Books like The Terror

01

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Alfred Lansing · History

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton led twenty-seven men into the Weddell Sea on a ship called the Endurance with the goal of crossing Antarctica on foot.

A kindred historical fiction read.

02

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

Hampton Sides · History

In 1879, the USS Jeannette sailed from San Francisco into the Arctic under the command of Lieutenant George Washington De Long, on a mission to reach the North Pole.

A kindred historical fiction read.

03

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Erik Larson · History

Dead Wake tells the story of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed the British ocean liner off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard, including 128 Americans.

A kindred historical fiction read.

04

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.

05

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy · Literary fiction

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West is set along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s and loosely follows a teenage runaway known only as the kid, who falls in with the Glanton gang — a historical band of scalp hunters hired by the Mexican government to kill Apache raiders.

A kindred historical fiction read.

06

The Fifth Season

N.K. Jemisin · Fantasy

The Fifth Season takes place on a continent called the Stillness, which is anything but: a geologically unstable supercontinent regularly devastated by "fifth seasons" — catastrophic climate events triggered by seismic activity that can last decades and kill millions.

Both dig into survival and endurance.

07

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.

08

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens · Historical fiction

A Tale of Two Cities is set against the French Revolution and follows three intertwined characters: Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his title and family legacy; Lucie Manette, the daughter of a man who spent eighteen years imprisoned in the Bastille; and Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who loves Lucie without hope and knows he will never be the man Darnay already is.

A kindred historical fiction read.

09

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.

10

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.

11

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.

12

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.