Best historical fiction of 2024 so far

Here’s the ten best historical novels published so far this year, as chosen by our experienced critics Nick Rennison and Antonia Senior. We’ll be updating the list regularly — but keeping it to a mean and lean ten — so it’s well worth bookmarking. Here’s the latest monthly historical fiction round-up and here’s our crime critics pick of the year.
And tell us what historical novels you’ve enjoyed this year in the comments below.
Quint, the grizzled shark hunter in Jaws (played by Robert Shaw in the 1975 film adaptation of Peter Benchley’s thriller), is last seen sliding down the side of his wrecked boat into the waiting jaws of his nemesis. This excellent novel recreates his life as it leads up to that terrible moment.When we meet Quint his third wife has just died. He is lost in a fug of booze and unexpressed grief. He arm-wrestles for money and hustles where he can. He decides to rejoin the navy, which he left nine years earlier at the end of the Second World War. An interview with a young, smug recruiting officer changes tone when it emerges that Quint was one of a handful of survivors of the USS Indianapolis, sunk by the Japanese. This real event is central to Quint’s fictional story — the survivors floated for days, being picked off by circling sharks. There is a lot of fun to be had with this book: lines from the film crop up in the British author Robert Lautner’s telling and it prompted a cushion-hugging rewatch of Jaws in the Senior house. But this novel is more than a gimmick — it offers a profound portrait of a life dislocated by war and violence. Its hero is an unromantic Hemingway who really, really hates sharks.Antonia SeniorBorough, £16.99
Francesca Kay’s fourth novel is set against the backdrop of the English Reformation. In the year that Henry VIII dies and the boy-king Edward VI takes the throne, old religious beliefs and long-established ritual are under threat. Kay’s narrator, Alice, is the lady of a manor house. Her much older husband is dying of a wasting disease. His sole earthly concern is with the chantry chapel he has commissioned and craftsmen, including an “imager” from Italy, arrive to build and decorate it. So too does a priest employed to say prayers for his soon-to-depart soul. Alice’s teenage stepdaughter, Agnes, is a resentful presence in the house and, outside its confines, forces demanding change begin to muster. Beautifully written and precisely observed, The Book of Days unfolds slowly, but the story picks up momentum as it heads towards a violent, unsettling conclusion. Nick RennisonSwift Press, £16.99
In the years after the First World War, life on the Hebridean island of Lewis was tough, marked by poverty and grief. Islander Donald S Murray’s novel opens in 1923 as the passenger ship SS Metagama leaves Lewis for Canada, carrying a boatload of islanders towards new lives. Sixteen-year-old Mairead is travelling to be a nanny in Toronto, leaving behind her brother Murdo and her parents, perhaps for ever. As the boat leaves the waters around Lewis, the loved ones left behind light bonfires across the coast as a final farewell. But Mairead refuses to look at the island as she leaves: “The glow and flame of a bonfire would be obscured by rain or mist or the salt of tears.” Instead, Mairead resolutely turns her eyes to her new life in Canada — and to Finlay, a boy a few years older than her, whom she befriends on the voyage. The most famous emigrant from Lewis to the United States was Mary Anne MacLeod, the youngest daughter of a crofter and fisherman. In New York, she married a man called Fred Trump, and they had a son called Donald. But The Salt and the Flame is a very un-Trumpian book: it’s tender, wise and beautiful. ASSaraband, £9.99
With books such as The Clockwork Girl and The House of Whispers, Anna Mazzola has established herself as a writer of great variety and inventiveness. Her new novel takes place in 1650s Rome. Men are dying and their corpses seem mysteriously resistant to decay. A young, ambitious magistrate named Stefano Bracchi is given the task of discovering the truth behind the rumours. Elsewhere in the city, Girolama is the head of a coterie of female healers committed to helping women violently mistreated by their menfolk. As his investigation proceeds, Stefano is obliged to confront the extreme measures of self-defence that the abused women, many now his prisoners, have taken. He begins to question his beliefs about power and justice. Based on real events from the 17th century, The Book of Secrets proves neither a simple morality tale (female virtue pitted against male villainy) nor simply a historical thriller. It is a haunting, complex work of fiction. NROrion £18.99
