Trending YA Historical Fiction Books

Of Mice and Men (Released: January 1937)

Author(s): John Steinbeck

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 3.80 (1558 Ratings, 85 Reviews)

Pages: 162

The tragic story of George and Lennie, who move from one farm to another, looking for work. George is clever but Lennie's size and slowness is always getting him into trouble. One day the two men get a job on a farm. Things are going well until they meet Curley, the farm foreman and his unhappy wife.

Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, General, Comics, Literature, Historical Fiction, Friendship, Literary Fiction, American literature, California

The Kite Runner (Released: January 1969)

Author(s): Khaled Hosseini

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 4.16 (1036 Ratings, 65 Reviews)

Pages: 401

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies. Since its publication in 2003 Kite Runner has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic of contemporary literature, touching millions of readers, and launching the career of one of America's most treasured writers.

Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult, General, Comics, War, Literature, History, Historical Fiction, Friendship, Performing Arts

The Count of Monte Cristo (Released: January 1830)

Author(s): Alexandre Dumas, David Case (Narrator), Robin Buss (Translator/Editor)

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 4.32 (759 Ratings, 51 Reviews)

Pages: 1276

The original revenge story, The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure story set in France and Italy. The story commences just before the Hundred Days of Napoleon and continues on to the reign of King Louis-Philippe. Edmond Dantes, a young merchant sailor is falsely accused of being a Bonapartiste and imprisoned on an island. It takes 14 years for Dantes to escape, during which he befriends an ageing fellow prisoner who bequeaths him a fortune hidden in a cave on an Italian island. With this fortune Dantes reinvents himself as the Count of the title and returns to France to seek revenge against the men who ruined his life.

Genre(s): Adventure, Fiction, Mystery, General, Comics, History, Historical Fiction, Friendship, French fiction, Classical fiction

All the Light We Cannot See (Released: January 2014)

Author(s): Anthony Doerr

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 4.20 (775 Ratings, 115 Reviews)

Pages: 544

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction, War, General, History, Classics, Friendship, Young Adult, Adventure

All Quiet on the Western Front (Released: January 1928)

Author(s): Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Wesley Wheen (Translator)

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 4.12 (458 Ratings, 37 Reviews)

Pages: 295

Paul Baumer enlisted with his classmates in the German army of World War I. Youthful and enthusiastic, they become soldiers. But despite what they have learned, they break into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. And as horrible war plods on year after year, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principles of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against each other - if only he can come out of the war alive.

Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, War, Young Adult, Comics, War stories, History, Historical Fiction, World War, Adventure

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Released: January 2006)

Author(s): John Boyne

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 3.82 (386 Ratings, 26 Reviews)

Pages: 215

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne.

Genre(s): Young Adult, Fiction, History, Historical Fiction, Friendship, Religion, Juvenile Nonfiction, Adventure and adventurers, Foreign Language Study, Concentration camps

Water for Elephants (Released: May 2006)

Author(s): Sara Gruen, John Randolph Jones (Narrator), David LeDoux (Narrator)

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 3.89 (435 Ratings, 38 Reviews)

Pages: None

None

Genre(s): Young Adult, Adventure, Classics, Historical Fiction

Things Fall Apart (Released: January 1958)

Author(s): Chinua Achebe, Biyi Bandele (Introduction)

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 3.63 (343 Ratings, 37 Reviews)

Pages: 185

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. The novel was first published in the UK in 1962 by William Heinemann Ltd, and became the first work published in Heinemann's African Writers Series. The novel follows the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo ("Ibo" in the novel) man and local wrestling champion in the fictional Nigerian clan of Umuofia. The work is split into three parts, with the first describing his family, personal history, and the customs and society of the Igbo, and the second and third sections introducing the influence of European colonialism and Christian missionaries on Okonkwo, his family, and the wider Igbo community. Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work along with Arrow of God (1964). Achebe states that his two later novels A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), while not featuring Okonkwo's descendants, are spiritual successors to the previous novels in chronicling African history.

Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, General, History, Historical Fiction, Religion, Nigerian fiction (English), Africa, Magical Realism, Folklore

The Joy Luck Club (Released: January 1989)

Author(s): Amy Tan

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 3.83 (284 Ratings, 16 Reviews)

Pages: 289

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, War, Literature, Historical Fiction, Women, China, literary criticism, Young Adult, Foreign Language Study

The Pearl (Released: January 1945)

Author(s): John Steinbeck

Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover

Rating: 3.37 (227 Ratings, 14 Reviews)

Pages: 90

John Steinbeck's The Pearl, first published in 1947, follows a pearl diver, Kino, and explores man’s purpose as well as greed, defiance of societal norms, and evil.

Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, Young Adult, Adventure, General, Historical Fiction, Antiques & Collectibles