The body at the tower

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.

In nine snowy days of 1591, Black comes home to Istanbul and finds the Sultan’s miniaturists split over a secret book that would paint faces the Frankish way; Elegant has already been killed, and the corpse, a dog, a gold coin, and the color red take turns naming the murderer. Orhan Pamuk’s 1998 novel (English translation 2001) is early-modern mystery historical fiction of Ottoman book art, heresy, and a workshop that may go blind before it tells the truth.

In 1663 Oxford, just after Charles II’s return, fellow Robert Grove is found dead at New College and the servant Sarah Blundy is accused of poisoning him. Iain Pears’s 1997 novel is early-modern mystery historical fiction of four witnesses who will not agree—a Venetian visitor, a dispossessed student, the mathematician John Wallis, and the antiquary Anthony Wood—each telling a Restoration in which the murder is also a political plot.

A young American nurse serves in Vietnam and struggles to be seen when she comes home.

A girl steals books in Nazi Germany; Death narrates a story of words and survival.

Linked stories follow two half-sisters’ lineages across centuries of African and American history.