So, this month, Hannah and I read historical fiction for our Biblio Talk genre read and since it’s one of my all-time favorite genres I thought I’d put together a top-ten book list for all those readers out there who love it as much as I do as well as those who just want to check it out for the first time! I have read all of these books and can attest to their ‘awesomeness!’ Read on my friends!!
A huge shout-out to Hannah for helping me get this blog put together! You’re a rock star!
This was my March 2024 genre read, and it’s safe to say that it easily jumped into my top 5 historical fiction books of all-time…that’s how good it is! You’re completely immersed in the Imperial Russian world/history and the characters are brilliantly written and keep you captivated from the first to last pages!
This is an historical fiction novel in the sense that the events took place and some of the characters are real people, however, Olivia West is a fictional woman who participated in an airplane race from California to Hawaii in the 1920’s. While Olivia West was not a real person, this book is an ode to all of the real women whose many accomplishments were never acknowledged or recorded for future generations of bold women.
For lovers of Victorian England, this historical fiction novel about Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, is sure to please.
This is a darker literary historical fiction novel about an asylum for women in late 1800’s Paris. The book tells the stories of inconvenient women being locked up and the treatment they endured while being ‘treated’ for their ‘ailments.’
These two books by Allison Pataki, tell the story of the Hapsburg Empire in Europe during the second half of the 19th century. The story is told from Empress Sisi’s point-of-view and focuses on her life and experience marrying Emperor Franz Joseph of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I thoroughly enjoyed both The Accidental Empress and Sisi and highly recommend reading both!
This book takes place in the 1600’s in Norway and focuses on the experiences of the community of women left behind in Finnmark when a storm takes the lives of most of the men from the village. This is a story of friendship, community, love, survival, and the lengths the world will go to ‘keep women in their place.’
This is a fictionalized account of the compilation of the Oxford English dictionary told from the point-of-view of the daughter of one of the scholars working on the project. Her story is special as is her obsession with collecting ‘women’s words’ and preserving them knowing they will never make it into the official Oxford Dictionary.
This is a nice, easy read that tells the story of a young woman in London during WWII, her coming of age during the war years working in a bookshop, and the importance of books even in the midst of war.
I’ve read several Margaret George books and they are all worth the effort (all of her books are tomes)! I loved this book and it’s definitely in my top 5 historical fiction of all-time. Cleopatra Pharaoh of Egypt is a complex historical figure who has gone through a million iterations in books, plays, film, etc. In Cleopatra’s own voice the reader journeys through the life and major events of her messy and complex life full of extreme highs and devastating lows.
