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

A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain

Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange That Transformed the Medieval World

Seven Sisters: Captives and Rebels in Revolutionary Europe's First Family

Nuclear Weapons: An International History

How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons

Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs

The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History

The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World

The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure

The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History

The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy

Emperor of Rome: How the Roman Empire Was Ruled (30 BCE to 476 CE)

Members Behaving Badly: A History of Britain in 52 Parliamentary Rogues

The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London

Saving Byzantium: The Struggle to Salvage an Empire

Mad Tom's Rising: The Revolutionary Mystic Sir Wiliam Courtenay and the Last Battle Fought on English Soil

The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas

Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity

Athena's Sisters: Reclaiming the Women of Classical Athens

A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence

A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust

First Kings: Forged by Vikings in England and Norway

Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union As a Civilization, 1953-1991

The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires

The Black Cross: A History of the Baltic Crusades

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World

The Man Who Stopped the Sultan: Gabriele Tadino and the Defence of Europe

Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East

Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent

The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince

The Desire for Syria in Medieval England

Money and the Making of the American Revolution

Eleanor: On the Trail of England's Lost Queen

Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed

El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness

Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World

Little Kingdoms: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain

On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All

Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome's Empire

Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy

The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack: How to Stay Alive in Renaissance England

Rhyme and Reason: A Short History of British Poetry

The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery

Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State

The Fateful Hour: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic

The Two Hundred Years War: The Bloody Crowns of England and France, 1292-1492

On the Ocean: The Mediterranean and the Atlantic from Prehistory to AD 1500

Daring to Be Free: Resistance and Rebellion in the Atlantic Slave World

Warrior Monks: Politics and Power in Medieval Britain

Crucible of Light: Islam and the forging of Europe from the 8th to the 21st Century

Revolting: A Riotous History of the World

Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower

We the People: A History of the US Constitution

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe

Queer Georgians: A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers and Homemakers

Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016

The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain

The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty

The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan

Three Rivers: The Hidden Histories of the Waterways That Made Europe

Artists of History: Churchill and de Gaulle - the Last Titans

Domination: The fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity

Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power

The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI and I

Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations

Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem: Frontier Inventiveness in the Age of the Crusades

Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea

Seven Rivers: A Journey Through the Currents of Human History

Carthage: A new history of an ancient empire

King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East

Goliath's Curse: A Deep History of Societal Collapse and What it Means for Our Future

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes

The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court

A Guide to Hillforts of Britain, An Aerial View: The Legacy of the Iron Age Dobunni Tribe

...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!