My Favorite Historical Novels...Maybe Ever

When I think of the historical fiction novels I've read, three jump to the top as my all-time faves:

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Dancer by Colum McCann

The Women by Kristin Hannah

Why are they so great?

All the Light We Cannot See is a gorgeously written story of two teens during WWII, and can be categorized as a cross-over YA and adult novel. The protagonists are a blind girl in France and a young Nazi radio operator in Germany. The prose is lyrical, and the story explores what the author described as complicated moral decisions. It's these types of conflicts, the ones with no clear right answer, that make a story compelling and leave you thinking about them for years afterward. Not to mention the descriptive prose that still conjures memories of the images it painted in my mind even decades later.

Dancer is perhaps the most debatable of my favorites here. It's full of lengthy, descriptive passages that I found beautiful and thought-provoking, if protracted. It is the story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev who started with nothing and became the most famous male ballet dancer of the 20th century. The numerous point-of-view characters, from doormen to dance teachers to famous performers, give varied insight not only into the life of Nureyev but also to the time and place that made him. I would argue, also, that those punctuation-free paragraphs create a sense of dancing through the text and an experience of the senses that lends itself to free-form, stream-of-consciousness writing.

The Women was inspired by the experiences of the women who worked as nurses in the Vietnam War. These women, like male Vietnam veterans, endured an atrocious reception upon returning to the United States and a difficult readjustment to civilian life. The writing style of this novel is more straightforward than the other two on my list, perhaps appropriate to the style of the time in history and the military characters. Like the other two, it places you deeply in the time, place, and (conscience) of the characters, and I found myself texting friends and family when the plot took surprising twists.

Now that I'm thinking about these, other powerful historical fiction comes to mind, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried...but I'll stop here.

What are your favorite historical novels? I'd love to add them to my To-Be-Read list!