The Far Pavilions

An Irish immigrant and his partner fight in the Indian Wars and Civil War (Walter Scott Prize 2017).

Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman working in Malaya when the Japanese invade, is marched for months with a party of women and children, and an Australian prisoner, Joe Harman, is punished for helping them. Nevil Shute’s 1950 novel is World War II romance historical fiction of the years after—an inheritance in 1948, the news that Joe survived, and the outback settlement she sets out to turn into a town like Alice Springs.

In the 1890s, Nancy Astley leaves the oyster parlour in Whitstable after she falls in love with the male impersonator Kitty Butler and follows her onto the London music halls. Sarah Waters’s 1998 novel is Victorian romance historical fiction of the life Nan builds when that affair breaks—under a man’s name on the streets, in a rich woman’s house in St John’s Wood, and in an East End household that asks something else of her.

In 1882, before his regiment sails with Lord Wolseley’s expedition, Harry Feversham resigns his commission and is given three white feathers by his brother officers; at a dance in Ramelton, Ethne Eustace breaks a fourth from her fan. A. E. W. Mason’s 1902 novel is Victorian adventure historical fiction of the years he then spends disguised in Egypt and the Sudan, trying to win the feathers back in the Mahdist war.

In 1839 Harry Flashman is expelled from Rugby, commissioned into Lord Cardigan's 11th Light Dragoons, and posted on through India to Afghanistan. George MacDonald Fraser's 1969 novel is Victorian military historical fiction of the years that follow—the Retreat from Kabul, the last stand at Gandamak, and the Siege of Jalalabad—told by a coward the army takes for a hero.

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