Books like A Tale of Two Cities

01

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens · Classics

Great Expectations follows Pip, an orphan boy on the Kent marshes who is yanked from modest obscurity into the orbit of wealth and social aspiration when an anonymous benefactor funds his move to London.

A kindred historical fiction read.

02

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · Classics

David Copperfield is the novel Dickens called his "favourite child" — a first-person bildungsroman that tracks David from a motherless childhood in Suffolk through blacking-factory misery (barely disguised autobiography), education, early work in London, two marriages, and eventual literary success.

A kindred historical fiction read.

03

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · History

All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists with his classmates during the First World War after being swept up in patriotic speeches.

A kindred historical fiction read.

04

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · Memoir

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

A kindred historical fiction read.

05

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien · Memoir

Tim O'Brien served as a foot soldier in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970.

A kindred historical fiction read.

06

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles · Historical fiction

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal — not to death, but to permanent house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel.

A kindred historical fiction read.

07

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · Historical fiction

A Thousand Splendid Suns follows two Afghan women across nearly forty years of their country's turbulence: Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy merchant who is married off at fifteen to a much older man in Kabul, and Laila, a young woman from a different generation whose family is destroyed in a rocket strike during the civil war and who is subsequently forced into the same household.

A kindred historical fiction read.

08

Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood · Historical fiction

Alias Grace is based on the historical case of Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant servant who was convicted in 1843, along with stable hand James McDermott, of the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada.

A kindred historical fiction read.

09

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · Historical fiction

All the Light We Cannot See follows two children through the Second World War on a collision course neither can see coming.

A kindred historical fiction read.

10

Babel

R.F. Kuang · Historical fiction

Set in an alternate 1830s Oxford, Babel imagines a Royal Institute of Translation at the heart of the British Empire — a place where silver bars engraved with translation "match-words" generate the industrial magic that powers British supremacy.

A kindred historical fiction read.

11

Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel · Historical fiction

Bring Up the Bodies is the second novel in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, picking up where Wolf Hall ended: Anne Boleyn is Queen, Henry VIII is restless, and Thomas Cromwell is the indispensable minister who keeps the machinery of the court running.

A kindred historical fiction read.

12

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · Historical fiction

Half of a Yellow Sun is set before and during the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967 to 1970, a conflict in which more than a million people died, most of them Igbo civilians from the secessionist Republic of Biafra.

A kindred historical fiction read.