Nominations flood in for The Nation’s Favourite Historical Novel
14th November, 2019
We’ve been delighted to receive so many nominations for your favourite historical novels of all time. You have been trawling your childhood memories, surveying your bookshelves, and discussing amongst yourselves – and the result so far is a terrifically diverse selection of books, from the oeuvre of Walter Scott himself, through much-loved historical series of last century, right up to recent bestsellers and prizewinners. There’s even been a bit of tactical block-voting! Please keep your nominations coming, because we’re only accepting them until the end of November, after which a top ten will be created for voting.
To give you some ideas, we asked the Walter Scott Prize judges what they would nominate. Here are some of their choices.
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
“It starts like a champagne cork bursting out of the bottle and never loses pace or interest. It also has one of the great heroines in literature in Rowena; a poster girl for the Me Too generation”
Others chose Redgauntlet and Old Mortality by Scott
The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff
“What you read and love as a child stays with you for life, and that wonderful tale of courage and adventure in the misty north will be with me forever”
Pure by Andrew Miller
“his eye and ear are unerring”
Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor
“I read it under the sheets with a torch when I was 8”
The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
“There was something so delicate and tender in the writing of the lovely boy, and though I must have read it thirty years ago, I can conjure up pictures from this book even now. “
The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
“Such a powerful, authentic, angry, sad, Australian voice”
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
“for the verve, the vim, the glorious career of the story and the wickedness and goodness and all-round Dickensy over-the-topness of the characters”
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell
“a book I can’t keep on my bookshelf because once I’ve spotted it, I have to read it again”
Stop the Train by Geraldine McCaughrean
“It made me laugh and cry and wish I’d read it when I was ten. It should be far more widely read by adults and children alike.”
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
“my go-to, desert-island book, not cosy, just all-engrossing”
Lincoln by Gore Vidal
The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell
“the funniest tragedy you’ll ever read. As one critic neatly put it, ‘devastating wit and rambunctious humanity'”
The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker
“subtle, multi-layered, gripping, it turned me inside out”
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
“the voice! I believed in it utterly”