We asked five well-loved authors to each suggest a couple of books they recommend for history lovers to enjoy reading over the summer.
Their choices include novels about the eve of the Roman Conquest and the eve of the Norman one; non-fiction about the long history of Black people in Britain and the island’s first King; and sweep across time and space from the steppes during the Mongol period to the Arctic Circle in the 19th century via 17th-century Italy and a sweltering Georgian summer in London. There’s humour, love, mysticism and murder.
We hope you get some good summer reading ideas from our suggestions.
Tony Bradman
I have fond memories of afternoons spent reading during the school summer holidays, and I’m recommending a couple of books that I wish had been available when I was a lad.
The first is Kata and Tor by the brilliant, Carnegie-winning, Kevin Crossley-Holland, a story of star-crossed love between a Viking boy and and an Anglo-Saxon girl set in 1066. I’ve written a 1066 novel myself, so I know just how hard it is to manage all those larger-than-life real characters and fit them into a gripping plot. Crossley-Holland is one of our best writers and pulls it off with aplomb, the personal and political storylines clear against the historical background, and all expressed in beautiful prose. A real treat for readers of any age over 11.
My second choice is a non-fiction title by David Olusoga, who a few years ago wrote a children’s version of his wonderful book Black and British — a short, essential history, exploring the diverse and multicultural strand in British life that was mostly ignored until recent years. Olusoga is a master of his subject and a great storyteller, and children over nine will find it utterly absorbing. Their parents might learn a lot from it, too.
Tony Bradman has been writing children’s books for longer than he can remember, and these days mostly writes historical fiction, including Viking Boy, Anglo-Saxon Boy (winner of a Young Quills Award from the Historical Association), and Roman Boy, published in July, 2024, with Greek Boy scheduled to appear in 2026. He’s currently working on a new series set in the Second World War.
Angus Donald
The Savage Isle by Michael Arnold: I’ve read plenty of Roman novels and plenty of novels about Romans in Britain, but what makes The Savage Isle unique and rather wonderful is that this takes place in a Britain on the eve the Roman invasion. The legions are poised, just over the Channel, like the Sword of Damocles, and their influence is already pervasive and corrupting. It’s a period about which little is known but Michael Arnold wields his powerful imagination to give us a British society of petty kings and strutting warriors, deep, dark wolf-infested forests and mystical druids; warring tribes and weird, blood-soaked religious rites. Poetic writing combined with authentic, investable characters and a bizarre but utterly believable Celtic backdrop. It’s a terrific summer read.
The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford: Jack Weatherford was responsible for rehabilitating the Mongols for the 21st century with his superb book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. No longer inhuman butchers, he showed us a disciplined steppe society that was surprisingly tolerant of different religions, advanced in communications and battle tactics, and no more bloodthirsty than other medieval cultures. In The Mongol Queens, he demonstrates that women had far more power to shape events than we might imagine. The daughters of Genghis Khan ruled the largest empire the world has ever known, keeping the peace, fostering trade and supporting education from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. These women were later erased from history and even their names have been forgotten. This fascinating book restores them to their rightful place.
Angus Donald has seen some of the scarier parts of the world as an anthropologist and journalist but now puts his characters in danger instead. He’s the author of the Outlaw Chronicles, the Holcroft Blood trilogy and the Fire Born novels. Templar Traitor, the first in his new Mongol Knight series, is out on 28 August, 2025. He’s writing Historia a feature about the strange true story behind his book.
Elizabeth Fremantle
The Pretender by Jo Harkin is a wonderfully immersive exploration of the life of Lambert Simnel, a boy who was championed by some as a pretender to Henry VII’s throne. Despite much of Simnel’s story being drawn from historical record it is a tale that seems too fantastical to have happened, yet it did. Harkin gives it a bawdy carnivalesque treatment that brings the medieval world into life with astonishing vibrancy, at times hilarious, often deeply touching, occasionally shocking – always captivating.
Queen James: the Lives and Loves of Britain’s First King is Gareth Russell‘s long-overdue examination into the life of James I and VI, which, importantly, doesn’t skirt shyly around the monarch’s bisexuality. Russell demonstrates how considering James’s sexuality is integral to understanding how he wielded political power. With exhaustive attention to detail and a lack of prurience, Queen James probes the political and the personal, giving a portrait of a young man raised to power in brutal times. Utterly compelling.
Elizabeth Fremantle, a former journalist, is the author of a number of novels set in the Tudor and Stuart periods. They were followed by Disobedient, about the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, which won the HWA Gold Crown in 2024. Her latest novel, Sinners, based on the life of Beatrice Cenci, published on 3 July, 2025.
Rachel Hore
Set in the 19th-century Arctic Circle, The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen is an epic love story between a young reindeer-herder and a minister’s daughter. The way the novel conveys the ancient timelessness of the herders’ way of life, threatened by encounters with the Lutheran village dwellers, and the demands of national politics, is masterly. Comparisons with Cold Mountain and The Great Circle are not unwarranted.
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie is beautifully, yet simply, written. It’s inspired by the real-life meeting between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe at the window of the former’s anchorite cell in about 1413 and imagines the lives of both these women. I loved the author’s convincing recreation of the voices and mindsets of these two very different mediaeval mystics, drawn together by their religious experiences.
Rachel Hore is the Sunday Times-bestselling author of 13 novels. Her 14th, The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge, is published on 31 July, 2025. She was an editor at HarperCollins in London, but now lives in Norwich where she taught Publishing and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia until 2019.
Susan Stokes-Chapman
The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson: This is one delicious romp of cat-and-mouse set in a sweltering summertime Georgian London — it has sensuous plotting, memorable characters, and will have you hankering for pineapple ice cream!
A Poisoner’s Tale by Cathryn Kemp: a fierce reimagining of the 17th-century Italian poisoner Giulia Tofana, it is a vividly wrought and poignant story which celebrates sisterhood, rebellion, and the power of women who dare to defy society.
Susan Stokes-Chapman‘s debut novel, Pandora, was published in January, 2022, becoming an instant number one Sunday Times bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award 2023, and, in 2020, for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award. Her second novel, The Shadow Key, was released in the UK in April, 2024, with the paperback on 13 February, 2025.
I hope you’ve enjoyed our summer reading suggestions and have found some books you’d like to read — or give the children for those rainy afternoons.
For more historical fiction and non-fiction reading inspiration, have a look at our round-up of historical books published in 2025. And come back again in December, when we’ll have our annual Christmas books feature.
Image:
Ein Nachmittag in den Dünen (An Afternoon in the Dunes) by Hermann Seeger (detail): Wikimedia (public domain)
