Publishing Company Blog | Can you recommend historical fiction for children and teenagers which isn't about the world wars?

There are so many great children's books about the first and second world war, but what about bringing alive the rest of British history? The Book Doctor has some great ideas

I'm all for my children knowing about history but I'm concerned that they spend so much time studying the two world wars and reading fiction relating to them that they think that is all that happened in the past. Obviously that is especially true this year but it could go on for another four years! Can you recommend some good peacetime books which will show children what living at other times in the past might have been like?

The two world wars affected so many people of all ages that it is no surprise that the stories about their experiences provide the background for so many outstanding books for children.

Any war or any other change to a whole population's lives such as a major natural disaster, makes an exciting and unpredictable background for a story: more unexpected things can happen especially for children as the chances are that humdrum family life will be turned upside down.

But you are right to look beyond them as is there is a wealth of wonderful historical fiction for children which bring alive the rest of British history – and not even just other wars lost and won.

In her many novels, Rosemary Sutcliff charted the making of Britain from the simple living of the upland shepherds of the Bronze Age in Warrior Scarlet to Elizabethan England in The Queen Elizabeth Story. She concentrated particularly on Roman Britain reflecting the many attitudes and experiences around the coming together of different cultures as the Romans and the indigenous population learned to live together and to blend their two very different ways of life.

In a loose series of titles which includes The Eagle of the Ninth and Dawn Wind Rosemary Sutcliff writes of Romano-British occupation and skirmish but she also details the home life of both sides describing the cooking, weaving and celebrations of the British tribes and the more advanced home comforts of the Roman invaders such as the installation of central heating in their villas.

Geoffrey Trease is deliberately radical in Cue for Treason, his Cumbrian-set story about how the peasants took the law into their own hands when their rapacious landlord attempted to enclose the fields and make them his own.

In his vivid and atmospheric adventures such as Devil in the Fog and Smith Leon Garfield also stands up for the poor as he uncovers the class divides of the eighteenth century and the untrustworthy nature of some of those who look the most respectable. Garfield's characters, typically children living on the margins of society, learn to shift for themselves as they survive poverty and manage to keep on the right side of the often less than moral law makers.

In different ways, Jill Paton Walsh's A Parcel of Patterns, Berlie Doherty's Children of Winter and Sally Nicholls's All Fall Down all bring alive the horrors of the plague and the terrible choices it forced individuals and communities to make.

Recent social history is well-represented, too: Adèle Geras's Lizzie's Wish tells of a young woman's desire to become a woman gardener – not something that was accepted at the time – inspired by the newly-opened Kew Gardens.

John Rowe Townsend's Noah's Castle, published in 1974 gives a sharp eyed and only little embroidered picture of how people reacted to the economic depression of the time with many hoarding supplies and fortifying their homes. In it, Barry has to choose. Will he support his father's endless efforts to protect his own or work for the greater good and help others?

And finally, set a decade later and already famous on screen and stage, Melvin Burgess's version of Lee Hall's Billy Elliot brings the ferocious struggle of the miners' strike in the 1980s alive for readers.