The 100 Best Historical Novels of All Time


The 100 Best Historical Novels of All Time is a book list for those who enjoy a taste of history in their fiction. The three giants of historical fiction are of course Tolstoy, Graves, and Vidal. Yet there are many other names worthy of note, especially Marguerite Yourcenar, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Mary Renault, and the twice winner of the Booker prize, for the first two parts of her trilogy on Cromwell, Hilary Mantel. These are to name but a few. If any great works or authors are missing from the list, please let us, and other readers, know in a comment below.

1. War and Peace

By Leo Tolstoy | Used Price: 70% Off

Published to coincide with the centenary of Tolstoy's death, here is an exciting new edition of one of the great literary works of world literature. Tolstoy's epic masterpiece captures with unprecedented immediacy the broad sweep of life during the Napoleonic wars and the brutal invasion of Russia. Balls ... More »

War and Peace
I, Claudius

2. I, Claudius

By Robert Graves | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D. A masterpiece. More »

3. Burr

By Gore Vidal | Under $1.00

Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial ... More »

Burr
Life and Fate

4. Life and Fate

By Vasily Grossman | Used Price: 60% Off

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that ... More »

5. The Master of Petersburg

By J. M. Coetzee | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling ... More »

The Master of Petersburg
The General in His Labyrinth

6. The General in His Labyrinth

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez | 70% Off

General Simon Bolivar, “the Liberatorâ€Â of five South American countries, takes a last melancholy journey down the Magdalena River, revisiting cities along its shores, and reliving the triumphs, passions, and betrayals of his life. Infinitely charming, prodigiously successful in love, war and politics, he still dances ... More »

7. Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel | Under $1.00

WINNER OF THE 2009 MAN BOOKER PRIZEWINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTIONA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLEREngland in the 1520s 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 ... More »

Wolf Hall
Salammbo

8. Salammbo

By Gustave Flaubert | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Salammbô (1862) is a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert. It is set in Carthage during the 3rd century BC, immediately before and during the Mercenary Revolt which took place shortly after the First Punic War. Flaubert's main source was Book I of Polybius's ... More »

9. Memoirs of Hadrian

By Marguerite Yourcenar | 80% Off

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual ... More »

Memoirs of Hadrian
The Siege of Krishnapur

10. The Siege of Krishnapur

By J. G. Farrell | Used Price: 70% Off

Winner of the Booker Prize.India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last ... More »

11. The Killer Angels: The Classic Civil War Novel

By Michael Shaara | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

“My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.â€Ââ€”James M. McPherson   In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two ... More »

The Killer Angels: The Classic Civil War Novel
Quo Vadis

12. Quo Vadis

By Henryk Sienkiewicz | Used Price: 90% Off

Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, commonly known as Quo Vadis, is a historical novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Quo vadis is Latin for "Where are you going?" and alludes to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, in which Peter flees Rome but on his way ... More »

13. The Last of the Wine

By Mary Renault | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

In The Last of the Wine, two young Athenians, Alexias and Lysis, compete in the palaestra, journey to the Olympic games, fight in the wars against Sparta, and study under Socrates. As their relationship develops, Renault expertly conveys Greek culture, showing the impact of this supreme philosopher whose ... More »

The Last of the Wine
Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

14. Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

By Eiji Yoshikawa

The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Miyamoto Musashi was the child of an era when Japan was emerging from decades of civil strife. Lured to the great Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by the hope of becoming a samurai-without really knowing ... More »

15. The Leopard

By Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | 80% Off

Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. The dramatic sweep and richness of observation, the seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and the grasp of human frailty imbue The ... More »

The Leopard
Augustus

16. Augustus

By John Williams

WINNER OF THE 1973 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD  By the Author of Stoner In Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams took  on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams ... More »

17. The Ghost Road

By Pat Barker | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

 The final book in the Regeneration Trilogy, and winner of the 1995 Booker Prize   The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the ... More »

The Ghost Road
Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth A Novel

18. Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth A Novel

By Naguib Mahfouz | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt.In this beguiling new novel, originally published in 1985 and now appearing for the first time in the United ... More »

19. A Grain of Wheat

By Ngugi wa Thiong'o | Used Price: 50% Off

The best-known novel by the great Kenyan writerSet in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it ... More »

