The Name of the Rose

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.

A Highland glen’s stories across centuries of saints, strangers, and secrets (Walter Scott Prize 2022).

A young wife in 1680s Amsterdam receives a cabinet house—and cryptic dolls that seem to know too much.

In 1893, newly widowed Cora Seaborne leaves London for the Essex marshes, where rumor of a winged serpent collides with a country vicar, a dying wife, and the new sciences of fossils and medicine. Sarah Perry’s novel is Victorian historical fiction of faith, desire, and a coastal town arguing with the modern world.

Colonel Picquart unravels the Dreyfus Affair in this tense historical thriller (Walter Scott Prize 2014).