recommend me good historical novels

[parietal]

I love historical novels - the feeling of being in a different place and time. So why are 50% of the modern ones full of anachronisms, especially in people's attitudes and interpretations. I'm currently reading one with an 11 year old black boy in 18th century London who is worrying about structural racism rather than just trying to survive. Yes, obviously there is lots of racism around in that era, but I don't believe that a kid would be theorizing about it, he'd just be living it. And it would be so much more powerful if the author just showed his experience. Similarly, I hate it when novels make their characters into modern feminists in a way that is completely out of place.

what authors / novels can you recommend that depict strong interesting characters that will not jar in this way?

Well I loved 'Song of Achilles', but I doubt it will fulfill your brief on historical accuracy.

I'm not sure there's much fiction that will - surely the nature of fiction requires a little suspended disbelief, an allowance for artistic licence. My husband enjoys history but is similarly bothered by the 'unrealistic', so he reads nonfiction exclusively.

Andrew Taylor: The American Boy, Bleeding Heaert Yard, and others.
Patrick O'Brien
Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
Voyage of the Narwhal, Andrea Barrett
Thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet
As Meat Loves Salt
Crooked Heart -Lissa Evans
Some Luck, -Jane Smiley
Sarah Waters
Hannah Kent
Andrew Miller -Pure; Now we shall be entirely free; I think there are others I've not read
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton
Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries

I

Sharon Penman. All of it.

Hilary Mantel, Dorothy Dunnett, Sigrid Undset, Tolstoy (War and Peace), George Elliot (Romola).

Anything by
Susan Howatch
RF Delderfield
EM Delafield
Cynthia Harrod Eagles ( not meaning her mysteries, the sagas)

Manda Scott's Boudicca series
Zoe Oldenburg The World is Not Enough

The Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall trilogy made me feel like I was in Tudor London. The sights, the smells, the culture....I felt I was THERE.

I re-read them every couple of years for that pure escapism and narrative brilliance

The Testimony of Frannie Langton is very good.
The Essex Serpent.
The Cadfael mysteries are absorbing and detailed. (Medieval)
The Jeeves and Wooster books are a pure delight.

For an evocation of Victorian England, The Quincunx by Charles Palliser

Rose Tremain's historical books, especially Restoration.

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer.

Ooh - more modern but A Winter In Madrid by the guy who wrote the Shardlake novels was excellent I thought.

Colleen McCullough Masters of Rome books are fantastic

The Conn Iggulden Emperor series are simply incredible. I loved each one.

If you like Naval fiction, J.D. Davies is good. He actually has a Ph.D. in Naval history, so he knows his stuff. He writes about the 17th century, which makes a change from the Napoleonic era which so many Naval fiction authors go for.

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer.

And The Spanish Bride and An Infamous Army.

(Jonathan Chawleigh in A Civil Contract is a splendid creation. Georgette Heyer was very good at secondary characters, and he is possibly the best.)

Not highbrow, but many of Santa Montefiore's novels are historical. Avoid the ones about the Deverills as they're not as good as many of her others

Yes!

The Kingmaker series by Toby Clements is phenomenal.

Yes, they are fantastic. They are so vivid that in the MIrror and the Light you think the ending won't really happen, that it's not historical fact and can still be changed.

I'll also add Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety.

Anything written by Rosemary Sutcliff. so incredibly well researched and written.

Seconding Georgette Heyer and Ellis Peters, and adding Jodi Taylor Chronicles of St Mary’s for a wild card!

Diana Norman!

Also Patricia Finney / PF Chisholm (same person writing about time of Elizabeth I in different styles)

Diana Norman also wrote as Arianna Franklin

And H F M Prescott on the Pilgrimage of Grace / dissolution of the monasteries in The Man on a Donkey

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - his other books besides the Sherlock Holmes mysteries

Arnold Bennett - Old Wives Tales