Occupied France, a Korean family in Japan, and the Underground Railroad reimagined as a real railway. The 2010s historical fiction readers rate highest on Goodreads.
The full ranking
Occupied France, a Korean family in Japan, and the Underground Railroad reimagined as a real railway. The 2010s historical fiction readers rate highest on Goodreads.
Pachinko (Min Jin Lee)
An epic multigenerational saga following a Korean family that emigrates to Japan in the early twentieth century and navigates decades of discrimination, sacrifice, and survival. Readers call it a masterpiece of scope and empathy, with characters they felt they truly knew.
All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)
Pulitzer Prize winner following a blind French girl and a German boy whose lives converge in the rubble of Saint-Malo during the final days of World War II. Readers praise its luminous prose, intricate structure, and the way it finds beauty and humanity amid the machinery of war.
Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi)
Each chapter follows a different generation of two half-sisters' family lines, one in Ghana and one sold into American slavery, tracing the legacy of the slave trade across three centuries. Readers call it breathtaking in its ambition and deeply moving in its execution.
The Nightingale (Kristin Hannah)
Two sisters in Nazi-occupied France take very different paths of resistance, one sheltering downed Allied airmen and one enduring life under a German officer billeted in her home. Readers call it emotionally devastating and one of the best novels about women in wartime ever written.
The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner reimagining the Underground Railroad as a literal subterranean railway network, following Cora, a young enslaved woman fleeing a Georgia plantation. Readers praise its haunting originality, controlled rage, and unflinching examination of American history.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Heather Morris)
Based on the true story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew forced to tattoo prisoners at Auschwitz who falls in love with one of the women he numbers. Readers praise its power to bear witness to atrocity through a story of enduring love.
The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)
Told from the perspective of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, the novel recreates the couple's years among the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris. Readers call it evocative and bittersweet, a vivid portrait of a literary era seen through the eyes of a woman left behind by it.
Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel)
The second volume of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy chronicles the fall of Anne Boleyn, as Henry VIII's chief minister engineers a queen's destruction with cold precision. Readers and critics prize it as a masterclass in political suspense and historical fiction.
News of the World (Paulette Jiles)
A spare, elegiac novel set in post-Civil War Texas, following an elderly news reader hired to return a ten-year-old girl captured by Kiowa raiders back to her German relatives. Readers praise its quiet moral depth, beautiful landscape writing, and unexpectedly tender bond between its two protagonists.
Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders)
A formally radical debut novel in which the ghost of President Lincoln's young son Willie haunts a Washington graveyard alongside a chorus of restless dead, on the night Lincoln visits the crypt. Readers and critics alike call it one of the most inventive American novels in years, funny and profoundly sad in equal measure.
Ranked across 5 sources: Goodreads · Ranked by Rating (Reader Reviews); Goodreads · Ranked by Number of Ratings (Reader Popularity); The Greatest Books · Best Historical Fiction 2000-2019 (Aggregated); Reader's Digest · 55 Best Historical Fiction Books (unordered roundup); Amazon Reviews · Ranked by Star Rating (June 2026). Full scoring is on the Methodology tab above.
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