A Grain of Wheat
Raised from the Ground

20. Raised from the Ground

By Jose Saramago | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

A multigenerational family saga that paints a sweeping portrait of twentieth-century PortugalFirst published in 1980, the City of Lisbon Prize–winning Raised from the Ground follows the changing fortunes of the Mau Tempo family—poor landless peasants not unlike Saramago’s own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal ... More »

21. The Kindly Ones

By Jonathan Littell | Under $1.00

“Simply astounding. . . . The Kindly Ones is unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.â€Â — Time A literary prize-winner that has been an explosive bestseller all over the world, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been called “a brilliant Holocaust novel… a world-class masterpiece of ... More »

The Kindly Ones
The Kingdom of This World

22. The Kingdom of This World

By Alejo Carpentier | Used Price: 70% Off

A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri-Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. ... More »

23. Conversation in the Cathedral

By Mario Vargas Llosa | Used Price: 80% Off

A Haunting tale of power, corruption,and the complex search for identity Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría. Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who ... More »

Conversation in the Cathedral
A Tale of Two Cities

24. A Tale of Two Cities

By Charles Dickens | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles ... More »

25. Missing Person

By Patrick Modiano

Winner of the Prix GoncourtIn this strange, elegant novel, winner of France's premier literary prize, Patrick Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.For ten years Guy Roland has lived without ... More »

Missing Person
Brooklyn

26. Brooklyn

By Colm Toibin | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

“One of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary literatureâ€Â (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile ... More »

27. Pharaoh

By Boleslaw Prus

Pharaoh (Polish: Faraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer BolesÅ‚aw Prus (1847–1912). Composed over a year's time in 1894–95, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of ... More »

Pharaoh
Pure

28. Pure

By Andrew Miller | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an engineer of modest origin, arrives in the city in 1785, charged by the King’s minister with emptying the overflowing cemetery of Les Innocents, a ancient site whose stench is poisoning the neighborhood’s air and water and leaving a vile taste in its inhabitants’ food. At ... More »

29. Andersonville

By MacKinlay Kantor | Used Price: 80% Off

"The greatest of our Civil War novels."—The New York Times. The 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the Andersonville Fortress and its use as a concentration camp-like prison by the South during the Civil War. More »

Andersonville
The Blue Flower

30. The Blue Flower

By Penelope Fitzgerald | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

In eighteenth-century Germany, the impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis seeks his father's permission to wed his true philosophy -- a plain, simple child named Sophie. The attachment shocks his family and friends. This brilliant young man, betrothed to a ... More »

31. In Praise of Hatred

By Khaled Khalifa | Used Price: 70% Off

1980s Syria, our young narrator is living a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents in Aleppo. Her three aunts, Maryam the pious one; Safaa, the liberal; and the free-spirited Marwa, bring her up with the aid of their ever-devoted blind ... More »

In Praise of Hatred
The Iron King

32. The Iron King

By Maurice Druon | Used Price: 80% Off

‘This is the original game of thrones’ George R.R. MartinFrom the publishers that brought you A Game of Thrones comes the series that inspired George R.R. Martin’s epic work.“Accursed! Accursed! You shall be accursed to the thirteenth generation!”The Iron King – Philip the Fair – is as cold ... More »

33. Germinal

By Emile Zola | Used Price: 70% Off

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! ... More »

Germinal
The Year of the French

34. The Year of the French

By Thomas Flanagan | Used Price: 80% Off

In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, ... More »

35. Restoration

By Rose Tremain | Used Price: 90% Off

The Booker shortlisted novel that “restored the historical novel to its rightful place of honorâ€Â (New York Times). Robert Merivel, son of a glove maker and an aspiring physician, finds his fortunes transformed when he is given a position at the court of King Charles II. Merivel slips ... More »

Restoration
The Overseer's Cabin

36. The Overseer's Cabin

By Edouard Glissant | Under $1.00

With Édouard Glissant’s The Fourth Century, the Village Voice observed, “we get the full effect of his overarching project: a literary exorcism of Martinique’s scarred psyche and past, a lingering cry against the ‘black hole of time and forgetting.’â€Â Glissant, “one of the most significant figures in Caribbean ... More »

37. Man's Fate

By Andre Malraux | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

As explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to life the profound meaning of the revolutionary impulse for ... More »

Man's Fate
Freedom and Death

38. Freedom and Death

By Nikos Kazantzakis

Freedom and Death is Kazantzakis's modern Iliad. The context is Crete in the late nineteenth century, the epic struggle between Greeks and Turks, between Christianity and Islam. A new uprising takes place to rival those of 1854, 1866 and 1878, and the island is thrown into confusion yet ... More »

