The Gallows Pole

Lockwood, new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, takes shelter at Wuthering Heights and hears how the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw loved each other on the Yorkshire moors—until Cathy married Edgar Linton, died in childbirth, and Heathcliff’s revenge closed on the next generation at both houses. Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel is eighteenth-century gothic literary historical fiction of obsessive love, class, and a house that will not let the dead go.

After eighteen years in the Bastille, Dr Manette is restored to his daughter Lucie in London—then the French Revolution draws an exiled aristocrat, a wasted English lawyer, and the Manettes back to Paris and the shadow of the Guillotine. Dickens’s novel is historical fiction of 1775–1793 London and Paris: sacrifice, revenge, and the best and worst of times.

On Exmoor in the 1670s, yeoman’s son John Ridd sees the Doone clan kill his father, then finds a child named Lorna in their hidden valley and grows up set on winning her out of that stronghold. R. D. Blackmore’s 1869 novel is early-modern romance historical fiction of the Doone Valley, the Great Winter, and Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685—a Somerset love story against an outlaw clan the law will not touch.

A boy from India arrives in colonial Virginia—America’s earliest Asian immigrant story (SAH Prize 2025).

Thomas Cromwell rises through Tudor England’s deadly court, told in close, modern-feeling prose.

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