Few writers have left a mark on English fiction as deep or as lasting as Daphne du Maurier. Her novels are atmospheric, psychologically unsettling, and utterly gripping, mixing gothic suspense with rich historical settings and an uncanny feeling that something dark lies just beneath the surface of respectable life. Rebecca alone has never been out…

If you have ever wished a novel could show you an entire civilisation from birth to the present day, Edward Rutherfurd writes exactly that. His books are enormous, ambitious, and unlike almost anything else in historical fiction. Each one takes a single place, invents four to six families, and follows their descendants across centuries, sometimes…

Few Victorian mystery series have matched the staying power of Anne Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels. Thirty-two books spanning nearly four decades, all set in the fog-drenched streets and drawing rooms of late nineteenth-century London. This is a series built on an irresistible premise: a working-class police inspector and his upper-class wife, navigating murder,…

Anne Perry spent more than four decades writing some of the most meticulously observed Victorian mysteries, building a body of work that tops 100 novels and making her one of the most prolific crime writers of the twentieth century. Her two flagship series, following Inspector Thomas Pitt and amnesiac detective William Monk, transformed the Victorian…

Colleen McCullough spent seventeen years and seven novels recreating the fall of the Roman Republic in one of the most ambitious works of historical fiction ever written. The Masters of Rome series is enormous in every sense: in scope, in research, in page count, and in the sheer scale of its historical vision. It covers…

Diana Gabaldon created one of the most remarkable phenomena in modern publishing when she sat down in 1988 with no intention of showing her writing to anyone. What began as a private experiment became Outlander, a genre-defying saga that has now sold more than 50 million copies in 38 languages across 114 countries. She is…