My 2025 To-Read Historical Fiction Books

Last week, I shared my list of 2025 To-Read History Books, focusing on the first half of the year. As one of my reading goals is to read more non-fiction books written by women, I’ve spent a great deal of time in the world of non-fiction books. However, I of course still love historical fiction. I’ve chosen five historical fiction books for the first half of 2025 that I am looking forward to and will be grabbing! While I will certainly be reading more than these, they are the standouts. Let’s get into my 2025 To-Read Historical Fiction Books! 

My 2025 To-Read Historical Fiction Books

Harlem Rhapsody, Victoria Christopher Murray (4 February 2025)

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all.

E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.

 When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.

The Queens of Crime, Marie Benedict (11 February 2025)

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment.

May Daniels, a young English nurse on an excursion to France with her friend, seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later, her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of a crowded train station without anyone noticing? If, as the police believe, the cause of death is manual strangulation, why is there is an extraordinary amount of blood at the crime scene? What is the meaning of a heartbreaking secret letter seeming to implicate an unnamed paramour? Determined to solve the highly publicized murder, the Queens of Crime embark on their own investigation, discovering they’re stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy Sayers herself, threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to keep hidden.

Miss Austen Investigates: A Fortune Most Fatal, Jessica Bull (25 March 2025) 

When Jane Austen arrives at Rowling House to visit her wealthy brother, Neddy, she hopes that some time away will distract her from her broken heart and the dashing Tom Lefroy’s lacklustre proposal. Little does she know that her sister-in-law Elizabeth has other plans: to help Jane come out to society and find a respectable husband of good status and wealth.

Meanwhile, when a mysterious foreign princess is taken in by Mrs. Knight, Neddy’s adoptive mother, Jane and her family fear that Neddy’s inheritance could be at risk, jeopardizing them all. Jane is determined to unmask the beleaguered princess as a con artist and reveal her true identity. But when Jane’s sleuthing leads her to believe that Neddy is involved in an unspeakable crime, she must try to save a traumatized young woman. And she must do it without destroying her wealthy brother, whom all the Austens rely on.

The Determined, Rachel Rueckert (29 April 2025) 

1721, Spanish Town, Jamaica. Captured, convicted, and pregnant, twenty-three-year-old Anne Bonny faces the gallows. When writer Captain Charles Johnson enters the garrison, she strikes a deal: she’ll tell this opportunistic fool about her life if he sends a doctor to her friend, Mary Read, who’s battling prison fever in isolation.

For Anne and Mary, life at sea offers a freedom that few women ever know. Born to an Irish gentleman and his maid, Anne leaves her beloved County Cork behind when her family emigrates to South Carolina to escape prejudice. Cornered in a crisis, she flees, making a bitter bargain for safe passage to the Bahamas.

Across the Atlantic in England, Mary confronts her own limitations as an illegitimate daughter. Sneaking into a merchant crew, she disguises herself as a cabin boy, working harder than the men to avoid scrutiny. But when war breaks out, sending Mary into the cavalry, she meets a challenge even she might not rival.

When their paths collide in Nassau, a notorious pirate den, Anne and Mary find kinship and a new life aboard the infamous Revenge, the fastest ship in the Caribbean. Yet with an ambitious governor out for blood, every raid brings more risk. And from the high seas to the depths of a Jamaican prison, Anne and Mary must navigate impossible choices, each determined to taste freedom again.

Austen at Sea, Natalie Jenner (6 May 2025) 

In Boston, 1865, Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, have accomplished as much as women are allowed in those days. Chafing against those restrictions and inspired by the works of Jane Austen, they start a secret correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother, now in his nineties. He sends them an original letter from his sister and invites them to come visit him in England.

In Philadelphia, Nicholas & Haslett Nelson—bachelor brothers, veterans of the recent Civil War, and rare book dealers—are also in correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, who lures them, too, to England, with the promise of a never-before-seen, rare Austen artifact to be evaluated.

The Stevenson sisters sneak away without a chaperone to sail to England. On their ship are the Nelson brothers, writer Louisa May Alcott, Sara-Beth Gleason—wealthy daughter of a Pennsylvania state senator with her eye on the Nelsons—and, a would-be last-minute chaperone to the Stevenson sisters, Justice Thomas Nash.

It’s a voyage and trip that will dramatically change each of their lives in ways that are unforeseen, with the transformative spirit of the love of literature and that of Jane Austen herself.

What books are on your 2025 to-read historical fiction books list? 

Cheers,
The Historian
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