39. Half of a Yellow Sun

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 70% Off

With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, ... More »

Half of a Yellow Sun
Iron in the Soul

40. Iron in the Soul

By Jean-Paul Sartre | Used Price: 70% Off

June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralized, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul unfolds what men thought and felt and did as France fell. Men who shrugged, men who ran, men ... More »

41. Property

By Valerie Martin | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his ... More »

Property
Kristin Lavransdatter

42. Kristin Lavransdatter

By Sigrid Undset | Used Price: 60% Off

The turbulent historical masterpiece of Norway’s literary masterIn her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political ... More »

43. The Unvanquished

By William Faulkner | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, THE UNVANQUISHED focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions. More »

The Unvanquished
Darkness at Noon

44. Darkness at Noon

By Arthur Koestler | Used Price: 80% Off

Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and ... More »

45. The Glass Palace

By Amitav Ghosh | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the ... More »

The Glass Palace
For Whom the Bell Tolls

46. For Whom the Bell Tolls

By Ernest Hemingway | Used Price: 90% Off

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls.The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International ... More »

47. Alone in Berlin

By Hans Fallada | Under $1.00

Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the ... More »

Alone in Berlin
The Parisian

48. The Parisian

By Isabella Hammad | Used Price: 80% Off

A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle ... More »

49. The Age of Innocence

By Edith Wharton | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) wrote carefully structured fiction that probed the psychological and social elements guiding the behavior of her characters. Her portrayals of upper-class New Yorkers were unrivaled. The Age of Innocence, for which Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, is one of her most memorable novels.At ... More »

The Age of Innocence
Girl With a Pearl Earring

50. Girl With a Pearl Earring

By Tracy Chevalier | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

The New York Times bestselling novel by the author of Remarkable Creatures and The Last Runaway Translated into thirty-nine languages and made into an Oscar-nominated film, starring Scarlett Johanson and Colin FirthTracy Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly-imagined ... More »

51. The Armies of the Night

By Norman Mailer | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

One of the first examples of "new journalism" daringly combines reportage with a novelistic style and garnered Mailer his first Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Armies of the Night centers on the March on the Pentagon, the most famous anti-Vietnam ... More »

The Armies of the Night
The Known World

52. The Known World

By Edward P. Jones | Used Price: 80% Off

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, The Known World is a daring and ambitious work by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones.The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the ... More »

53. The Inheritors

By William Golding | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Eight Neanderthals encounter another race of beings like themselves, yet strangely different. This new race, Homo sapiens, fascinating in their skills and sophistication, terrifying in their cruelty, sense of guilt, and incipient corruption, spell doom for the more gentle folk whose world they will inherit. Golding, author of ... More »

The Inheritors
Kidnapped

54. Kidnapped

By Robert Louis Stevenson | 70% Off

'Your bed shall be the moorcock's, and your life shall be like the hunted deer's, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.'Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his life in the dangerous ... More »

55. The Sorrow of War

By Bao Ninh | Used Price: 80% Off

Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originaly published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has ... More »

The Sorrow of War
Ivanhoe

56. Ivanhoe

By Walter Scott | Under $1.00

In Ivanhoe Scott fashioned an imperial myth of national cultural identity that has shaped the popular imagination ever since its first appearance at the end of 1819. With the secret return of King Richard and the disinherited Saxon knight Ivanhoe, Scott confronts his splendid and tumultuous romance, featuring ... More »

57. Les Miserables

By Victor Hugo | Under $1.00

Now a major musical film from Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway, and also featuring Amanda Seyfreid, Helena Bonham-Carter and Sacha Baron-Cohen, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is one of the great works of western literature. Now in ... More »

Les Miserables
Bomber

58. Bomber

By Len Deighton | Used Price: 80% Off

Bomber is a novel about the realities of war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of 24 hours in the summer of 1943, portraying all the ... More »

59. Storm of Steel

By Ernst Junger | Used Price: 60% Off

The memoir widely viewed as the best account ever written of fighting in WW1 A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the ... More »

Storm of Steel
The Red Badge of Courage

60. The Red Badge of Courage

By Stephen Crane | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.The Red Badge of Courage ... More »

61. Love, Anger, Madness

By Marie Vieux-Chauvet | Used Price: 70% Off

Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed ... More »

Love, Anger, Madness
Before the Dawn

62. Before the Dawn

By Toson Shimazaki | Used Price: 80% Off

An historical novel portrays the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the changes in Japanese life after the arrival of Commodore Perry. More »

63. Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War

By Karl Marlantes | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

An incredible publishing story—written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, a New York Times best seller for sixteen weeks, a National Indie Next and a USA Today best seller—Matterhorn has been hailed as a “brilliant account of warâ€Â (New York Times Book ... More »

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

64. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

By Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn | 80% Off

The first published novel of controversial Nobel Prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn- now in trade paperback. First published in 1962, this book is considered one of the most significant works ever to emerge from Soviet Russia. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a ... More »

65. Sword of Honor

By Evelyn Waugh

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)This trilogy of novels about World War II, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of Evelyn Waugh’s career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new ... More »

Sword of Honor
The Raj Quartet

66. The Raj Quartet

By Paul Mark Scott | Used Price: 80% Off

 The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott's epic study of British India in its final years, has no equal. Tolstoyan in scope and  Proustian in detail  but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals ... More »

67. The Radetzky March

By Philip Roth | Used Price: 80% Off

The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta family, encompasses the entire social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I. The author's greatest achievement, The Radetzky March is an unparalleled portrait of a civilization in decline, and as such, a universal ... More »

The Radetzky March
Romola

68. Romola

By George Eliot | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

'There is no book of mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood' Wrote George Eliot of Romola, the novel which argues her most profound and utopian vision of the position of women. ... More »

69. Death of Virgil

By Hermann Broch | Used Price: 70% Off

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian ... More »

Death of Virgil
The Man on a Donkey: A Novel of England in the Reign of Henry VIII

70. The Man on a Donkey: A Novel of England in the Reign of Henry VIII

By H.F.M. Prescott | Used Price: 60% Off

A powerful novel of England during the reign of Henry VIII. When the King's men despoil the monasteries and divide the wealth among the royal favorites, rebellion begins to brew in the north--and for a few weeks, the leader held the fate of a nation in his hands. More »

71. All Quiet on the Western Front

By Erich Maria Remarque | Price: $0.01

Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece of the German experience during World War I.I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous ... More »

All Quiet on the Western Front
Goodbye to Berlin

72. Goodbye to Berlin

By Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood's classic story of Berlin in the 1930s - and the inspiration for Cabaret - now in a stand-alone edition. First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood ... More »

73. The Bruce Trilogy

By Nigel Tranter | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

This trilogy tells the story of Robert the Bruce and how, tutored and encouraged by the heroic William Wallace, he determined to continue the fight for an independent Scotland, sustained by a passionate love for his land. More »

The Bruce Trilogy
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

74. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

By Mark Twain | Under $1.00

Regarded by many as the most luminous example of Twain's work, this historical novel chronicles the French heroine's life, as purportedly told by her longtime friend — Sieur Louis de Conté. A panorama of stirring scenes recount Joan's childhood in Domremy, the story of her voices, the fight ... More »

75. The Charterhouse of Parma

By Stendhal | Used Price: 70% Off

Headstrong and naïve, the young Italian aristocrat Fabrizio del Dongo is determined to defy the wrath of his right-wing father and go to war to fight for Napoleon. He stumbles on the Battle of Waterloo, ill-prepared, yet filled with enthusiasm for war and glory. Finally heeding advice, Fabrizio ... More »

The Charterhouse of Parma
Blood Meridian

76. Blood Meridian

By Cormac McCarthy | Used Price: 80% Off

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes ... More »

77. Sagittarius Rising

By Cecil Lewis

A memoir by a WWI fighter pilot, with the adventurous spirit of War Horse and the charm of The Little Prince A singular, lyrical book, Sagittarius Rising is at once an exuberant memoir from the Lost Generation and a riveting tale of the early days of flight during ... More »

Sagittarius Rising
The Road to Jerusalem: Book One of the Crusades Trilogy

78. The Road to Jerusalem: Book One of the Crusades Trilogy

By Jan Guillou | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

For power. For passion. For glory. The epic story of the Knights Templar. Born in 1150 to a noble Swedish family and coming of age at a monastery under the tutelage of a Cistercian monk and a former Knight Templar, young Arn Magnusson is sent to fulfill his ... More »

79. All the King's Men

By Robert Penn Warren | Used Price: 70% Off

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power. New Foreword by Joseph Blotner for this fiftieth anniversary ... More »

