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Book Guides for Historical and Faith-Inspired Fiction

The best reading guides don't tell you what to think about a book. They open doors you might not have found on your own: historical context that makes the setting legible, thematic threads worth tracing, craft observations that help you understand why a scene works, faith questions worth sitting with.

Here you'll find reading guides, discussion questions, and curated reading lists — resources for book clubs, classrooms, and the committed solo reader who likes to engage deeply.

How to Use These Guides

These guides are designed to be used flexibly. A book club might work through the discussion questions over two meetings. A classroom might use the historical context as a launching point for research. An individual reader might read the thematic notes after finishing and then re-read selected passages with fresh eyes.

None of these guides contain spoilers in the introduction — we note where spoilers begin so you can read as much or as little as you want before finishing the book.

Reading Lists by Theme

Biblical Historical Fiction

Novels set in and around the world of the Bible — from the ancient Near East to first-century Judea to the early church. This is one of the most demanding subgenres in historical fiction, requiring careful scholarship and sensitivity to readers for whom these texts are sacred.

Key questions for biblical historical fiction:

How does the novelist handle the gap between what the biblical text says and what a novelist needs to show?
How are female characters given agency within the historical constraints of patriarchal ancient societies?
Where does the novelist's theological perspective show — and is it consistent with the historical setting?

Notable works in this tradition have been recognised by awards including the Christian Book Awards and the Caleb Award for Australasian faith-based writing.

Indigenous History and Fiction

Historical fiction set in the Pacific — particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia — often grapples with colonial history, indigenous sovereignty, and the collision of worldviews. This is powerful, necessary territory for historical fiction. The New Zealand Book Awards consistently recognise outstanding work in this area, and the genre is producing some of the most politically and morally complex fiction currently being written anywhere.

Key questions for indigenous historical fiction:

Is the author writing from inside or outside the culture depicted? How does that affect the reader's relationship to the story?
How does the novel handle the documentation gap — the fact that indigenous histories were often oral and systematically suppressed?
What does the novel ask of non-indigenous readers?

Victorian and 19th-Century Fiction

The nineteenth century was the novel's century — and it was a period of extraordinary social change. Industrial revolution, empire, evolving gender roles, religious crisis and revival. Historical fiction set in this period has rich material to work with. We recommend beginning with the primary sources: Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Brontë — and then seeing how contemporary novelists use and depart from those models.

See also our article on six things about Charles Dickens that will change how you read Victorian fiction.

Medieval Historical Fiction

The medieval period offers readers plague, crusade, monastery, court intrigue, and a cosmology utterly different from our own secular assumptions. The best medieval historical fiction — Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose — succeeds precisely because it takes the medieval worldview seriously rather than simply providing a picturesque backdrop.

"Good books deserve unhurried attention. These guides are built for readers who want to go deeper."

Discussion Questions for Any Historical Novel

Looking for general questions to use with any historical fiction? See our general discussion points guide — questions that work across periods and genres, from biblical fiction to Victorian melodrama to indigenous history.

For Classrooms

Teachers using historical fiction in secondary or tertiary classrooms will find our thematic questions useful as essay prompts or seminar starters. The American Library Association's historical fiction programming resources are also worth bookmarking for classroom use.