Historical fiction

Hillary Mantell's stuff- Wolf Hall, A Place of Greater Safety, the list could go on

Came in to post that, so I'll add Baudolino is also fantastic.

Gladiators Koestler

Azincourt was good but the Last Kingdom series has become somewhat tedious and repetitive.

Sigrid Undset's Master of Hestviken and Kristin Lavransdatter series.

sienkiewicz's Deluge series

Julian - Gore Vidal

Mary Renault

The Turkish Gambit by Boris Akunin

Shogun (Asian Saga Series) by James Clavell

Came to post this. Her books on Ancient Greece are pretty good. It's been a long time (12 years or so) since I read Last of the Wine, but I remember it being good. I read Mask of Apollo and Fire from Heaven more recently and I loved both of those as well.

I also found Louis L'Amour's The Walking Drum to be fantastic, as far as historical fiction goes. Set in the 10th or 11th century, starting in Western Europe, moving through Iberia and ending in the Middle East, its plot is somewhat reminiscent of The Count of Monte Cristo. It is also overflowing with references to historical figures (philosophical, scientific, literary, military, etc.) that I had never heard of before but upon investigation were clearly of great influence. I would highly recommend it.

"The Saladin Trilogy" by Jack Hight. Very good!
"The Accursed Kings" saga by Maurice Druon.
Bernard Cornwell's books.
"Alamut" by Vladimir Bartol.

"The Hammer and the Cross" trylogy.
It's a uchronia, but it's a historical fiction.

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Came to post this, but that 5 book set is ass. I've never seen so many typos before in my life.

True. I guess they just used OCR software and never bothered to have someone proof-read what they scanned.

There's a typo every 4 or 5 pages or so. Most you can figure out the context to fix in your head, but some are more difficult to parse.

My favorite is when it is describing someone's voice and keeps using "ass" instead of "bass".

OP I wish I had a time machine to go back to the 90's to read that book again for the first time. It was gut wrenchingly good.

A couple of detective series I like,the Alchemist's Apprentice is set in Venice and has Nostrodamas(one version of him:apparently there were several with that name),and the Brother Caedfal mysteries(many of the books were filmed as a TV series starring Derek Jacobi)..

Are none of you concerned with reading historical fiction, in the sense that the emotional impact might sway your view in a negative way? I don't mind reading historical fiction for the most part, but I would never read one on a topic I haven't yet read as actual history.

Anyway, OP, Eagle in the Snow.

If I write stories about people in the past but it's not like about the events and just uses it as a setting is that historical fiction?

Technically, yes. Although I would think most people count that as plain literature for the most part. Otherwise most of the literature written in the 19th and 20th century could easily count as historical fiction.

Or you could listen to the wonderful people at Goodreads who label a dyke romance that just barely makes contact with its setting in the Victorian era as "historical fiction."

Game of Thrones also shows up all the time in Goodreads' historical fiction lists and shit.

I wish there was a site like Goodreads but for adults, not people who use tumblr reaction images as reviews.

Goodreads is just the worst... Some of the best books ever written get like 3.70 scores there, while fantasy shit gets 4.50 at times.

Also it's kind of funny how fantasy series work on that website. The first book that's sampled by the most people usually has the fairer score, and as you progress and more and more people lose hope with the series leaving only the fanatics, the scores begin to soar.

I've found that it's usually easier to tell what's good by going to the one star reviews. If it's some older people with decent grammar that complain the book was shit, it usually is; if you've got some young retards calling it boring, it's usually great. But the 5/5 reviews are usually indicative of absolutely nothing.

The warlord chronicles by bernard cornwell is really good.
Its set in the 5th century during the anglo-saxon invasions and the spread of christianity.

God Tier

a bunch of the stuff on this god among men's shelf

what a fantastic set

Oh hey it's that shelf again, that's the one who put me onto Patrick O'Brian mainly because I saw that metric fuckton big collection of his works
God bless whoever that shelf belongs too

Hey, that's my shelf! Surprised someone saved it. Need to do a new picture since I've added another dozen or so books since that pic. Actually, I'm running out of shelf space, which is problematic as I don't have a good place for more shelves.

I keep seeing this. It's based around Russian folk tales right?

Books need a RYM equivalent, where obviously there are plebs who think Pink Floyd is the greatest thing ever made ever but generally the average rating for an album is ~3 stars and people aren't afraid to judge something critically and use a non-inflated rating scale. Goodreads has not only a "young adult genre fiction tumblr pleb" problem but a ratings inflation problem, there should be more nuance to the rating scales.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

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No. Its about an ALMOST old believer mystic who becomes a faith healer. He also starts to exist outside of time in a borgesian style no spoiler it starts right away. It won Russia's National Book Award a few years ago.

Ivanhoe

>running out of shelf space
>OED in print form
>2017

>Not enjoying oneself in a comfy chair with a dog at one's feet next to a roaring fire with a snifter of brandy at hand while flipping through a 20 pound volume of the OED to learn about the history of our language and the etymology of archaic vocabulary.

I tried some of the most famous Alexandre Dumas works, but the books were pretty shitty.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff