# The best historical novels of all time

The historical novels that appear most often on must-read lists, from Hadrian's Rome to Cromwell's England.

- 10 votes · 21 items
- Jan 8, 2026 · medalloversionoriginal
- https://even.best/en/l/3027/the-best-historical-novels-of-all-time

## Top 21

1. **The Feast of the Goat** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Mario Vargas Llosa, 2000. The last days of the Trujillo dictatorship.
2. **The Name of the Rose** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Umberto Eco, 1980. William of Baskerville and Adso in a 14th-century abbey.
3. **War and Peace** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Leo Tolstoy, 1869. Russia against Napoleon.
4. **The Pillars of the Earth** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Ken Follett, 1989. Building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
5. **The Leopard** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958. Aristocratic Sicily facing Italian unification.
6. **Ivanhoe** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Walter Scott, 1819. Knights, Richard the Lionheart and the birth of the genre.
7. **The Three Musketeers** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Alexandre Dumas, 1844. D'Artagnan in Richelieu's France.
8. **The Kingdom of This World** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Alejo Carpentier, 1949. The Haitian Revolution and the marvellous real.
9. **Memoirs of Hadrian** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Marguerite Yourcenar, 1951. The emperor writes to Marcus Aurelius; the book that elevated the genre.
10. **I, Claudius** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Robert Graves, 1934. Julio-Claudian Rome told by the stammering emperor.
11. **Wolf Hall** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Hilary Mantel, 2009. Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII; Booker Prize winner.
12. **The Egyptian** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Mika Waltari, 1945. A physician in the Egypt of Akhenaten.
13. **The General in His Labyrinth** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Gabriel García Márquez, 1989. Simón Bolívar's last journey.
14. **A Tale of Two Cities** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Charles Dickens, 1859. London and Paris during the French Revolution.
15. **Gone with the Wind** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Margaret Mitchell, 1936. Scarlett O'Hara and the American Civil War.
16. **Quo Vadis** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Henryk Sienkiewicz, 1896. Christians in Nero's Rome.
17. **Shōgun** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — James Clavell, 1975. An English navigator in Japan in 1600.
18. **The Heretic** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Miguel Delibes, 1998. The Protestants of Valladolid and the Inquisition.
19. **The Physician** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Noah Gordon, 1986. A young Englishman travels to Persia to study medicine.
20. **Cathedral of the Sea** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Ildefonso Falcones, 2006. 14th-century Barcelona around Santa María del Mar.
21. **The Betrothed** (-1 · ▲0 ▼1) — Alessandro Manzoni, 1827. 17th-century Lombardy, plague included.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.