The East Indian

Linked stories follow two half-sisters’ lineages across centuries of African and American history.

In 1547, during the Rough Wooing, Francis Crawford of Lymond comes back to Scotland an outlaw accused of treason, with the English army already in the kingdom and his brother Richard still at Culter. Dorothy Dunnett’s 1961 novel is early-modern adventure historical fiction of the double game he plays from the Borders to Edinburgh, and of the trial that has to name what he has actually been doing.

In 1640s Boston, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet A after bearing a child out of wedlock, while the town’s beloved minister hides his share of the secret and her long-lost husband returns under a new name to hunt the father. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is Puritan historical fiction of shame, hypocrisy, and a woman who will not name her lover—the American classic readers still search by title.

Coin-clippers in 18th-century Yorkshire defy king and crown (Walter Scott Prize 2018).

An English pilot is shipwrecked into the deadly politics of feudal Japan.

A WWII nurse walks through standing stones into Jacobite Scotland—and a complicated love story.