The full ranking
The decade Eco lit up a medieval monastery and McMurtry drove cattle across a vanishing frontier. The 1980s novels that still define historical fiction, ranked by reader ratings on Goodreads.
The Sunne in Splendour (Sharon Kay Penman)
Sharon Kay Penman's 1982 debut novel rehabilitating Richard III, following his life from boyhood through the Battle of Bosworth Field and presenting the maligned king as a man of genuine honor caught in the brutal politics of the Wars of the Roses. Readers praise its extraordinary research depth and the emotional force of its portrayal of a complicated, contested life.
Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)
Larry McMurtry's 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning epic following two retired Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana, a meditation on the end of the American frontier, loyalty, and loss. Readers call it the greatest Western novel ever written and praise the depth of its characters, particularly the laconic Gus McCrae and methodical Call.
The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
A 1989 epic set in 12th-century England centered on the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, weaving together master builders, monks, noblewomen, and power-hungry bishops across decades of political upheaval. Readers praise its addictive plotting and the way Follett transforms architecture into narrative drama.
The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
A 1980 Italian novel set in a 14th-century Benedictine monastery where a Franciscan friar and his novice investigate a series of murders while the library conceals a dangerous secret, blending medieval theology, semiotics, and detective fiction. Readers praise its dazzling erudition worn lightly and its ability to make a world eight centuries old feel immediately alive.
The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
The 1980 first entry in Auel's Earth's Children series, following Ayla, a Cro-Magnon girl orphaned and adopted by a Neanderthal clan, whose anatomical modernity sets her apart in everything from memory to physical capability. Readers praise its immersive prehistoric world-building and its feminist undercurrent of a woman refusing the limits imposed by a society that cannot fully comprehend her.
Schindler's List (Thomas Keneally)
Thomas Keneally's 1982 Booker Prize-winning docufiction following Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who used his factory to save more than 1,200 Jewish workers from the Holocaust, reconstructed from survivor testimony. Readers call it one of the most important books of the 20th century, a morally complicated portrait of an unlikely hero.
The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel narrated by Stevens, an English butler making a motor trip through the countryside while reckoning with his decades of professional devotion to a Nazi-sympathizing lord and the personal life he sacrificed for duty. Readers call it one of the most quietly devastating studies of repression and regret in the English language.
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
Toni Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in post-Civil War Ohio, where a formerly enslaved woman is haunted by the ghost of the infant daughter she killed to prevent her from being taken back into slavery. Readers call it shattering and irreducible, the most important American novel of the second half of the 20th century.
The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
Alice Walker's 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning epistolary novel following Celie, a Black woman in the rural American South in the 1930s, writing letters to God and her sister across decades of abuse, love, and hard-won liberation. Readers call it devastating and transcendent, one of the most important American novels of the 20th century.
Perfume (Patrick Süskind)
Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel following Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a 18th-century French perfumer with a preternatural sense of smell and no scent of his own, whose obsessive quest for the perfect fragrance leads to increasingly monstrous acts. Readers praise its original premise, its deeply sensory prose, and the unsettling logic of its antihero's worldview.
Ranked across 4 sources: Goodreads · Ranked by Rating (Reader Reviews); Goodreads · Historical Fiction of the 1980s (Reader-Voted List); The Greatest Books · Best Historical Fiction 1980-1989 (Aggregated); Amazon Reviews · Ranked by Star Rating (June 2026). Full scoring is on the Methodology tab above.
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