The best historical novels of all time
The top 3 according to 10 votes from people: The Feast of the Goat · The Name of the Rose · War and Peace. (Updated Jan 8, 2026.)
The historical novels that appear most often on must-read lists, from Hadrian's Rome to Cromwell's England.
Automatically translated (original in Español). See the original
Top 21
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1
The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa, 2000. The last days of the Trujillo dictatorship.
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2
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco, 1980. William of Baskerville and Adso in a 14th-century abbey.
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3
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy, 1869. Russia against Napoleon.
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4
The Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett, 1989. Building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
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5
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958. Aristocratic Sicily facing Italian unification.
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6
Ivanhoe
Walter Scott, 1819. Knights, Richard the Lionheart and the birth of the genre.
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7
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas, 1844. D'Artagnan in Richelieu's France.
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8
The Kingdom of This World
Alejo Carpentier, 1949. The Haitian Revolution and the marvellous real.
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9
Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar, 1951. The emperor writes to Marcus Aurelius; the book that elevated the genre.
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10
I, Claudius
Robert Graves, 1934. Julio-Claudian Rome told by the stammering emperor.
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11
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel, 2009. Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII; Booker Prize winner.
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12
The Egyptian
Mika Waltari, 1945. A physician in the Egypt of Akhenaten.
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13
The General in His Labyrinth
Gabriel García Márquez, 1989. Simón Bolívar's last journey.
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14
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens, 1859. London and Paris during the French Revolution.
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15
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell, 1936. Scarlett O'Hara and the American Civil War.
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16
Quo Vadis
Henryk Sienkiewicz, 1896. Christians in Nero's Rome.
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17
Shōgun
James Clavell, 1975. An English navigator in Japan in 1600.
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18
The Heretic
Miguel Delibes, 1998. The Protestants of Valladolid and the Inquisition.
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19
The Physician
Noah Gordon, 1986. A young Englishman travels to Persia to study medicine.
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20
Cathedral of the Sea
Ildefonso Falcones, 2006. 14th-century Barcelona around Santa María del Mar.
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21
The Betrothed
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.
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