Today’s TTT is a ‘genre freebie’, and my first thought was near-future SF, but I did that one in spring. Whoopsie. Well, in honor of my current read, The Four Winds, I’m going to spotlight Historical Fiction, and restrict authors to one appearance only. That means you, Bernard Cornwell. But first, the tease, which is a nonfiction work that Four Winds got me interested in:

The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought, no epic siege of frost, no prairie fire, nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done. They had removed the native prairie grass, a web of perennial species evolved over twenty thousand years or more, so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land—thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Now for the historical fiction! In order most random. These are mostly the shooty-stabby kinds of books, but there are a few departures from that.

(1) Ben Kane. I think it was Cyberkitten who introduced me to this author, and Kane has been one of my absolute favorites in recent years, especially his novel about the battle of the Teutoberg Forest and his King Richard the Lionheart trilogy.

(2) Michael Shaara. For me, the original. I’d read some scattering of historical fiction before picking up The Killer Angels at one of the multitude of Civil War museums I visited as a teenager, but I’d never read an author so absorbing that I instantly put his name to memory. The Killer Angels chronicled the story of the battle of Gettysburg, using a variety of viewpoint characters (from both sides, ranging from enlisted to the officers) to give the reader not only a view of the battle from the trenches and from the top, but to deliver a sense of what it was like to be agonized by knowing your best friend was on the other side, and that he might very well die from your own orders. I haven’t revisited TKA during the tenture of this blog (note to self: do that, me!), but I sometimes read his son Jeff, who used to imitate his dad’s style when he was still writing ACW books. Jeff has written novels about every American war from the Revolution to Korea.

(3) Robert Harris is the king of variety historical fiction. Any other author on this list can be stuck in a box. It may be a big box (“Eh….combat fiction!”), but it’s still a box. Not so Harris, who has written books set everywhere from ancient Rome (Pompeii, the Cicero trilogy) to the modern British political scene, and even made one venture into technical thrillers with his Fear Index.

(4) Phillip Kerr has a series of very grim mystery-thrillers set in 1930s-1940s Germany, featuring a Berlin detective whose disdain for the Nazis makes him a useful investigator for the same: Himmler and company appreciate that he doesn’t take sides between different Nazi power players, but loathes all equally. There’s a lot of dark humor, but given the setting I had to restrict my Kerr reading to one-a-year, especially after reading The Lady from Zagreb. Getting up close and personal with genocide is not my stein of bier.

(5) C.S. Forester. When I read that Gene Roddenberry had told William Shatner that his character was intended to be Horatio Hornblower in Space, I had to give ol’ Horry a try, and I thoroughly enjoyed Forester’s long series of novels and short stories featuring a young officer who rises to fame throughout the Napoleonic wars, and ending up marrying the Duke of Wellington’s little sister.

(6) Anita Amirrezvani. I encountered by Amirrezvani by accident: I won her Blood of Flowers, about a young woman who learns the craft of creating Persian rugs, in a contest, and later purchased her Equal of the Sun, about a princess who comes to power following her aging father’s death. My favorite part of this books is Amirrezvani’s incorporation of Persian poetry & other literature into the texts, and she’s why I plan to read The Shahnameh.

(7) Steven Pressfield. He hasn’t written much, but what he has recreated is stellar. So far I’ve read his account of the Battle of Thermopylae and a history of Alexander the Great’s Afghan campaign. The latter was so visceral it reminded me of Vietnam literature.

(8) David Liss. Liss has written some of the most interesting HF on this list, in part because he does business and crime thrillers set during the late Age of Discovery, in England, Portugal, and the Netherlands. He uses a style that evokes the pattern of speech at that time without replicating it, so he’s quite readable.

(9) Khalid Hosseini. I almost didn’t mention Hosseini because he’s very well known at this point, but his stories in Afghanistan are unforgettable — “For you, a thousand times over!”. The Kite Runner is his most famous.

(10) Bernard Cornwell. The king, the champ, the capo di tutti i capi. Cyberkitten suggested I read Sharpe’s Eagle many years ago, and since then Cornwell has not only become my favorite HF author bar none, but my second-most-read-author-period. Over time he will may even surpass Asimov, who I’ve read over a hundred titles from. Where to start with BC? There’s the Sharpe series, of course, following a street urchin turned soldier turned officer who rises to fame thanks to his rifle skills and small-arms strategizing; his Saxon Chronicles series, about an English warrior who loses his family land during the Viking invasion of Britain, but who is raised by the Vikings and struggles between his loyalty for them and his own people — and then there’s the numerous bits of independent fiction, from novels about Shakespeare’s brother to a late-19th century murder mystery, and an American Revolutionary war title. Cornwell is consistently good.

Now, those who read this blog on the regular may notice some surprising absences. No Simon Scarrow? Steve Saylor? No John Stack? No Alison Weir or Sharon Kay Penman? I’ve read and loved them, but I was trying to vary up settings here, and Stack/Saylor/Scarrow are both in the same Roman fiction camp as Harris’ Cicero and Pompeii books, for instance, and English historical fiction is well-covered in general.