The Ten Thousand Things

In eleventh-century Persia a judge who might punish Omar Khayyam for his verses gives him a blank book instead, and the Rubaiyat crosses the Seljuk court, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, and Hassan-i Sabbah’s fortress at Alamut. Amin Maalouf’s 1988 novel (English translation) is medieval biographical historical fiction of that manuscript, taken up again in the 1890s by an American who carries it toward the Titanic.

In the ninth century, a canon’s daughter hides her sex, takes her dead brother’s name, and rises from a Fulda monastery to Rome as scholar, healer, and—according to the legend—pope. Donna Woolfolk Cross’s international bestseller is medieval biographical historical fiction of learning, disguise, and a woman the church spent a thousand years denying.

Marie de France is sent to a failing English abbey—and remakes it into a kingdom of women.

At the Heian court, the emperor’s son Genji is too loved to be left a prince in the line of succession and too restless to stay clear of love or politics, and the tale follows him through poems, rooms, and exile. Murasaki Shikibu’s early-eleventh-century novel, read in English in Royall Tyler’s translation, is medieval literary historical fiction of that shining prince and of the women and the next generation the story keeps after he is gone.

The ‘fool’ Claudius narrates the murderous intrigue of Rome’s first emperors.

The plague, a marriage, and the death of Shakespeare’s son—told with intimate, luminous focus.