The Most Anticipated Historical Fiction of 2026

We all know what happened to Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. But what if she woke up the day after her execution and took it upon herself to seek justice? A fantastical journey through the wilds of England and Tudor history, filled with danger and magic and steeped in Arthurian legend, The Beheading Game is a prescient reminder that “mouthy” women have always been punished. Now, thanks to debut novelist Rebecca Lehmann, nearly five hundred years after Anne Boleyn’s death, one of history’s most maligned women finally has the chance to tell her story.

The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time.

A woman’s desperate flight from an Apache raid unfolds into a sweeping tale of the Mexico-U.S. border wars. Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, Now I Surrender radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.” Part epic, part alt-Western, Now I Surrender Is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.

From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, a rousing novel that follows two young women fleeing a divided America: One running toward a dazzling future and the other running from a troubled past. Exuberant and riveting, a sly commentary on truth and beauty and fulfillment that resonates with our times, Lidie delivers a panoramic portrait of a volatile era and the headstrong women trying to live an honest life in it.

A sweeping novel of siblings, steeped in love, heart-rending loss, and sacrifice, the story of twins who meet shockingly different fates, but whose bond will last forever. Stunningly and propulsively written, The Shock of the Light is a novel of bravery, the brutal human cost of war, a brother and sister bond that outlasts even death, and the redemptive love that grows in unexpected places.

When a Victorian fossil hunter discovers a baby pterodactyl, she vows to protect him, with the help of a fellow scholar — her former fiancé — in this enchanting and transporting historical fantasy.

Skye MacKinnon is desperate for an escape. When she wins a lottery to buy a run-down cottage on a Greek island for only one euro, Skye jumps at the chance to get out of England and start over. As she unlocks the tattered blue door of her whitewashed new cottage, the sun-kissed sea glinting in the bay outside her windows, Skye immediately feels like she’s found her true home. Sweeping, escapist, and full of heart, The House of Hidden Letters reminds us of the importance of human connection. Izzy Broom has written a poignant and hopeful novel for those who have found love and family in unexpected places.

A richly drawn, captivating, and endlessly amusing novel of love and subterfuge between a lady’s maid and her clandestine lover, set in the country estates of nineteenth-century England. A deliciously funny, gorgeously detailed, utter enthralling novel, A Perfect Hand is a glorious novel of class, gender, and England on the cusp of enormous change.

Past and present collide in this posthumous, semiautobiographical masterpiece by the author of Beetlecreek. In this time-bending tale of survival and kinship, the product of more than twenty years of literary labor, William Demby weaves elements of the neo-slave narrative and Afrofuturism into a panoramic vision encompassing the forces of empire, race, gender, and religion.

A trio of women bond in friendship as a neighborhood tries to seek justice from a system that has forgotten them. “The Shape of Dreams is a powerful prayer, a novel that indicts the injustice for which there is no quick solution … [It is] a song of furor and tenderness that will leave its mark” (Walter Mosley, author of the Easy Rawlins series).

You know my name, but you do not know me. Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love’s thrall. Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves. Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children. How willfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, and divinely blessed to rule. Death will silence me no longer. This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived … Cleopatra tells her own story in this evocative and sensuous historical epic from the bestselling and award-winning author of Faebound and The Final Strife.

A debut novel by the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days, following two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them.

A fearless fortune teller in 1920s Paris must use her powers to divine who she can trust when an exiled Romanov princess and her brother come to her seeking answers about a decades-old mystery …

From the award-winning author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line comes a stunning historical novel set in nineteenth-century Tibet that follows two outsiders — an Indian schoolteacher spying for the British Empire and an English “lady” explorer — as they venture into a forbidden kingdom.

Moving from Pakistan’s dazzling chaotic cities to its lawless feudal countryside, This Is Where the Serpent Lives powerfully evokes contemporary feudal Pakistan, following the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters whose lives are linked through violence and tragedy, triumph, and love. In matters of power and money and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between paths that are moral and just and more worldly choices that allow them to survive in the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their culture. Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.

A sweeping novel about a correspondent trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean War, and the women who help her find her way home, from the national bestselling author of Daughters of Shandong. Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on a “Forgotten War,” the resilience of love within our darkest histories, and the indefatigable determination of mothers to protect their children.

They were an unlikely pair — a blond bombshell and a photographer determined to be taken seriously — but Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold would make a deal that would change their lives in this dazzling new novel from the national bestselling author of Mrs. Poe and The Woman with the Cure.

In this enchanting, adventurous debut novel, a band of seafaring smugglers lands on the Cornish coast, where a young widow with a mysterious past becomes entangled in their schemes — and with their charismatic captain.