Great Alternative History Novels Book List

Enjoy books that explore how the world would be if history did not happen exactly how it did? Want to explore an alternate time line for our world? Check out this book list...



1) "Fatherland: A Novel" by Robert Harris

Fatherland is set in an alternative world where Hitler has won the Second World War. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb.

As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich. And, with the Gestapo just one step behind, March, together with an American journalist, is caught up in a race to discover and reveal the truth -- a truth that has already killed, a truth that could topple governments, a truth that will change history.

2) "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.

3) "Dominion" by C.J. Sansom

1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany. The global economy strains against the weight of the long German war against Russia still raging in the east. The British people find themselves under increasingly authoritarian rule--the press, radio, and television tightly controlled, the British Jews facing ever greater constraints.

But Churchill's Resistance soldiers on. As defiance grows, whispers circulate of a secret that could forever alter the balance of the global struggle. The keeper of that secret? Scientist Frank Muncaster, who languishes in a Birmingham mental hospital. Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, a spy for the Resistance and University friend of Frank's, is given the mission to rescue Frank and get him out of the country. Hard on his heels is Gestapo agent Gunther Hoth, a brilliant, implacable hunter of men, who soon has Frank and David's innocent wife, Sarah, directly in his sights.

4) "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth

In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history.
In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

5) "SS-GB: Nazi-Occupied Britain 1941" by Len Deighton

SS-GB deals with life in Nazi-occupied Great Britain, about one year after the German Army successfully overruns the British Isles.

6) "The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson

It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur–the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if? What if the plague killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been–a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt.

This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world’s greatest scientific minds–in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions and Christianity is merely a historical footnote.

Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson renders an immensely rich tapestry. Rewriting history and probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power, and even love on such an Earth. From the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Western Hemisphere, from the age of Akbar to the present and beyond, here is the stunning story of the creation of a new world.

7) "In Allah We Trust" by Colin J.G. Johnson

America under Islam? A compelling thriller based in a world with an alternate history. In this alternate world Christianity thrives in the Middle East, while Islam is the dominant faith in Europe and the Americas.

William Ramsay is a Captain in the US Army engaged in the battle against Christian insurgents and terrorists waging a crusade against the United States, Europe and other western Islamic countries.

Sent to Afghanistan to investigate mysterious rows of holes being dug in the ground, he discovers these are being made by Afghan boys digging out depleted uranium bullets. Strafing runs by American A-10 aircraft have left millions of these spent bullets in Afghanistan. Fearing the depleted uranium will be shaped into armour piercing penetrators, Ramsay tracks those collecting the bullets. Following them to a foundry in Pakistan he finds that, instead of being turned into round shaped armour penetrators, the bullets are being melted and cast into brick sized ingots.

Ramsay and his team race to discover who is making the uranium ingots, and what they plan to do with them.