All the King's Men
The Last of the Mohicans

80. The Last of the Mohicans

By James Fenimore Cooper | Under $1.00

The second of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, this is the one which has consistently captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826. It's success lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial hostility, and ... More »

81. Tipping the Velvet

By Sarah Waters

Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen. A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the ... More »

Tipping the Velvet
Birdsong

82. Birdsong

By Sebastian Faulks | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters ... More »

83. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

By Maryse Conde | Used Price: 60% Off

This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence ... More »

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
The Hunger Angel

84. The Hunger Angel

By Herta Muller | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg ... More »

85. His Bloody Project

By Graeme MaCrae Burnet | 70% Off

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2016 BY NEWSWEEK, NPR, THE GUARDIAN, THE TELEGRAPH, AND THE SUNDAY TIMES A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE "THOUGHT PROVOKING FICTION"?THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW A brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish farming ... More »

His Bloody Project
The Enchantress of Florence

86. The Enchantress of Florence

By Salman Rushdie | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess the powers of enchantment and sorcery, attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities at the height of their powers–the hedonistic Mughal ... More »

87. Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade

By Assia Djebar | Used Price: 80% Off

In this stunning novel, Assia Djebar intertwines the history of her native Algeria with episodes from the life of a young girl in a story stretching from the French conquest in 1830 to the War of Liberation of the 1950s. The girl, growing up in the old Roman ... More »

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade
The Game of Kings

88. The Game of Kings

By Dorothy Dunnett | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

For the first time Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles are available in the United States in quality paperback editions.The first book in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, Game of Kings takes place in 1547. Scotland has been humiliated by an English invasion and is threatened by machinations elsewhere beyond its borders, ... More »

89. Shogun

By James Clavell | Used Price: 80% Off

A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in an extraordinary saga of a time and a place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power... More »

Shogun
Napoleon Symphony

90. Napoleon Symphony

By Anthony Burgess | Under $1.00

Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine funâ€Â to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed—in liberty, equality, and fraternity—from Beethoven’s Third “Eroicaâ€Â Symphony, in this ... More »

91. All Souls' Rising

By Madison Smartt Bell | Used Price: 90% Off

"A serious historical novel that reads like a dream." --The Washington Post Book World"One of the most spohisticated fictional treatments of the enduring themes of class, color, and freedom." --San Francisco ChronicleNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTPEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST This first installment of the epic Haitian trilogy brings to life ... More »

All Souls' Rising
Memoirs of a Geisha

92. Memoirs of a Geisha

By Arthur Golden | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the ... More »

93. The Three Musketeers

By Alexandre Dumas | Used Price: 80% Off

Alexandre Dumas’s most famous tale— and possibly the most famous historical novel of all time— in a handsome hardcover volume.This swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honor, and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is richly populated with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings, queens, cavaliers, and criminals in a ... More »

The Three Musketeers
Daughter of Fortune

94. Daughter of Fortune

By Isabel Allende | Used Price: 80% Off

An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, vivacious young Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Entering a rough-and-tumble world of new arrivals driven mad by gold fever, Eliza moves in a society of single ... More »

95. An Ice-Cream War

By William Boyd | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

"Rich in character and incident, An Ice-Cream War fulfills the ambition of the historical novel at its best." --The New York Times Book ReviewBooker Prize Finalist"Boyd has more than fulfilled the bright promise of [his] first novel. . . . He is capable not only of some very ... More »

An Ice-Cream War
A Long Long Way

96. A Long Long Way

By Sebastian Barry | Rock-bottom Price: $0.01

Praised as a “master storytellerâ€Â (The Wall Street Journal) and hailed for his “flawless use of languageâ€Â (Boston Herald), Irish author and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a powerful new novel about divided loyalties and the realities of war. In 1914, Willie Dunne, barely eighteen years ... More »

97. Three Kingdoms

By Luo Guanzhong | Used Price: 50% Off

Three Kingdoms tells the story of the fateful last reign of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), when the Chinese empire was divided into three warring kingdoms. This decisive period in Chinese history became a subject of intense and continuing interest to historians, poets, and dramatists. Writing some ... More »

Three Kingdoms
Jazz

98. Jazz

By Toni Morrison | Used Price: 80% Off

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings ... More »

99. Doctor Zhivago

By Boris Pasternak | Used Price: 60% Off

First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself ... More »

Doctor Zhivago
Measuring the World

100. Measuring the World

By Daniel Kehlmann | Used Price: 80% Off

Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment.     Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. ... More »