Journeys Through Time: My favorite historical fiction in 2025

Trying to find a picture of a woman reading, I was surprised to find that the subject of a woman seated in front of an open book is a very popular one in paintings through the centuries. Matisse adds his version (as seen above) with “Reading Woman with Parasol.”

Ahh, reading outside in nature, in sun or shade…Though wintertime, post holidays, it’s also pleasant to sit with a cup of afternoon tea next to a plate of melomakarona, the sinfully delicious spiced honey Greek Christmas cookies, baked then dipped in a syrup with honey, cloves, cinnamon and orange. My mother-in-law and her sister used to bake mountains of them that would somehow disappear soon after the new year. You just can’t get enough of these cookies. And they have olive oil, so we tell ourselves, they’re healthy too!

In contrast, the other Greek Christmas cookies, kourabiedes, use butter (lots of it) and confectioner’s sugar (that admittedly you can shake off) A plate of these would usually last months after the New Year. .

This blog post though is not about Christmas cookies, it’s about reading. But since we’re still close to the seasonal festivities, I thought of bringing them in…

Specifically I discuss six historical fiction books I read in 2025 that made me travel to different times and places.

In historical fiction, as we know, a writer blends imagined characters and plots with real historical events and settings. Or a book can be about real historical characters but given a fictional treatment. In each case, we the readers travel and escape into different worlds and times without leaving the living room. But not only to escape, to learn too.

The books mentioned below were not written last year but books that I read during the year and loved all of them. 

I. The Lion Women of Tehran

Very timely as the situation in Iran is dire right now. Thousands of protestors against the government have been shot and killed. What will happen is uncertain, whether the regime will last or not. The Lion Women of Tehran uses the city as a backdrop and covers the period from 1950 to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and beyond.

In the novel we trace the friendship of two girls: Elaheh (known as Ellie) and Homa. The friendship is an unlikely one, as they’re from two different social classes, which Ellie’s mother never fails to remind her daughter of (the mother consoles herself even in hard times with the pride of being related to kings and queens.) Not only do the girls differ in social class but also in their interests: both excellent students, Homa is a committed political activist, working tirelessly for women’s rights, while Ellie is more apolitical and traditional in wanting to grow up to marry and have a family. The two girls go in and out of each others’ lives while events, some tragic, some with surprising turns, happen around them. Their future plans are upended by constant political turmoil.

Despite their differences and even acts of betrayal, their friendship endures and grows. And again in spite of their differences, they both grow up in their own way to be shirzan, or lionesses. A wonderful read.

II. The Fountains of Silence

The upheaval of the Spanish Civil War is in the background, but Sepetys sets her novel not during the war, but 20 years after and we see much of the terrible effects of the war through the eyes of a young American narrator.

I loved the character of eighteen year old Daniel, the protagonist, as he changes from a naive American teenager from a wealthy family to a thoughtful young man, due to his feelings for Ana. From her he learns about the effects of  the Spanish Civil War on her family and society in general. 

Madrid 1957, height of Francoism when Daniel accompanies his parents from Texas to Spain because his father, an oil tycoon, is there to make a deal with Franco along with other business oriented visitors, welcome to make investments. (It’s always about the oil it seems…) Daniel seems like a “pure” Texan teenager, but his mother is originally from Spain and he’s been brought up speaking both Spanish and English, which sets him apart from his Dallas community as being “too exotic.” With a love of photography and a natural curiosity about  his surroundings, in Madrid he meets Ana, a hotel maid attached to taking care of his family, who’s just a few years older than him. Ana’s family has lived the nightmare of the Civil War, father killed, mother imprisoned. She and Daniel are deeply attracted to each other but Ana hides secrets that are slowly revealed, and desperately wants to keep her job at the hotel.

The 2nd part of the book takes us forward nearly 20 years to after Franco’s death, back to Madrid from Dallas. A major theme in the book is the shameful taking of children from their parents, if dubbed “degenerate” and given to appropriate Catholic parents to be brought up. In an author’s note, Sepytys tells us as many  as 300,000 babies were taken from their parents and put up for adoption.  (This was also a shameful episode in Greece during and after the Civil War in the late 1940’s, early 1950’s.)

Oral interviews with the U.S. government about the ongoing situation in Spain give the book a sense of realism. A fascinating story with realistic and sympathetic characters.

III. There are Rivers in the Sky

“This novel is my love song  to rivers—those still living and those that are long gone,” writes  British – Turkish author Elif Shafak in her notes at the end of the book.

I love how the author interweaves three stories happening at different  times in history with the theme of water/rivers.  It’s not only  original, but beautifully written and captivating.  Especially with the character of Arthur, you just can’t wait to keep sharing his story.

 In connecting mighty rivers like the Tigris and the Thames, Shafak leaves you thinking about  the interconnectedness of people and places across history.
 
There are three stories: (1) Narin, a Yazidi girl in 2014 when ISIS was massacring her people, (2) Zeleekah, a  young hydrologist in London, who’s [left her husband and] is living on a houseboat on the river in 2018, and (3) Arthur Smith, born on the Thames in 1840, from an impoverished mother,  and christened tongue in cheek “King Arthur of the Sewer and the Slums.”  Arthur’s story is based on a historical figure who succeeded in deciphering the cuneiform tablets with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Arthur’s story is the most fascinating of the three, as this young boy,  recognized as a genius, fights to escape his destitute background, with a  mother who becomes mentally ill and a violent father who’s absent (mercifully) from home most of the time. As he tries to make sense of  this often bleak world he’s part of, we’re rooting for him all the way to escape it.

