18th Century Historic Fiction
Explore the best 18th century historic fiction books! Dive into captivating tales of love, war, and adventure set in the 1700s. Discover classic and lesser-known gems now.
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The Scandal of the Season
by Sophie Gee
Sexy and audacious, this irresistible debut novel reconstructs the real-life scandal that inspired Alexander Popes famous and bestselling poem, The Rape of the Lock.
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Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His study leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition featuring a new foreword by Russell Banks. Tappan Wilder has written an engaging and thought-provoking afterword, which includes unpublished notes for the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, illuminating photographs, and other remarkable documentary material. Granville Hicks's insightful comment about Wilder suggests an inveterate truth: "As a craftsman he is second to none, and there are few who have looked deeper into the human heart."
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Doña Inés Vs. Oblivion
by Ana Teresa Torres
Winner of the Pegasus Prize for International Literature, this novel tells the history of a bitter family dispute, beginning in 18th century Caracas and spanning nearly two centuries. Translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.
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Rob Roy
by Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott—who invented the historical novel—is still the writer to whom we turn when we seek the undiluted pleasures of narrative romance. His Rob Roy (1817) is a rousing tale of skulduggery and highway robbery, villainy and nobility, treasonous plots and dramatic escapes—and young love. From London to the North of England to the Scottish Highlands, it follows the unjustly banished young merchant's son Francis as he strives to out-maneuver the unscrupulous adventurer plotting to destroy him—and allies himself with the cunning, dangerous, and dashing outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor in a heroic effort to regain his rightful place and win the hand of the girl he loves. (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
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The Nature of Monsters
by Clare Clark
Following her successful debut of "The Great Stink"--a "New York Times" Editors' Choice selection--Clark has created another transporting novel with exquisite prose, dark humor, and a historian's eye for detail.
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Waverley
by Walter Scott
Romantic young English captain in Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745 strives for love, harmony, and peace.
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The Thief Taker
by Janet Gleeson
In the cellar there was no sound at all except her own breathing and the soft rustle of her skirts. After her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, she noticed a niche in the wall a yard from where she stood. She saw something there about the size of her fist. Agnes quietly picked it up. It was wrapped in a cloth and surprisingly heavy. . . a pistol, the hilt filthy with mud and dirt. Suddenly she heard the chinking sound of glasses nearby. There was no mistaking the voices now. Before she had time to call out, another door creaked open and the pair emerged from the darkness. Agnes Meadowes is cook to the Blanchards of Foster Lane, the renowned London silversmiths. Preparing jugged hare, oyster loaves, almond soup, and other delicacies for the family has given her a dependable life for herself and her son. But when the Blanchards' most prestigious commission, a giant silver wine cooler, is stolen and a young apprentice murdered, Theodore Blanchard calls on Agnes to investigate below stairs. Soon she is inside the sordid underworld of London crime, where learning the truth comes at a high price.
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Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
by Diana Gabaldon
From the exquisitely talented and award-winning author of the Outlander saga comes this latest addition as Lord John Grey, an 18th-century Englishman, pursues a deadly family secret as well as a clandestine love affair.
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The Chess Machine
by Robert Löhr
Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen dazzles the public with the "creation" of an automated chess-playing machine that is secretly operated from within by an outcast Italian dwarf, until the mysterious death of a seductive countess places the machine under suspicion.
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The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B
by Sandra Gulland
Passion intertwines with fate in this riveting and historically rich novel about the journey of a woman from poverty to ultimate power in Revolution-era France. In this first of three books inspired by the life of Josephine Bonaparte, Sandra Gulland has created a novel of immense and magical proportions. We meet Josephine in the exotic and lush Martinico, where an old island woman predicts that one day she will be queen. The journey from the remote village of her birth to the height of European elegance is long, but Josephine's fortune proves to be true. By way of fictionalized diary entries, we traverse her early years as she marries her one true love, bears his children, and is left betrayed, widowed, and penniless. It is Josephine's extraordinary charm, cunning, and will to survive that catapults her to the heart of society, where she meets Napoleon, whose destiny will prove to be irrevocably intertwined with hers.
