Historical Fiction Classics

Of The Lion of St. Mark, G.A. Henty wrote: "I have laid my story in the time not of the triumphs of Venice but of her hardest struggle for existence, when she defended herself successfully against the coalition of Hungary, Padua, and Genoa, for never at any time were the virtues of Venice, her steadfastness, her patriotism, and her willingness to make all sacrifice for her independence more brilliantly shown.

Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train.

Summer, 1947. Kate Herrick, a war widow, returns to her childhood home for a final visit before the house is sold. But Rose Cottage is not the idyllic paradise she remembers from her youth and someone has been there before her. As Kate uncovers an old secret that haunts the home she thought she knew, she is forced to confront a dark truth from her own past.... Beyond the weedy garden with its riot of rose bushes, nothing had changed. And someone was crossing the bridge to approach the garden gate. Someone I knew well....

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic among the world's great authors, and The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans – an ironic ‘deception’ given that "Adam Bede", her first novel, is written unashamedly from a feminist standpoint. The story centres on a pastoral love triangle. Two young men, carpenter Adam Bede and squire Captain Arthur Donnithorne, are both in love with the mercurial Hetty Sorrel. There’s a further love interest between Adam and beautiful lay preacher Dinah Morris. The setting is a country village in the north of England in the last years of the eighteenth century.

All alone in Singapore, proper Miss Primrose Tunstell must steal helium to save her airship, the Spotted Custard, in a scheme involving a lovesick werecat and a fake fish tail. When she uncovers rumors of a new kind of vampire, Prim and the Custard crew embark on a mission to Peru. There, they encounter airship pirates and strange atmospheric phenomena, and are mistaken for representatives of the Spanish Inquisition. Forced into extreme subterfuge (and some rather ridiculous outfits) Prim must also answer three of life's most challenging questions.

What's Georgiana Darcy's story? Jane Austen tells us so little in Pride and Prejudice that we're left to wonder. How did the early loss of her parents shape Miss Darcy's character? And what about her near-disastrous affair with Mr. Wickham? Is that the true source of her shyness? She adores her brother and his new wife, Elizabeth, but will their guiding influence be enough to steer Georgiana clear of new trouble as she comes of age and falls in love again?

When The Centurions was first published in 1960, readers were riveted by the thrilling account of soldiers fighting for survival in hostile environments. They were equally transfixed by the chilling moral question the novel posed: how to fight when the "age of heroics is over". As relevant today as it was half a century ago, The Centurions is a gripping military adventure, an extended symposium on waging war in a new global order, and an essential investigation of the ethics of counterinsurgency.

In New Orleans in 1937, a man and woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict risks his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation.

The stories of King Arthur and Merlin, Lancelot and Guinevere, Galahad, Gawain, Tristan and the rest of the Knights of the Roundtable, and the search for the Holy Grail have been beloved for centuries and are the inspiration of many modern fantasy novels, films, and shows. These legends began when an obscure Celtic hero named Arthur stepped on to the stage of history sometime in the sixth century, generating a host of oral tales that would be inscribed some 900 years later by Thomas Malory in his classic Morte D’Arthur (The Death of Arthur).

Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's first major novel, was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden for long. When the marriage between Walter Morel and his sensitive, high-minded wife begins to break down, the bitterness of their frustration seeps into their children's lives.

John Thornton is a man of heavy responsibilities who has many things on his mind, but the most troublesome of them all is Margaret Hale. She wants nothing to do with him, and he wishes he could feel the same. When a moment of vulnerability allows her a glimpse into his heart, she begins to see him very differently.

Psychic Nan Killian and Medium Sarah Lyon-White - along with their clever birds: the raven, Neville; and the parrot, Grey - have been agents of Lord Alderscroft, the Elemental Fire Master known as the Wizard of London, since leaving school. Now Lord Alderscroft assigns them another commission: to work with the famous man living at 221 Baker Street - but not the one in flat B. They are to assist the man living in flat C. Dr. John Watson and his wife, Mary, themselves Elemental Masters of Water and Air, take the occult cases John's more famous friend disdains.

Leutnant Trotta rettet dem Kaiser in der Schlacht bei Solferino das Leben und wird zum Dank in den Adelsstand erhoben. Sein Sohn dient als Bezirkshauptmann in der Provinz, dessen Sohn - der Enkel des 'Helden von Solferino' - versucht erfolglos, Karriere beim Militär zu machen. Dann beginnt der Krieg.

Im Frühjahr 1945 soll ein dreijähriger Junge vom KZ Buchenwald nach Auschwitz überführt werden. Das würde den Tod des Jungen bedeuten. Daher nehmen einige KZ-Häftlinge das Kind unter ihre Obhut. Gegen alle Vernunft verstecken zwei Häftlinge das Kind, obwohl sie damit die Vorbereitungen des illegalen Lagerkomitees für einen Aufstand gefährden. Das Überleben des Jungen wird zum Sinnbild für den Überlebenswillen der Häftlinge. Der Roman entstand frei nach Motiven einer wahren Begebenheit.

Long ago, Old Filth was a Raj orphan - one of the many young children sent 'home' from the East to be fostered and educated in England. Jane Gardam's novel tells his story, from his birth in what was then Malaya to the extremities of his old age. In so doing, she not only encapsulates a whole period from the glory days of British Empire, through the Second World War, to the present and beyond, but also illuminates the complexities of the character known variously as Eddie, the Judge, Fevvers, Filth, Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy and Sir Edward Feathers.

For Smoke and his daughter, Denny, life on the Sugarloaf Ranch is more valuable than all the gold in the world. Which works out fine, since all the gold mines in Big Rock were squeezed dry years ago. Even so, that won't stop a pair of smooth-talking businessmen from trying to squeeze out a little more. One of them has developed a newfangled method for extracting gold-something called "hydraulics" - and he's bought up all the old mines to do it.

Arguably Jane Austen's most popular novel, Emma is a vivid, captivating, and irresistibly witty classic about love and marriage.

Des Esseintes, dernier descendant d'une noblesse épuisée, après avoir profité un temps des plaisirs d'une vaste fortune, ayant finalement asséché la veine des amitiés charnelles, des mondanités insipides et de l'exubérance juvénile décide, fébrile, de se retirer de Paris en un pavillon qu'il aménage en havre salutaire où il pourra se consacrer en paix à la lecture et aux raffinements des sens.

Pride and Prejudice is a romantic novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story charts the emotional development of the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, who learns the error of making hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between the superficial and the essential. The comedy of the writing lies in the depiction of manners, education, marriage, and money during the British Regency period.