New Historical Fiction To Read in 2025

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all. Discover the extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

A groundbreaking trans Regency romance that’s both delightfully witty and refreshingly iconoclastic. With its heady combination of dry wit, slow-burn romance, and a nuanced portrait of trans identity, A Gentleman’s Gentleman stands to transform the historical romance genre as we know it.

An immersive, sultry, heart-pounding historical reimagining of the Robin Hood ballads, told through the piercing eyes of one of his spies.

Set on Ireland’s west coast in the 1970s and 80s, this captivating debut novel is about a baby boy who is discovered on the beach beside a small fishing town, as told by the locals who fall under the boy’s transfixing spell.

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize captures a time of dizzying global change. At the turn of the 21st century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world,  each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.

The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom. In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.

A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel. Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape up and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

Danielle Steel delivers an exciting and moving historical novel about a courageous wife and mother hiding in occupied France. In Far From Home, Danielle Steel captures the devastation of World War II with a sweeping story of family love that transcends impossible odds.

A prismatic, mind-bending epic about the splintering of a family into different worlds. The violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family. Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing is a singular work that explores how — amid profound loss and the madness of grief — ghosts are made momentarily real.

A gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town. Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting — enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been — and what still could be.

Much like Lee Chang-dong’s internationally renowned films (Burning, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry), these brilliant, unsettling tales, originally published in Korea in the 1980s and now translated into English for the first time, investigate themes of injustice, betrayal, and terror — on both an intimate and national scale. Lee writes deeply and hauntingly about conflicts between family, the powerful and the vulnerable, conformists and rebels.

A sweeping historical novel in the vein of Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell set during the time of the Tudors’ ascent. The Pretender tells the story of Lambert Simnel, who was raised in obscurity as a peasant boy to protect his safety, believed to be the heir to the throne occupied by Richard III, and briefly crowned, at the age of ten, as King Edward VI, one of the last of the Plantagenets.

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this breathtaking saga, an epic story of love, faith, and defiance. Inspired by the real life of a 16th-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name Is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.

A thrilling reimagining of the world of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of the infamous Jacob Fagin, London’s most gifted pickpocket, liar, and rogue. Colorfully written and wickedly funny, Allison Epstein breathes fresh life into the teeming streets of Dickensian London — reclaiming one of Victorian literature’s most notorious villains in an unforgettable new adventure.

Two sisters living on Martha’s Vineyard during World War II find hope in the power of storytelling when they start a wartime book club for women — a spectacular novel inspired by true events.

In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger. A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.

1956, Malibu, California: With her name on the Hollywood blacklist and her life on hold, starlet Melanie Cole has little choice in company. There is her next-door neighbor, Elwood, but the screenwriter’s agoraphobia allows for just short chats. Then one early morning Melanie spots Elwood’s sister-in-law and caretaker, June, digging in his beloved rose garden. After that she doesn’t see Elwood at all anymore. Where could a man who never leaves the house possibly have gone? Something is not right on Paradise Circle …

Following the unlikely friendship of four women in the first female class at Oxford, their unshakeable bond in the face of male contempt, and in their coming of age in a world forever changed by World War I, a captivating debut about sisterhood, determination, and courage.

A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms.

Shiv Advani is an 18-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their laws, and then return home and help drive the British out of India. But as anyone who has ever lived in a British colony can tell you, “the English problem” is multifaceted. Soon the people Shiv sought to be liberated from will be the people he desperately wants to be a part of.