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The Serpent in the Garden
by Janet Gleeson
A wedding day murder leads to a commissioned portrait painter fighting to defend his reputation in this historical mystery filled with greed and revenge from bestselling author Janet Gleeson. She opened the shagreen box. Couched in gray silk was an emerald necklace, one he had not seen for twenty years. The stones were just as he recalled them: a dozen or more, baguette cut and set in gold links, with a single ruby at the center. Flashes of verdigris, orpiment, and Prussian blue sparkled in the candlelight. The form of this necklace was as disturbing as ever. It had nearly cost him his life. It is the summer of 1765. The renowned and exquisitely dressed portrait painter Joshua Pope accepts a commission to paint the wedding portrait of Herbert Bentnick and his fiancée, Sabine Mercer, to whom Bentnick has become engaged less than a year after the death of his first wife. Joshua has barely begun the portrait when a man's body is found in the conservatory. A few days later, Sabine's emerald necklace disappears, and Bentnick accuses Joshua of theft. The painter is suddenly fighting not only for his reputation, but for his life. With a sure understanding of period detail and character, Janet Gleeson creates a richly nuanced tale of greed and revenge that plays out in the refined landscapes and dark streets of eighteenth-century London.
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Lucia
by Andrea Di Robilant
The world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Venice is revealed through the life of Lucia Mocenigo and her letters to her sister as she details the milieu of the Venetian aristocracy, the fall of Venice to Napoleon, her relationship with the Empress Josephine, affair with an Austrian officer, and firsthand account of the 1814 defeat of Bonaparte in Paris. 50,000 first printing.
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Demelza
by Winston Graham
Set in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, this novel is part of the Poldark saga. At the heart of the novel stand Demelza and Ross Poldark, their son, Jeremy, their daughter, Clowance, and the rival family, the Warleggans.
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The Angry Tide
by Winston Graham
Ross Poldark sits for the borough of Truro as Member of Parliament - his time divided between London and Cornwall, his heart divided still about his wife, Demelza. His old feud with George Warleggan still flares, as does the illicit love between Morwenna and Drake, Demelza's brother.
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Jeremy Poldark
by Winston Graham
Set in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, this novel is part of the Poldark saga. At the heart of the novel stand Demelza and Ross Poldark, their son, Jeremy, their daughter, Clowance, and the rival family, the Warleggans.
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Warleggan
by Winston Graham
Set in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, this novel is part of the Poldark saga. At the heart of the novel stand Demelza and Ross Poldark, their son, Jeremy, their daughter, Clowance, and the rival family, the Warleggans.
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The Black Moon
by Winston Graham
The birth of a son to Elizabeth and George Warleggan serves only to accentuate the rift between the Poldark and Warleggan families, and the enduring rivalry between George and Ross finds a new focus for bitter enmity and conflict.
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The Four Swans
by Winston Graham
Set in the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, this novel is part of the Poldark saga. At the heart of the novel stand Demelza and Ross Poldark, their son, Jeremy, their daughter, Clowance, and the rival family, the Warleggans.
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Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe
by Sandra Gulland
In the second novel in the acclaimed Josephine B. Trilogy, Sandra Gulland offers a sweeping yet intimate portrayal of the political and personal struggles of the wife of the most powerful man in the world. Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe is the much-awaited sequel to Sandra Gulland's highly acclaimed first novel, The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. Beginning in Paris in 1796, the saga continues as Josephine awakens to her new life as Mrs. Napoleon Bonaparte. Through her intimate diary entries and Napoleon's impassioned love letters, an astonishing portrait of an incredible woman emerges. Gulland transports us into the ballrooms and bedrooms of exquisite palaces and onto the blood-soaked fields of Napoleon's campaigns. As Napoleon marches to power, we witness, through Josephine, the political intrigues and personal betrayals -- both sexual and psychological -- that result in death, ruin, and victory for those closest to her.
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The Last Great Dance on Earth
by Sandra Gulland
The Last Great Dance on Earth is the triumphant final volume of Sandra Gulland's beloved trilogy based on the life of Josephine Bonaparte. When the novel opens, Josephine and Napoleon have been married for four tumultuous years. Napoleon is Josephine's great love, and she his. But their passionate union is troubled from within, as Josephine is unable to produce an heir, and from without, as England makes war against France and Napoleon's Corsican clan makes war against his wife. Through Josephine's heartfelt diary entries, we witness the personal betrayals and political intrigues that will finally drive them apart, culminating in Josephine's greatest tragedy: her divorce from Napoleon and his exile to Elba. The Last Great Dance on Earth is historical fiction on a grand scale and the stirring conclusion to an unforgettable love story.
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Master and Commander (Vol. Book 1) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)
by Patrick O'Brian
The beginning of the sweeping Aubrey-Maturin series. "The best sea story I have ever read."—Sir Francis Chichester This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.