17 Of The Best Historical Fiction Novels Of The Past Decade

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“But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. As ever present as a pulse.”

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Historical fiction has always offered a fascinating glimpse into the past, bringing forgotten lives, turbulent periods and defining points in history vividly back to life. But over the past decade, we’ve been especially spoiled with some particularly memorable novels, from sweeping family sagas and intimate stories of survival to ambitious reimaginings of historical events. The best historical fiction novels don’t just recreate the past. They use it to explore timeless questions about love, identity, war, power, class, and the nature of being human. They can make history feel immediate, personal, and surprisingly relevant to the world we live in today. Join us at What We Reading as we delve into the best historical fiction books of the past decade, highlighting the novels that continue to stand out for their storytelling, characters, historical detail and lasting impact. 

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The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett

First pick in our list of the best historical fiction novels of the past decade is Brit Bennett’s Goodreads Award-winning work, The Vanishing Half. The Vignes sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults; it’s everything, including their racial identities. Although separated by so many miles, and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen when their own daughters’ story lines intersect? 

Weaving together multiple strands and generations,  from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, The Vanishing Half is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of race, gender, and identity, and the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s desires and expectations.

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Before We Were Yours – Lisa Wingate

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to hospital one night, Rill is left in charge – until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into the Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty. 

Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption. 

James – Percival Everett

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. 

Brimming with nuanced humour and lacerating observations that have made Percival  Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. 

Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell

England, 1580. A young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague. 

A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerising and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down historical fiction novel from one of our most gifted writers. 

All The Colours Of The Dark – Chris Whitaker

Late one summer, the town of Monta Clare is shattered by the abduction of teenager Joseph ‘Patch’ Maculey. Nobody more so than Saint Brown, who will risk everything to find her best friend. But when she does, it will break her heart. 

Patch lies alone in a pitch-black room – until he feels a hand in his. Her name is Grace and, though they cannot see one another, she lights their world with her words. But when he escapes, there is no sign that she ever even existed. Left with only her voice and her name, he paints her from broken memories – and charts an epic search to find her. As years turn to decades, and hope becomes obsession, Saint will shadow his journey – on a darker path to hunt down the man who took them – and set free the only boy she ever loved. 

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Pachinko – Min  Jin Lee

In the early 1990s, teenage Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant – and that her lover is married – she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. 

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is one of the best historical novels about love, sacrifice, and loyalty. From the bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlours of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. 

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The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead

Elwood Curtis is about to enrol in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide ‘physical, intellectual, and moral training’ which will equip its inmates to become ‘honourable and honest men.’

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional, and sexual abuse is rife. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr Martin Luther King’s ringing assertion. But Elwood’s fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors. The tension between Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s scepticism leads to a choice that will have decades-long repercussions. 

We Were The Lucky Ones – Georgia Hunter

It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadows of war grow closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romances, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe become inescapable, and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety. 

As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working gruelling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere. 

The Women – Kristin Hannah

When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, twenty-one-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath joins the Army  Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death. In war, she meets – and becomes one of  – the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost. 

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming back home to a changed and divided America. One of the best historical fiction books of the past decade, The Women shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way, and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country have too often been forgotten.  

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Atmosphere – Taylor Jenkins Reid

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars as long as she can remember. So, when she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s shuttle program, she suddenly burns to become one of the few people to go into space. In the summer of 1980, she begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Centre, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates. 

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant. Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere tells a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love – this time among the stars. 

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The Heart’s Invisible Furies – John Boyne

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery, or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, what is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world. 

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and so much more. Through the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today, The Heart’s Invisible Furies promises to make you laugh and cry while reminding you of the power of the human spirit. 

The Things We Cannot Say – Kelly Rimmer

Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now fifteen and engaged, she is unconcerned about rumours of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border, and dreams instead of the day Tomasz returns from college in Warsaw so they can be married. But little by little, injustice by brutal injustice, the Nazi occupation takes hold, and Alina’s tiny rural village, its families, are divided by fear and hate.

Then, as the fabric of their lives is slowly picked apart, Tomasz disappears. Where Alina used to measure time between visits from her beloved, now she measures the spaces between hope and despair, waiting for word from Tomasz and avoiding the attention of soldiers who patrol her parents’ farm. But for now, even deafening silence is preferable to grief. 

Benbecula – Graeme Macrae Burnet

On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother, and aunt. At trial in Inverness, he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison. 

Some years later, Angus’ older brother, Malcolm, recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past. 

The Valley Of Ravens – Barbara Erskine

Eve, desperate for a fresh start, arrives in the Valley of Ravens to restore a long-abandoned cottage. Everyone knows the place is cursed. Why else would it be called The Witch’s House? As Eve begins her renovations, it becomes clear that the place has a secret waiting to be uncovered, if only she can make the connection with the past. 

Wales, 1260. Alys, a healer living in the depths of the valley, discovers Llewelyn – the last true Prince of Wales – lying wounded on the battlefield. She tends him, and her fate is forever bound to his. Her vow to keep his final secret will echo through the centuries. 

The Overstory – Richard Powers

The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’ historical novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking tales that range from antebellum New York to late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. 

There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. 

Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo

Teeming with life and crackling with energy, Girl, Woman, Other charts the lives and struggles of twelve uniquely different characters. Mostly women, black, and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends, and lovers, across the country and through the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic, and utterly irresistible. 

The Matchbox Girl – Alice Jolly

Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead, and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she can’t fully comprehend. Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation. 

But the date is 1938, and the place is Vienna – a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created, and difficult decisions need to be made. Triumphant and tragic, soulful and spirited, The Matchbox Girl is a burningly brilliant historical novel that brings the stories of a generation of lost children into the light.