Besides her lyrical writing, Shafak masterfully connects ideas, objects and people from one story to the next. An object  from one historical period will turn up in another, and characters as  well: a lamassu (wings of a bird, head of man, body of lion), the missing flood tablet, the Englishman himself buried in the Yazidi village. The novel is quite a tour de force in this respect, but also brings up  themes that Arthur puzzles over like should antiquities be left in the  country they’re found in or stored in great museums of other countries (an issue very alive certainly in Greece today with the Parthenon marbles). And of course great rivers run from one section to another,  both rivers running now and ghost rivers, those that were once great but now buried. This was one book that I was sad to have finished and to leave the worlds that Shafak created for us.

IV. The Song of Achilles

Having enjoyed Madeline Miller’s book Circe and  its almost hypnotic narrative voice, I was curious to read her earlier book, The Song of Achilles.

It’s another “voice story,” told through the eyes of Patroclus, who’s actually a minor character in the Iliad. (When I think of how I suffered through reading that in high school, if only I had had The Song of Achilles to read.) The story of the “real” relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was always left a little vague; Miller decides that for sure they were lovers and her writing, beautiful and lush, really makes you feel their passion for  each other. If all you know of Achilles is from his fighting and what  seems like arrogance, you get a more rounded picture of him as a boy, along with his  childhood friend Patroclus, an exiled prince, both being taught by Chiron, a centaur on Mt. Pelion.

Unfortunately when the Trojan War breaks out, duty calls and we start to see a darker side of  Achilles as he moves to fulfill the prophecy about his fighting prowess and his inevitable fate to kill Hector. With Achilles and Patroclus dead, Odysseus goes to beg Pyrrhus, Achilles’ 12 year old son to bury Patroclus properly (with Achilles).

He talks to the boy prophetically of fame and glory, “Fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one  generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the  holocaust of memory. Who knows? Perhaps one day even I will  be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.”

Both a refresher course on the gods and protagonists of the Trojan War as well as a  beautifully written and enjoyable read.

V. Arrested Song

From ancient Greece, we move to 20th century Greece. What a tempestuous time: wars, population upheaval, world war II and the German occupation, civil war, military junta … Those events form the backdrop for Irena Karafilly’s novel.

Some years ago the author spent some time in Molyvos, a lovely village by the sea on the island of Lesvos and heard a legend about a schoolteacher that caught her imagination and inspired her interest in first a story, then a novel set in Molyvos around the time of WWII. After seven years of research, then writing the novel, we have the story of Calliopi Adham, a schoolteacher and a memorable and complex protagonist,

The book blends history and personal resistance on the part of Calliopi, a free and courageous spirit. Way ahead of her time, she’s misunderstood by her fellow villagers and often gossiped about by them. As she walks her dog (appropriately named Sappho), we get a glimpse of other townspeople and their stories, and so build up an understanding of the conservative rural society that she’s often at odds with. Although she has her faults, we really admire her for her resistance and often unwillingness to compromise. As Karafilly said in an interview, “saintly characters do not make for an interesting plot.” And indeed it’s a fascinating plot driven by an unexpected love story that marks the characters’ lives. As the story moves beyond the German occupation to the divisive and terrible Greek Civil War up until the Greek military junta in the late 1960’s, Calliopi’s character evolves as well. A book you don’t want to put down.

 VI. All Our Yesterdays

World War II has undoubtedly inspired more historical fiction than any other period. Think of some books of recent years:  All the Light You Cannot See, The Nightingale, The Book Thief, We were the Lucky Ones.

Written in 1952, Natalia Ginzburg’s novel opens in Mussolini’s Italy, soon before the war begins.

Admittedly, the book took a little while to get used to with its long paragraphs and run on sentences, but once I did, I loved it, mainly for the setting, in the years leading up to World War II in fascist Italy, during the War and right  after. Slowly the characters of two families, one wealthy, one not, in  an unnamed town in northern Italy begin to take on individual qualities  with our attention focused mainly on Anna and her growing up.

Besides family and friendships, All Our Yesterdays deals with the impact of war and how  different characters face it, and on heroism, both physical and moral.  When Anna tells Cenzo Rena that she fears she has no courage, he reassures her: “…no one found himself with courage ready made, you had  to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life.”

The 2nd part of the book takes us to Rena’s  southern Italian village of San Constanza and we see the ordinary lives of the townspeople and the peasants, the contadini, details that take on universal meaning. One of the  things I liked best about the book was Ginzburg’s ironic tone, as if humor is lurking in the background even with various tragedies that occur in the story. The characters stay with you long after you finish reading.

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If you enjoyed my comments on these books (coincidentally all written by women) you might like to join Goodreads, where you can read other readers’ reviews and post your own. You can check out and follow my reviews on Goodreads to find more books of interest, both historical fiction and others.

The melomakarona are long since gone, replaced by brownies. Not bad too for nibbling and reading.

I’d love to hear from you! Have you read any of the above books or other historical fiction? (Or any other books you enjoyed this year.)

Please drop me a note in the comments. (You’re asked to give your name and email to make a comment.)

Happy 2026!

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Sherri Moshman Paganos is a writer and former educator, inspired by her life in Athens, where she and her husband are happily retired and enjoying their travels in Greece and abroad. You can check out her writing — fiction, non-fiction, poetry and articles here.