Traitor's Knot

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

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.

Orphaned in the Himalayan foothills and raised as a Hindu, Ashton Pelham-Martyn is later claimed by British India as an officer—then falls in love with an Indian princess promised to another man, as the Raj and the Second Anglo-Afghan War tear his loyalties in two. M. M. Kaye’s novel is Victorian historical romance of nineteenth-century India: identity, empire, and a love story on the scale of the old panoramic sagas.

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 October 1783 Ross Poldark comes back from the American war to Nampara in Cornwall and finds his father dead, the land derelict, and Elizabeth Chynoweth promised to his cousin Francis. Winston Graham’s 1945 novel is early-modern saga historical fiction of the years through 1787—a mine he fights to reopen, the bankers and gentry of Truro, and Demelza Carne, the miner’s daughter he takes in from a fair, who is his wife by the end of this first volume.

Wounded Confederate soldier Inman walks home across North Carolina toward Ada, who is learning to keep a mountain farm alive as the Civil War wrecks the Blue Ridge. Frazier’s National Book Award winner is Civil War historical fiction of desertion, survival, and a love story paced to the land.