Historical novels

Following Hilary Mantel's historic win of the Booker and the Costa in the same year with a historic novel here are some more books that talk of the past and sing of days of yore.

HHhH

by Laurence Binet

Harvill Secker

HHhH, the debut novel from Laurent Binet, tells the story of Operation Anthropoid, two Czechoslovakian parachutists' mission to assassinate Nazi commander Reinhard Heydrich. With skill Binet guides us through Heydrich's cruel ascent to power, the Resistance fighters' preparations and the...

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Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

Canongate Books

Carol Birch's eleventh novel harnesses this same drive and commitment, producing a story of rich, vivid detail, brilliant characters and a satisfying and compelling narrative.

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Slammerkin

by Emma Donoghue

Virago

Set in the eighteen century, partly in London and partly in Wales, Slammerkin is the story of Mary Saunders - a clothes obsessed young woman, whose desire for fine dresses leads her into prostitution at the age of thirteen.

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The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

HarperCollins

The story is based upon the life of the romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the name Novalis, but Lively has written much more than a fictionalised biography of the man.

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Wolf Hall

by Hilary Mantel

Fourth Estate

England in the 1540s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The...

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Austerlitz

by W G Sebald

Penguin

Austerlitz is about memory and forgetting, and the shadows of absence and guilt that the Holocaust cast forward into the future.

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Restoration

by Rose Tremain

Vintage

Tremain's exuberant tale of Robert Merivel, bumbling courtier to Charles II, who reluctantly leaves London but in the process achieves personal redemption.

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