Your Favorite Historical Fiction Novels

[Kraxis]

I think I'm going to add a couple of... let us just call them interesting, writers.

Sven Hazel's books. Historical? Hardly, but they have an interesting setting and they can be pretty nasty.

Even 'worse' are the books of Leo Kessler. They are enjoyable to a great extent, if you can ignore his obsession with women, and the male interaction they sometimes have.

I guess both could be called good books for 13-14 year olds, but I found them quite enjoyable even now. I guess I'm trying to be more of a devil's advocate here.

[phred]

Dorothy Dunnet's Lymond series is a lot of fun.
It takes place in the 1500s and follows her character Francis Crawford through Scotland, France (court of Henry II?), Malta, Istanbul, Moscow and a few points in between.

It starts with "The Game of Kings"

[King Henry V]

Oh my mum is a huge fan of the Lymond saga. She tried to make me read it once, but I found it very heavy going and I switched off after page 20.

[phred]

Oh my mum is a huge fan of the Lymond saga. She tried to make me read it once, but I found it very heavy going and I switched off after page 20.

Yeah, that first book is hard to get into.
It starts in medias res and you really don't know what's going on until near the end of the book. The payoff is nice, and once you've read the first book, the others are a breeze.

[Rufus]

In my opinion, you probably won't find a better historical fiction writer for medieval England than Sharon Kay Penman. Her Sunne in Splendour, about the later War of the Roses and a unique take on Richard III, is long but a fantastic epic. There's also her trilogy about England and Wales in the 13th Century - Here Be Dragons (mainly about Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, aka Llewelyn the Great), Falls the Shadow (about Simon de Montfort) and The Reckoning (about Llewelyn ap Gryffydd, aka Llewelyn the Last, and Edward I). And she's two books through a trilogy about the start of the Plantagenet dynasty; the first two were While Christ and His Saints Slept (about the civil war between Stephen and Maude) and Time and Chance (about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine). My favorite is probably Sunne in Splendour, followed by Falls the Shadow and Time and Chance.

She also has a mystery series set in the reign of Richard the Lionheart; they're a nice quick read but not as good as her epic novels. She's better as a standard novelist, I think, than a mystery writer. Her mysteries are entertaining but more as historical novels than mysteries; a bit predictable, oftentimes ...