Claire Clairmont is 18 and determined to live a romantic life. Pregnant with Lord Byron’s child, she is naively convinced that she has a future with the wild poet. It’s unlikely — he ridicules her and his cruel nickname for her is “Clairy Cocotte”, a variant on the French slang for prostitute. Lesley McDowell’s riveting portrayal of Claire’s life skips back and forward through time, following her in later life as a governess in Russia and a socialite in Paris. But the central event is the visit with her stepsister, Mary Shelley, to Byron’s villa in Lake Geneva. Claire is proud of the future author of Frankenstein and jealous of her talents; one of Byron’s small licks of spite is to call Claire a “handmaiden” to Mary’s divinity. Over that weekend Byron’s cruelty comes to a head. A clever portrait of a fascinating, flawed heroine. ASWildfire, £18.99
In the pre-First World War Russian Empire, three Jewish teenagers embark on a journey on foot from their rural shtetl to Lublin. They are carrying a suitcase full of brushes to sell. Joke-loving Elya, their self-appointed leader, dreams of the money they will make; Ziv is a boisterous bully and would-be revolutionary; his cousin Kiva is a nervous scholar in the making, fearful of marauding Cossacks. The road to the town of Lublin proves longer than any of them anticipated and, as it continues to stretch ahead, the boys face a series of challenging encounters with others and with their own inner demons. Often very funny, but overshadowed by the omniscient narrator’s knowledge of the horrors awaiting the boys’ fellow Jews in the coming century, this is an original, compelling work of fiction. NR And Other Stories, £14.99
In the 1950s, Nevada granted quick divorces to anyone resident in the state for six weeks. “Divorce ranches” sprang up to cater for the unhappily hitched outsiders. This excellent debut takes place at one such ranch, the Golden Yarrow, where awkward and odd Lois arrives to escape Lawrence. “I just felt that — if I stayed with him — I’d, not explode exactly, that sounds too violent or exciting even, but collapse in on myself. That I’d disappear.” The women in residence each have their own story of a miserable marriage. A new guest, the bruised, beautiful and charismatic Greer, arrives and soon becomes the centre of the Golden Yarrow’s social eddies. But slowly the atmosphere at the ranch becomes more sinister as Greer’s grip on the women tightens. Is Greer who she seems? The Divorcées is riveting to the last page. ASManilla, £16.99
The Household by Stacey Halls The author of The Familiars and Mrs England, Stacey Halls mixes melodramatic motifs with psychological insight in her absorbing new novel set in Victorian London. Angela Burdett-Coutts, a philanthropist, uses some of her vast riches to establish a home for “fallen women”. At Urania Cottage, in countryside near London, former prostitutes and petty thieves live together to pursue the chance of redemption and a fresh start in life. At the same time, Angela is the target of a stalker, Richard Dunn, intent on forcing her into marriage or paying him large sums of money. Urania Cottage proves less of a refuge than its founder had hoped. One of the women flees, another dies and a third unexpectedly elopes with an older man. As Dunn concocts an elaborate plot to entrap Angela, Halls weaves together the disparate elements of her story with great skill. NRManilla, £16.99
Fourteen-year-old Massimo is lying in a gutter in the Italian town of Cassino. He looks up, “bloodied and blue”, to see a man standing above him, “white and glowing and pristine like a marble God”. The man is Pietro Houdini, an art historian, on his way to the abbey at Monte Cassino to preserve its artwork. He takes Massimo — recently orphaned, his parents killed by a bomb — along as his assistant. It is 1943, the Allies are advancing from Naples on their way to Rome, and the Germans are digging in. When Houdini realises that the Germans are going to loot the abbey, he comes up with a plan to steal three Titians that involves the killing of two German soldiers. As the Allies come closer, the war intensifies around them, increasing the perils. Derek B Miller has crafted an ambitious, sometimes tricksy story full of colourful characters. ASDoubleday, £20
In 1830s Canada naive Alex is a lamb let loose in a wolfish society. Stranded in the wilderness after the death of his mentor and lover, a grizzled fur trader, he stumbles back to the fortified village on Mackinac Island. There he is persuaded to take part in a doomed robbery that ends in a shoot-out. Alex takes a bullet to the torso. His life is saved by a doctor, William Beaumont, but his body reconstructs itself bizarrely, creating a kind of fleshly tunnel that leads directly into his stomach. Beaumont sees an opportunity for medical discovery and, keeping Alex a virtual prisoner, subjects him to a series of invasive experiments. Alex’s attempts to escape only lead him into new forms of captivity. Already acclaimed for three volumes of short stories, Paul Carlucci has written an exceptionally vivid and intense tale of a young man struggling to find freedom amid people eager only to exploit him. NRSwift Press, £16.99
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