The 7 Best Historical Epics to Read in 2026 — ranked by where to start

The story follows a ragtag group of builders, monks and nobles across fifty years as they try to raise a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, all set against the English civil war known as the Anarchy. What makes it the genre's best on-ramp is pure pacing: Follett came up writing thrillers, and it shows. There's a villain you'll want to throttle, a building project that runs like a slow-burn heist, and chapter-ending hooks that keep a thousand-page book moving like something half the size.

It's the most "just one more chapter" book on this list, and the title readers most often credit with converting them to historical fiction in the first place.

Skip this if: you want elegant, literary prose — Follett's writing is built for momentum, not lyricism.

Reads completely standalone, though it opens the long-running Kingsbridge series if you get hooked.

An English ship's pilot wrecks on the coast of feudal Japan and is pulled into the schemes of a warlord maneuvering to become shōgun. More than anything else here, the book drops you inside an unfamiliar world — its court etiquette, its politics, its language barrier — until you're decoding the culture right alongside the stranded outsider.

The acclaimed 2024 FX adaptation sent a wave of new readers back to the source, and the common verdict is that the novel goes deeper than any screen version can reach. Critics consistently single out the immersion; the recurring complaint is the sheer length and the dated Western-outsider framing.

Skip this if: you bounce off slow openings — the first hundred pages are a deliberate disorientation before the grip kicks in.

First in Clavell's Asian Saga, but a complete story on its own.

Two aging former Texas Rangers drive a cattle herd from the Mexican border up to Montana — and that plain setup carries one of the most beloved double-acts in American fiction: the talkative Gus and the buttoned-up Call. It won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, and it's the book people most often hand to friends who swear they "don't like Westerns."

The draw isn't the plot; it's the company. Readers routinely describe finishing it and missing the characters like real people. A 40th-anniversary edition arrived in 2025 with a new foreword by Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, if you want the prestige edition.

Skip this if: you need a tidy, hopeful ending — McMurtry is unsentimental about who the frontier lets survive.

First published in its series and the natural place to start.

Spanning three generations of a family in South India's Kerala, the novel turns on a strange inheritance: in every generation, someone in the family drowns. Verghese is a practicing physician, and he braids the family saga with vivid medical history into something both sweeping and intimate.

It was a 2023 Oprah's Book Club pick and one of Barack Obama's books of the year. Across reviews, the most common praise is the richness of place and the matriarch at its center; the most common complaint is that the medical detail and the length ask for patience.

Skip this if: you want fast momentum — this one rewards readers who like to settle in and linger.

A standalone. If you love it, Verghese's earlier Cutting for Stone is the obvious next read.

Two estranged sisters take very different paths through the Nazi occupation of France — one fighting to keep her household alive under a billeted German officer, the other joining the Resistance. At around 450 pages it's the most approachable length on this list, and its reputation rests on one thing above all: it makes readers cry.

It won the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for historical fiction, and a film starring real-life sisters Dakota and Elle Fanning has been in the works. The common knock is that it leans melodramatic — but readers who pick it up to feel something rarely mind.

Skip this if: you're worn out on WWII fiction, or you distrust a book engineered to break your heart.

A standalone — no series commitment required.

A Russian count, spared execution after the revolution, is sentenced to permanent house arrest in a grand Moscow hotel — and the novel spans three turbulent decades of Soviet history without its hero ever stepping outside the building. It's "epic" in time rather than geography: a whole upheaval of a century glimpsed through one elegant, witty man and the lobby of the Metropol.

It's the lightest-footed, funniest book here, and the one to hand anyone who finds thousand-page sagas daunting. A 2024 series with Ewan McGregor brought it to a new audience.

Skip this if: you want big external action — the pleasures here are conversation, charm and confinement.

A standalone, and a gentle gateway into the heavier epics above.

This is the best-written book on the list — and the one to steer a newcomer away from first. Not because it's lesser, but because it asks the most. Mantel retells the rise of Thomas Cromwell in Henry VIII's court from inside his head, in a present-tense style where "he" can get slippery and the politics run dense.

It won the Booker Prize, as did its sequel Bring Up the Bodies (2012) — making Mantel the first woman to win twice — and the trilogy closed with The Mirror & the Light in 2020. Once the genre has its hooks in you, this is the summit. Mantel, who died in 2022, is widely regarded as having redrawn what historical fiction could do.

Skip this if: you're new to the genre or you want clarity and speed — read Pillars first, then come back and earn this one.

Opens the three-book Cromwell arc (~1,800 pages all in); can be read alone.