The Count of Monte Cristo

In 1815, convict Jean Valjean is released from the galleys and tries to live honestly under a stolen name, while Inspector Javert hunts him through Restoration and July-Monarchy France. Hugo’s novel follows Fantine, Cosette, Marius, and the 1832 Paris barricades—crime, mercy, and a social epic that still defines French historical fiction after Waterloo.

In Brittany on the eve of the Revolution, lawyer André-Louis Moreau watches a marquis kill his closest friend, then goes from a Rennes courtroom to a traveling theater—where he plays the clown Scaramouche—and on to a Paris fencing hall as France turns on its nobles. Rafael Sabatini’s 1921 novel is French Revolution historical adventure of disguise, the sword, and a man born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

In 1799, Dutch clerk Jacob de Zoet arrives on Dejima, the fan-shaped island that is Japan’s only window to the West, to make a fortune and sail home—until the midwife Orito Aibagawa, a magistrate’s bargain, and a mountain nunnery’s secrets pull him into the closed country’s dangers. David Mitchell’s 2010 novel is Napoleonic-era historical fiction of translation, love, and power at the edge of the shogunate, longlisted for the Booker Prize.

In 1830 on Faith Plantation in Barbados, eleven-year-old George Washington Black is taken from the cane fields to serve Christopher “Titch” Wilde, who is building a hydrogen balloon he calls the Cloud-cutter—and when a death puts a bounty on Wash, the two cut the tether and flee. Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel is adventure historical fiction of the 1830s, from an enslaved boy’s escape out of Barbados through Virginia, the Arctic, Nova Scotia, London, and Morocco.

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.

Five Russian families move through court, love, and the Napoleonic invasion as 1805 becomes Borodino and Moscow burns. Tolstoy’s epic is Napoleonic historical fiction on a national scale—ballrooms and battlefields, Pierre and Natasha, and the question of who makes history.