Best Historical Fiction Series to Start in 2026

Kingsbridge is the safest recommendation for a reader who says, “I want a huge historical series, but I do not want homework.” The Pillars of the Earth follows builders, clergy, nobles, and ordinary families around the construction of a cathedral during the 12th-century Anarchy. Follett writes with a thriller writer’s instinct for conflict, so political shifts, romances, betrayals, engineering problems, and local power struggles keep a very long book moving.

The larger series is unusually flexible because the books jump across different eras rather than following one hero continuously. That means you can read Pillars as a complete experience and stop, or keep going through World Without End, A Column of Fire, The Evening and the Morning, and The Armor of Light. You are committing to a place and a style more than to a single cliffhanger-driven plot.

Start here if: you want the historical-epic feeling that made our historical epics guide work, but you also want a shelf of follow-up books waiting if the first one lands.

Skip this if: you prefer compressed literary prose. Follett prioritizes story machinery and accessibility over subtlety.

Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, now commonly branded as the Last Kingdom series, give you one of historical fiction’s cleanest long-form engines: Uhtred of Bebbanburg ages, fights, changes loyalties, loses people, gains enemies, and keeps getting dragged into the long political project of making England. The first-person voice is blunt and readable, and the battle scenes are easier to follow than in many military-heavy novels.

Thirteen books sounds punishing, but each installment is more manageable than the giant doorstoppers on this page. That changes the psychology of the commitment. Instead of buying into a thousand-page opening volume, you get a sequence of faster campaigns with a clear central character and a finished endpoint in War Lord. The Netflix adaptation also makes the world unusually easy to visualize if you have already seen it.

Start here if: your ideal historical fiction contains shield walls, divided loyalties, kings who have to earn authority, and a narrator who would rather be fighting than debating theology.

Skip this if: you want domestic detail, romance, or courtly interiority to matter as much as campaigns and politics.

Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & the Light follow Thomas Cromwell through Henry VIII’s court from his rise to power through the political machinery that eventually closes around him. This is the most demanding series here, but it is also the one most likely to satisfy a reader who wants historical fiction to feel like serious literary fiction rather than a costume drama.

Mantel keeps you close to Cromwell’s perception. Alliances can turn on a sentence, a remembered insult, a piece of property, a marriage negotiation, or a detail everyone else misses. The trilogy is only three books, but they are dense books; the commitment is intellectual rather than numerical. If you like rereading paragraphs because the power shift happened half a line earlier than you first noticed, this is your series.

Start here if: you want the strongest prose and do not mind concentrating. Three books also make it a more bounded project than Kingsbridge, Poldark, or The Last Kingdom.

Skip this if: you are brand new to historical fiction and want immediate clarity. The shifting pronouns and dense Tudor network can make the opening feel slippery.

If Arthurian fiction usually loses you when the magic gets too shiny, this trilogy is the correction. Cornwell treats Arthur as a plausible sixth-century war leader living in a fractured Britain where religion, tribal loyalty, old Roman structures, and invading forces are all colliding. The familiar names are there, but the world is muddy, politically unstable, and grounded in what people of the period might actually have believed.

The trilogy has the action Cornwell readers expect, yet it feels more mythic and tragic than The Last Kingdom. Because there are only three volumes, it is also a useful test case: you can get the long-arc satisfaction of a series without signing up for thirteen books. Cornwell himself has long described these Arthur books as personal favorites, and it is easy to see why—the series has a stronger emotional finish than most battle-led historical fiction.

Start here if: you want swords, politics, religion, and legend, but you want the legend treated as something people believe rather than as a fantasy rule system.

Skip this if: you want the romantic Camelot of popular mythology. This version is harsher and deliberately less polished.

The Century Trilogy follows five interconnected families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—through the defining upheavals of the 20th century. Fall of Giants handles World War I, the Russian Revolution, and social change; Winter of the World moves through fascism and World War II; Edge of Eternity reaches the Cold War, civil rights era, and the political conflicts of the later century.

This is the better Follett choice if what excites you is not medieval atmosphere but the feeling of watching private lives repeatedly collide with events you already know from history class. The trilogy is technically only three books, but each is enormous, so do not confuse a short series count with a small reading project. The reward is continuity across generations: you see political choices become family history and family history become political consequence.

Start here if: you like multigenerational sagas and want one continuous historical sweep rather than Kingsbridge’s jumps between separate eras.

Skip this if: you want one deeply interior central character. The cast is intentionally broad and the camera keeps moving.

Poldark is the series to choose when you want history to enter through households, money, marriages, mines, rival families, and local reputation rather than armies. Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall after fighting in the American War of Independence and finds both his estate and his expected future altered. From there, the series grows outward into a long social history of a community.

The appeal is accumulation. Twelve novels let Graham show children becoming adults, relationships changing shape, fortunes moving with the mining economy, and class resentments persisting across decades. It is more romantic than the other series on this list, but it is not merely a romance sequence; labor, debt, land, politics, and social position keep shaping what the characters can actually do. The official Winston Graham site identifies Bella Poldark as the twelfth and final book.

Start here if: you want a long series where the emotional and economic life of one region matters as much as national history.

Skip this if: you primarily read historical fiction for battles, espionage, or rapid plot turnover.

Twenty novels normally sounds like the biggest commitment on the page, but Cadfael works differently. Each book is a compact medieval mystery centered on Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk, former Crusader, gardener, herbalist, and unusually experienced observer of human behavior. The series takes place during the Anarchy—the same broad civil-war era that powers The Pillars of the Earth—but approaches it through murders, local disputes, monastery life, and the smaller consequences of national instability.

That episodic structure makes Cadfael ideal for readers who want a dependable historical world without needing to remember a 3,000-page continuous plot. You can read one, stop for months, and return without feeling lost. The tradeoff is scale: these books do not deliver the cathedral-sized ambition of Follett or the battlefield momentum of Cornwell. Their pleasure is steadier and more intimate.

Start here if: you want historical atmosphere in shorter installments and like mysteries more than war narratives.

Skip this if: the word “epic” is the reason you clicked. Cadfael is deliberately smaller, quieter, and more episodic.