The Best Historical Fiction: What the Genre Does When It Works

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0500

In September of 1980, NBC ran a miniseries about a sixteenth-century English pilot who gets shipwrecked on the coast of Japan and spends the next several years trying to stay alive in a feudal society he doesn’t understand. My father watched the first two episodes from his La-Z-Boy and declared it confusing. I picked up the book the following week from the South Bend Public Library, a battered paperback of James Clavell’s Shogun that had clearly been through other hands, and I read all twelve hundred pages in under two weeks. I was fourteen years old.

Historical Fiction on Sunday Evening Review

The Best Historical Fiction: What the Genre Does When It Works