What are some good historical fiction novels?
They may or may not be based on true events, but need to feel authentic and real to the reader.
![6a0120a7aae27b970b01b8d064b387970c-800wi[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/8JYFbS9.jpg "6a0120a7aae27b970b01b8d064b387970c-800wi[1].jpg")
>>347922
Can't top Schweik. Don't even try, you'll fail miserably.
>>347938
I remember seeing this some years ago, and it was mostly pictures. Maybe I missremember?
Is there actually good prose, or is it more like a comic book?
>>347922
Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin series is GOAT
![00-josef-lada-the-good-soldier-c5a1vejk-1920s[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/nfiyFPv.jpg "00-josef-lada-the-good-soldier-c5a1vejk-1920s[1].jpg")
>>348095
Of course it's good prose (albeit unfinished), it's just that illustrations by Josef Lada became iconic in their own way.
I Claudius by Robert Graves
>>348210
Srsly lad? So theatrical and melodramatic.
Masters of Rome by Colleen McCullough (my favorite book series, could be used as an entertaining history book due to accuracy)
The Roman by Mika Waltari (Quo Vadus BTFO)
The Egyptian by Mika Waltari (basically anything by Mika Waltari)
A few books (including a trilogy about Alexander and the Diadochi) by Mary Renault
>>347922
>What are some good historical fiction novels?
Look up Patrick O'Brian, Dudley Pope, Alexander Kent for napoleonic wars naval fiction. O'Brian in particular is so fucking good the only thing you will begrudge him is dying two chapters into the last novel.
Look up Bernard Cornwell for napoleonic wars land warfare and british dark ages fiction.
Look up Robert Harris, Robert Fabbri, Harry Sidebottom, Simon Scarrow (a bit meh) for ancient Rome fiction.
These are all series. For single novels I can suggest Luther Blisset's Q, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss (the fuck? how do you get this from L'Œuvre au noir?), Robert Graves's Belisarius and more but I can't be assed to write further.
>>349141
Don't a lot of these (especially Cornwell) force modern morals and ways of thinking onto people in history? I'd rather have a novel showing how it was. Dirty, slaveowning, daughter-selling times. Not good or bad, just how it was.
>>349170
If you don't want that, you may want to avoid Kent, Scarrow and Cornwell (tho the saxon cycle might fit your standards, it's the most "brutal" of his works). The rest is good on the subject. Also let me add Sharon Key Penman.
>>349170
Also you might like Richard Woodman, his Drinkwater novels are noticeably darker than the naval fiction genre average.
>>349170
This, so much wankery over pagan fetishism too.
>>347922
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fencing_Master
What about Sienkiewicz? Guy got a Nobel prize after all.
>>347922
Anything by Bernard Cornwell.
The Flashman Series by George MacDonald Fraser.
I like Chrisitan Camerons Chivalry series.
Dont know how accurate it is but i enjoyed them
The Chivalry series is Cameron's third historical series, also published by Orion (May 2013). Based loosely around the exploits of Sir William Gold, one of Sir John Hawkwood's lieutenant's in Italy, this series begins with Gold's life as a goldsmith's apprentice in London just after the great plague of 1347 and will continue through the Battle of Poitiers and the Savoyard Crusade, as well as the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, right through to the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, covering the history of the period—military, chivalric, and literary—in England, France, Italy, and Greece and roughly in parallel with the career of Chaucer's knight. Geoffrey Chaucer is a major character, along with John Hawkwood and Jean Le Maingre.
