My top five historical novels

Lev Tolstoy: War and Peace.

This epic is, along with Anna Karenina, regarded as Tolstoy’s finest work of fiction. I classify it as a historical novel – in the broad sense of a novel that shows people’s lives in an earlier time, rather than simply of being written for the genre ghetto – because, although it was published in 1869, it deals with the events leading up to Napoleon’s catastrophic invasion of Russia half a century earlier. This makes it one of the first historical novels – but, all these years later, it’s still the greatest.

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose.

One of the cleverest books I’ve ever read, this tale of the adventure of a Franciscan friar and his novice in medieval Italy is part murder mystery, part game with semiotics, and part pure historical, brilliant fiction. It’s not the development characters you encounter in these pages that you remember so intensely – it’s the whole-body plunge into the complexities of the medieval mindset, so radically different from our own. For a modern writer, even a philosopher, to have pulled this off so successfully is an extraordinary achievement.

Iain Pears: An Instance of the Fingerpost.

I read this12 years ago and have gone on thinking about it ever since. Ostensibly it’s about a murder in 17th-century Oxford, retold four times, by four of the people who were present – a difficult trick to pull off, but one that Pears manages with aplomb. And there’s so much more here than an excellent plot. It’s one of those books you can take something new away from, every time you revisit it, whether it’s information about the politics of the Restoration, or fascinating (and grisly) accounts of the fast-developing science, or the philosophy, or Pears’ take on the real-life characters he fills his pages with. It’s writing filled with the fluidity and fears and latent contradictions of the era he’s describing, which carries the reader, on the back of each unreliable narrator, into a new, possibly contradictory, corner of the reality of the times. But what stays with me, every time, is the sheer shock of the final story, in which, quite unexpectedly – to me at any rate – all the mind-games give way to a strangely moving finale with religious and sacrificial overtones. I can’t say more without giving the secret away. But it’s brilliant.

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall.

I love everything Mantel writes, anyway: the haunting darkness of it, the subtlety. But her take on Tudor soap-opera is a masterpiece. Deftly upending the popular expectation that Thomas Cromwell, the man who did for Anne Boleyn, was an out-and-out bad guy (and, by contrast, that Cromwell’s enemy Thomas More was someone to root for), she recreates the sense of threat and unexpectedness utterly lost from most retellings of this too-familiar story. Her Anne is a bug-eyed, calculating, sparrow on speed; the royal ladies in waiting pinch and push; the aristocracy are fools, puffed up with pride and their unjustified sense of entitlement; and only Cromwell, slyly intelligent and narrow-eyed behind his thuggish exterior, has the combination of native wit, the wiles of his gutter past, and the unexpected gift of compassion, to negotiate through the terrors of the times. I can’t wait for the sequel.

Sarah Waters: Tipping the Velvet.

This story takes place round the back of London’s Victorian music-halls, and ends happily ever after with lovers reunited – which all sounds sentimentally enough within the realms of genre expectations, except that the lovers are lesbian. Nan, a Whitstable oyster-girl who falls in love with a male impersonator called Kitty, follows her to London and goes on the stage with her. But when the pair fall out, Nan embarks on a series of hair-raising sexual adventures of her own in the capital. What has stayed with me, even more even than the extremely vivid characters from up and down the social scale, is Waters’ fascinated, and fascinating, depiction of the city itself – in the colourful yet basically realistic manner of Dickens or Defoe – as Nan voyages to and fro across its streets.