fiction · doorways in time
Pick a moment in history
Every doorway here earned its place by demand — millions of copies sold, tens of millions of listens. Step through one and follow characters who lived it.
Occupied Europe, 1939–1945
The Civilian War
Ordinary lives inside occupation, resistance and the machinery of propaganda.
All the Light We Cannot See · 15.2M copies · 200+ weeks on the NYT list
England, 1520s–1550s
The Tudor Court
Cromwell's England: power exercised through paperwork, surveillance and belief.
Wolf Hall (trilogy) · 5M+ copies · 41 languages · double Booker
Rome, 133–27 BC
The Fall of the Republic
How the world's most successful republic talked itself into one-man rule.
Emperor series · 3M+ copies across the early series
France & Europe, 1789–1815
Revolution & Napoleon
From the storming of the Bastille to Waterloo: hope, terror and the first celebrity general.
A Tale of Two Cities · ~200M copies by common estimate
England, 12th century
The Cathedral Builders
Civil war overhead, a two-hundred-year building project underway regardless.
The Pillars of the Earth · ~27M copies · Kingsbridge series 50M+
Persia & Europe, 11th–14th century
Medicine & Forbidden Knowledge
A Christian student in Isfahan, a poisoned library, and the plague that broke a civilisation.
The Physician · 10M+ copies · a phenomenon across Europe
Sengoku Japan at the moment of contact
Japan, 1600
An English pilot shipwrecked into a civilisation that owes Europe nothing.
Shōgun · ~15M lifetime · 2024 FX remake re-proved the demand
Mexico, 1519–1521
Cortés & Moctezuma
Six hundred men, an empire of millions, and the collision that made the modern world.
Aztec · NYT bestseller of its year
Europe, June–August 1914
Sarajevo, 1914
One wrong turn by a driver, and the machinery of alliances did the rest.
All Quiet on the Western Front · 20M+ copies, the interwar mega-seller
Vietnam & America, 1965–1975
Vietnam & the Home Front
The nurses, the protests, the homecoming nobody planned for.
The Women · Publishers Weekly's #1 book of 2024 · 1M copies in seven weeks
America, 1861 onward
The Civil War & Its Afterlives
The war, the freedom it promised, and the century-long fight over what it meant.
Gone with the Wind · 30M+ copies
Ice Age Europe, ~30,000 years ago
The First of Us
Two human species share a frozen continent. Only one of them has needles.
The Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth's Children) · 45M+ copies worldwide