25 Best Historical Fiction Books to Take You Back in Time

Evangelical Baptist Nathan Price moves his wife, four daughters and all the contents of their household to the Congo in 1959, during a calamitous fight for independence from Belgium. The historic turmoil sets the backdrop for a powerful story of a family struggling to survive across three decades in a tale that feels both epic and familiar. 

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and all of our hearts, this gripping novel chronicles a young enslaved woman's struggle toward freedom. In Colson's telling, the underground railroad is no metaphor, but an actual railroad that Cora has to travel through space, time and the horrors of the antebellum South. 

Ana, the daughter of a wealthy Galilee man and sister to a man named Judas, has always been ambitious and creative. So when she's promised to an older widower, she can't stand the thought. She meets a young Jesus and the two flee to his mother Mary's house in Nazareth. What follows is a reverential tale of a woman who survives against the odds, introducing us to a different side of a very familiar cast of characters. 

The story of a girl who comes of age during the Cambodian genocide, this is tale of hope and perseverance amid staggering loss. As the Khmer Rouge brutalizes the populace and her world is thrown into turmoil, seven-year-old Raami finds solace in the folk stories her father taught her even as her world is enveloped in horror. 

When 13-year-old Brionny witnesses a flirtation between her sister Cecilia and her childhood best friend and Robbie, she doesn't fully understand what she's seen. And as a result, she sets in motion a devastating crime that reverberates through all of their lives. Set before, during, and after WWII, it's a meditation on family, class, love and jealousy that's masterfully timeless. 

Even if you haven't read the book, you probably know the Vermeer painting. This classic takes readers inside the relationship between the Dutch painter and anonymous girl who was his muse in a stirring portrait of a bygone era. 

When their father dies unexpectedly, siblings Lucy and Sam are left orphaned in their dicey Gold Rush-era mining town. They steal a horse, grab the body, and take off on a journey to find a safe place to lay him – and their own pasts – to rest. This gorgeous novel marries Chinese symbolism with a uniquely American sensibility and the timeless force of familial love. 

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A highly secretive monastery in the year 1327. Suspected heresy within the Italian elites. Seven mysterious deaths and a monk-turned-detective following symbolic clues that become increasingly sinister the more he learns. This is part historical fiction, part delicious mystery and totally absorbing.  

It's 1953 and Thomas Wazhashk works as a night watchman at a jewel factory near the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Patrice works there too, saving up to follow her sister Vera off the reservation to the big city, but she gets more than she bargained for when she travels to find her. All the while, there's a bill working its way through Congress that threatens the Chippewa's rights to their land, as well as the very identity of this memorable cast of people. 

Told through the voice of an Igbo warrior in the late 1800s, this first in a series of three explores his community's resistance to British colonialism and the European presence on the continent as a whole. It vividly captures life in a pre-colonial African village, as well as takes a hard look at the tragedy of what is lost under imperialism.

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With Spain in the throes of civil war, two refugees embark for Chile on a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to start a new life in exile. A story of hope, of finding love amidst horrible circumstances and the promise of home, this one is poetically beautiful. 

Part spy novel, part page-turning historical fiction, this Pulitzer Prize-winner follows a man who comes to Los Angeles after the Fall of Saigon to build a new life among other Vietnamese immigrants. But the former army captain is secretly a communist double-agent. 

Three very different women arrive to work as code breakers at Bletchley Park, untangling German messages to help Britain fight the Nazis. But as the war grinds on, their bond frays with it. Years later, the friends-turned-enemies are reunited by an encrypted letter, a mysterious traitor and the thrilling, dangerous work of breaking one last code. 

Vera Johnson has grown up between two worlds: The corrupt glamour of her bordello-owner mother and the squalor and danger of the family paid to raise Vera in her stead. But after the great earthquake of 1906 levels San Francisco, Vera has to assemble some unlikely allies to build a new kind of life from the rubble. 

This sweeping epic that spans four generations of a Korean immigrant family starts with a pregnant teenage Sunja making the difficult choice to reject her son's powerful but duplicitous father in favor of a sickly but kind minister. Her decision ripples through the ages in this stunning story of sacrifice, loyalty and ambition.

In a time when many of us are more tuned in to scientific advances than we've ever been before, this reimagining of what might happen if pioneering scientist Marie Curie had taken a different path is just what the doctor ordered. In parallel timelines, the book explores Curie's actual path and an alternate lifetime, as well as its consequences for the world. 

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, this expansive work follows the rise and fall of the fictional Macondo. Alive with vibrant characters, the tragedies and triumphs of human life and everything that comes with it, this is a must-read. 

Eerily resonant during the COVID-19 pandemic, this story set during the Great Depression is a testament to women's resilience. Elsa marries a man she barely knows to escape a spinster's uncertain future. But when drought devastates the Great Plains, she has to make difficult choices not only in the face of a rocky marriage, but the threat to her family's very survival. 

During the tumultuous years of China's Cultural Revolution, 10-year-old Junie receives a letter from her parents in the United States promising to come retrieve her before her 12th birthday, but Junie doesn't want to leave her grandparents or the Chinese countryside. Her reluctance could derail her parents' plan, especially since long-buried family secrets and their individual struggles have already driven them apart.

Sethe was born an enslaved person and escaped to Ohio, but she's still haunted by the hideous things that happened on the farm that she left. Not to mention the ghost of the baby who died there, whose grave is marked with one word: Beloved.