The best seriously historical historical fiction novels

Segu may begin with a lone white explorer gazing across a river at the Bambara people, but this novel turns away from him to those whose world will be irrevocably changed as colonialism and Christianity, Muslim expansionism, and the horrific trade in human beings irrevocably changes the course of African lives. Condé turns an unblinking eye on the Traore family as they break under the weight of these civilizational pressures. Traditional ways of life turn brutal and desperate—women especially feel the brunt of an unstable world—and sons abandon the family for enemies or are kidnapped and enslaved. Each storyline in this famed epic cuts straight into the political and social complexities of that time and exposes its players to uncompromising account.

The inaccessible Secretum at the centre of the novel is not simply a repository for the most important manuscripts in Christendom. It is a maze shaped in the order of creation and an argument for how the world should be by controlling what people know. Knowledge has always been curated and does not require banning books or even book burnings to do the work of shaping minds, cultures, and empires towards a desired end. People at every level of society—not just elite scholarly, religious, and political powers—make direct but also unintentional decisions about what may be considered worthy resources for thought. This celebrated mystery asks us to consider and acknowledge the choices, majestic and banal, that lead to such ends.

The magnificence of the first in the Amalgant series is the immersive reconstruction of Mongol social, political, and religious worlds, as well as the lives of its people. Hammond resistantly reads histories produced by hostile cultures, instead privileging the earliest and most comprehensive Mongol tellings of their own lives, The Secret History of the Mongols. This is no dry historical account of cultural norms, steppe relations, or material artifacts, but an intimate and humane telling of the personal tragedies and struggles that would change the world as the war-orphaned Temujin grows to be the man we know as Chenggiz Khan.

This riveting Young Adult novel sets the action on a stage in which “East” and “West” are not divided as typically imagined, but intertwined economically, politically, and culturally. Moses’ staff has been stolen from Topkapi Place and a team of Ottoman janissaries is sent on a mission through Italy and England to recover it. The team is made of free and formerly enslaved men and women hailing from rising empires and those lost. Their struggles offer a searing account of the Ottoman, West and North African, and European dependence on the trade of enslaved human beings. And while the theft of the staff of Moses may seem fanciful, its possession confers imperial power and thus is the perfect object to ask from who was it truly stolen and to whom should it be returned.

Set in Delhi on the eve of the first battle for Indian independence in 1857 that would be so brutally put down by the British, ending with Delhi in flames and India coming under direct British rule, our detective, the poet laureate Mirza Ghalib investigates a murder. The investigation reveals the myriad of personalities, pressures, and allegiances from every corner of Indian and British society that led to the uprising and all that has come after. This finely wrought novel begins and ends with death at a Mushaira—a poetry recitation, public, private, or intimate for just two, that typically drew from every level of society—sounding the loss of India as it was before colonization, and then partition, when religious and social boundaries were not as starkly defined and policed as they are now.