All books

A comprehensive list of recent popular history books below! Click the covers to see more details on that book, also our review if available.

For more info see notes. You can also have a poke around the underlying data, which allows you to do a text search, and lets you see a few extra details.

Showing the 100 most recently published history books

Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China

Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660

The Burning Earth: A Material History of the Last 500 Years

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

The Rest is History Returns: An A-Z of Historical Curiosities

Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity

Forgotten Vikings: New Approaches to the Viking Age

Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King

Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus

The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome: A History of the Ptolemies

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel

The Greatest Nobodies of History: Minor Characters from Major Moments

Land Between the Rivers: A 5000-Year History of Iraq

Eighteen: The Young Lives of 18 Leading Britons

History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age

To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold

Flint Tools Field Guide: Identifying Stone Age Tools

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich

Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator

Nelson's Pathfinders: A Forgotten Story in the Triumph of British Sea Power

The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power

Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World

Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great

Son of Prophecy: The Rise of Henry Tudor

Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land

The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil

Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah

The Busy Narrow Sea: A Social History of the English Channel

History Hit Guide to Medieval England: From the Vikings to the Tudors - and Everything in Between

Jerusalem Through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades

Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany

To the Ends of the Earth: How Ancient Explorers, Scientists, and Traders Connected the World

The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic

Civilisation, An Unnatural History: How Human Nature Shaped Our Past and Imperils Our Future

Inside the Stargazer's Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe

How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500

Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration

Medieval Saints and Their Sins: A New History of the Middle Ages Through Saints and Their Stories

Bennelong and Phillip: A Relationship Unravelled

The Missing Thread: How Women Shaped the Course of Ancient History

Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture

Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World

Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean

A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity

Nepal: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present

The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World

Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain

In the Service of the Shogun: The Real Story of William Adams

The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens

A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps

Britain's Slavery Debt: Reparations Now!

London: A History of 300 Years in 25 Buildings

The Book-Makers: A Story in Thirteen Extraordinary Lives

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Civilization to Independence

After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City

A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War

Sound Tracks: Uncovering Our Musical Past

Populus: Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome

The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline

Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain

House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France

The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency

Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers: A Personal History

Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World

The Prince And The Poisoner: The Murder that Rocked the British Raj

Shakespeare's Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance

The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age

Heretic: The Many Lives of Jesus Christ and the Other Saviours of the Ancient World

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History

Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond

Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492

Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era

...use the filter above to show more books.

Notes (return to top ↑)

The purpose of this list is to give you a good feel for all the history books published recently in hardback in the UK, ordered by publication date with the newest at the top. When you first load the page it will show the first 100 most recently published books, but you can see many more less recent books if you use the filter. It is a reasonably exhaustive list but…
- I have excluded military history books which I see as a category all on its own (and would if included have swamped the non-military history books).
- I have excluded history books that I see as too “local” eg the many books on particular aspects of the US Civil War, or the many books focussing on relatives of medieval English kings.
The filter is an OR filter within categories and an AND filter between categories. For example if you select ' 2021' and ' 2022' books from both years will be shown - 2021 OR 2022...
...but if you select ' 2021' and ' Political' then only books that have both attributes will be shown - 2021 AND Political. I think this is intuitively what most people expect to happen.
This history book database is hand-curated - the categories for the books are chosen by me when I do my monthly roundup. This means they can't be manipulated to boost sales (“hey my book is in all the categories...”) but also that you may or may not agree with my judgement 🙂.
Links are provided to Amazon UK and US for convenience only, with no affiliation on my part. Please ignore them if you want to shop elsewhere.
Finally for the more technicially minded among you: this is not a proper database because all books are loaded when the page loads and are then selectively hidden or shown by the filter. On the negative side this is not a scalable solution, on the positive side it works well enough for now!