn what others have read and liked.
Read, Liked and Endorse:
1) C. S. Forester...the entire Horatio Hornblower series.
2) Bernard Cornwell....the entire Sharp series, and I think everything else as well. I look forward to new Cornwell books more than any other of these authors.
3) George Macdonald Fraser...the entire Flashman series...great stuff, excellent history and very funny at times.
4) Ken Follett....The Pillars of the Earth and its sequel, The Fall of Giants and its sequel (Pillars was much better I thought)
5) Steven Saylor..the Roma sub Rosa series....Saylor has created a fictional Roman detective, called "Gordiamus The Finder" and writes mystery stories set in Rome in the last century BCE. I've read all of his books save the one I'm reading now, and one more to go after that. Saylor is a fanatic for getting the details right. Highly educational, the mysteries themselves are actually no more interesting than an average Columbo episode.
Okay, But Not In Same League As The Above:
1) Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen's current series on the Revolutionary War. Their best work was their first, the alternative history series on the Civil War. They have abandoned alternative history in favor of historical novels. Everything is pretty good...pretty good writing, pretty good history, pretty entertaining....but never great.
Read But Didn't Really Like...
1) A couple of the Patrick O'Brian Jack Aubrey books. I enjoyed the Master and Commander film, but when I tired the books I found the writing to be of a highly stylized sort which didn't return enough for the effort. I wasn't enjoying the experience.
2) A couple of James Michener books....I kept finding historical mistakes, very sloppy research, plus Michener is a plodding, cliche recycling machine as a writer.
And oh...I'm of course aware of the classics, no need to remind me that Tolstoy and Dumas wrote historical fiction
Check out Sharon Kay Penman and Helen Hollick. I would steer clear of Hollick's fantasy series about pirates as that's a different sub-genre. But her two books on Emma of Normandy and Harold Godwinson are very well done - and surprisingly, her series on King Arthur is NOT fantasy but a very realistic take on the legend so you might like that as well.
I haven't read it yet but Manda Scott's Boudica series is on my to-read list and might appeal to you as well.
Oh and check out this website: Literature-Map - The tourist map of literature - you pop in the name of an author and it will give you a map of similar authors (the closer the name to the original name, the more similar).
For those with an interest in early Roman history, I highly endorse "A Pillar of Iron", by Taylor Caldwell. Fact based fiction revolves around the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great statesman, lawyer, and orator. All of the major players of the last years of the Republic are presented, including, of course, Julius Caesar.
While most of these might not qualify as "historical fiction", they more than just took place in past settings, they additionally reflect some characteristic of their era in a way that is historically enlightening. I can't vouch for the historical accuracy of any of them.
Andrea Barrett. "The Air That We Breathe" (Life in TB sanitarium)
Geraldine Brooks, "People of the Book" (Jewish history in Europe)
Peter Carey "Parrot & Olivier in America" (France and America, late 18th century)
Thomas Cobb "Shavetail" (A cut above the average Western, Borderlands)
Debra Dean, "The Madonnas of Leningrad" (Art preservation)
Charles Frazier "Thirteen Moons" (Cherokee nation before removal)
Thomas Mullen "The Last Town on Earth" (Northwest labor strife)
Richard Rayner "The Cloud Sketcher" (development of urban architecture)
Sarah Smith, "Chasing Shakespeares" (Authorship of Shakespeare)
Abraham Verghese, "Cutting for Stone" (Ethiopian revolution)
To my mind, the single most essential historical fiction is Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize winning work about 14th century Norway. Kristin Lavransdatter and Master of Hestiviken span seven volumes and 2600 pages through a century of the Middle Ages..
They've been re-translated into English lately, and disappointingly read like modern women's romance sagas, so try to find the older editions for their purist classical style.
The historical novels of the recently departed Gore Vidal were wonderful in my opinion. He obviously did a lot of research and as far as fiction goes they are highly readable and entertaining.
Some of Vidal's novels have to do with American history: Burr, Empire, Lincoln, etc. Others deal with world history. One of my favorites is Creation, it is about a courtier at the height of the Persian empire who also happens to be a grandson of the Persian prophet Zoroaster named Cyrus Spitama. Spitama travels around the ancient world and manages to meet all the great religious leaders and philosophers of the 6th Century before the Common Era - Confucius, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Socrates, Pythagoras, etc.
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