Subscribers to the WSJ’s weekly Books newsletter recently shared their favorite spy novels and mystery series. The genre we were most often asked to tackle next was historical fiction, a category both capacious and hard to define. Is it simply a novel that takes place in the past? The list below is restricted to books written by an author about a period earlier than her or his own—a definition broad enough to include everything from Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” to Allison Pataki’s recent “The Accidental Empress.”A skilled...

Source: Wall Street Journal July 02, 2020 14:37 UTC