Literary
The Sleeping Dictionary
In 1930s Bengal, ten-year-old Pom is orphaned when a tidal wave sweeps through her coastal village. She is rescued by…
Bellman and Black: A Ghost Story
When he is a boy, William Bellman somehow manages to kill a rook stone dead with a single catapult shot.…
Hunters in the Snow
The first thing to say about this novel is that it is really not at all conventional historical fiction, yet…
Dissident Gardens
In Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem presents 20th-century New York in a sweeping tale of strong women, ideals and disappointments. Rose…
Mr Darwin’s Gardener
This is not so much the story of Thomas Davies, the gardener, as of the villagers of Downe and the…
Here Comes Mrs Kugelman
Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman is an allegorical sort of novel about remembrance. Mrs. Kugelman is a Holocaust survivor, and she…
David
Born and sold in 1847, David is the biracial child of a slave and her master. When David’s mother is…
Infamy
Editors' choice
It’s 1830. William Burr is recovering from injuries after his latest skirmish chasing mahogany pirates in British Honduras when he…
Desolation Island
At heart an early 20th-century tale of adventure, Adolfo Garcia Ortega’s Desolation Island is a dense and meaty novel for…
The Grammarian
Editors' choice
This spellbinding novel is set in colonial India of 1911. It tells the story of Alexandre Lautens, a young French…
About our Reviews
Over the last 20 years The Historical Novels Review (the society’s print magazine for our members) has published reviews of some 15,000 historical fiction books.
