Based in North America

Some great North American historical fiction:

Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati
Much touted by its publicist, this first novel features Englishwoman Elizabeth Middleton, who hardly expects to fall for an American frontiersman when she travels to the New World.

Dawn on a Distant Shore by Sara Donati (Post Revolutionary America & Scotland)
When Elizabeth Bonner, fresh from childbirth, learns that her husband, Nathaniel, and his father are imprisoned in Montreal, she embarks on a voyage to save them with her infant twins, her stepdaughter, freed slave Curiosity Freeman, and Mohawk Indian Runs-from-Bears. Before returning home, she loses and regains her children; sees her husband shot; witnesses piracy, kidnapping and murder; and sails to Scotland as part of a scheme to save the land of a laird.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (Civil War, North Carolina)
Cold Mountain, a debut novel that tells the extraordinary story of a soldier's perilous journey back to his beloved at the end of the Civil War, made publishing history when it received unprecedented critical acclaim and went on to sell more than three million copies.

Cape Fear Rising by Philip Gerard (19th Century, Wilmington, NC)
Sam Jenks comes to Wilmington – in 1898 the largest city in North Carolina – to work for the local newspaper. He and his wife, Gray Ellen, find a city in the throes of racial conflict. A small minority of the white citizens, greatly outnumbered by the generally middle-class black population, feels threatened by that group's growing power. In revenge, they arrange for bands of armed men to attack the mainly innocent and defenseless black populace. Thousands of the survivors, along with their white supporters, flee the city, never to return.

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon by Kaye Gibbons (Civil War, Raleigh)
Emma Garnett Tate was born before the Civil War, and before her long life is over (she tells this story from the vantage point of old age), she'll head north and marry a Boston Lowell. Emma's father is, predictably, astonishingly cruel to his family and slaves alike, her mother longsuffering, and Emma herself "too eager to know matters that would do her no good in making a marriage."

Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan (Mexican-American War)
This full-scale novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo weaves in a love story between an American naturalist and a widow innkeeper who, along with her 16-year-old son, get swept up in the harrowing events of the heroic battle.

Nowhere Else on Earth by Josephine Humphreys (Lumbee Indians, Civil War, North Carolina)
In the summer of 1864, 16-year-old Rhoda Strong lives in the Lumbee Indian settlement of Robeson County, North Carolina, which has become a pawn in the bloody struggle between the Union and Confederate armies. The community is besieged by the marauding Union Army as well as the desperate Home Guard, who are hell-bent on conscripting the young men into deadly forced labor. Daughter of a Scotsman and his formidable Lumbee wife, Rhoda is fiercely loyal to her family and desperately fears for their safety, but her love for the outlaw hero Henry Berry Lowrie forces her to cast her lot with danger.

Hearts and Bones by Margaret Lawrence
Independent Hannah Trevor is a midwife in the small Maine town of Rufford several years after the end of the Revolutionary War. In the dead of a particularly brutal winter, an horrific act – the rape and murder of a young wife – draws Hannah into the constabulary's investigation and threatens to destroy everything she holds dear. Now an honorable man has been accused of the crime – Hannah's former lover, the father of her illegitimate daughter.

Blood Red Roses by Margaret Lawrence (Post Revolutionary America)
Eighteenth-century midwife Hannah Trevor, who gave birth to her deaf daughter some 10 months after her husband, a British sympathizer, left town, struggles to make ends meet in Rufford, Maine. Amid unrest due to heavy taxation, Hannah and others – including her married lover – discover a murder victim who turns out to be her long-thought-dead husband. Suspicion naturally falls on Hannah, already faced with losing her daughter to the courts.

Jacob's Ladder by Donald McCaig (Civil War, Virginia)
Duncan Gatewood, 17 and heir to Gatewood Plantation, falls in love with Maggie, a mulatto slave, who conceives a son, Jacob. Maggie and Jacob are sold south, and Duncan is packed off by his irate father to the Virginia Military Institute. Another Gatewood slave, Jesse – whose love for Maggie is unrequited – escapes to find her and is sheltered by a young white couple, who are sentenced to prison for this crime. Jesse finds his freedom and enlists in Mr. Lincoln's army; in time he will confront his former masters.

Boone's Lick by Larry McMurtry (19th-Century American West)
Boone's Lick abounds with the incidents, the excitements, and the dangers of life on the plains. Its huge cast of characters includes such historical figures as Wild Bill Hickok and the unfortunate Colonel Fetterman (whose arrogance and ineptitude led to one of the U.S. Army's worst and bloodiest defeats at the hands of the Cheyenne and Sioux) as well as the Cecil family (itself based on a real family of 19th-century traders and haulers). The story of their trek in pursuit of Dick, and the discovery of his second and third families, is told with brilliance, humor and overwhelming joie de vivre in a novel that is at once high adventure, a perfect western tale and a moving love story – it is, in short, vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the west, and his unrivaled eye for the telling detail. Boone's Lick is one of McMurtry's richest works of fiction to date.

Gone for Soldiers by Jeff Shaara (Mexican-American War)
This is Shaara's successful prequel to his father Michael's Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel, The Killer Angels. Many of the same characters inhabit its pages but before their allegiances have been fatally strained by the tensions of an impending Civil War. The protagonists are Gen. Winfield Scott, who created our first modern army, and young engineer Robert E. Lee, being tested for the first time as soldier and leader in the little-known Mexican War. Add Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Jeb Stuart, Joe Johnston, Beauregarde, Mexican general Santa Anna – what a cast of characters! The book is simply wonderful, populated with eminently human heroes who are called upon to perform Herculean tasks in a war muddied beyond redemption by the ambitions of back-home and battlefield politicians.

Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara
As The Last Full Measure opens, Gettysburg is past, and the war advances to its third brutal year. On the Union side, the gulf between the politicians in Washington and the generals in the field yawns ever wider. Never has the cumbersome Union Army so desperately needed a decisive, hard-nosed leader. It is at this critical moment that Lincoln places Ulysses S. Grant in command – and turns the tide of war. For Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg was an unspeakable disaster – compounded by the shattering loss of the fiery Stonewall Jackson two months before. Lee knows better than anyone that the South cannot survive a war of attrition. But with the total devotion of his generals – Longstreet, Hill, Stuart – and his unswerving faith in God, Lee is determined to fight to the bitter end.

Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara (American Civil War)
Shaara, whose father, Michael Shaara, won the Pulitzer in 1975 for his Civil War saga The Killer Angels, penned this prequel, which spent 14 weeks on PW's bestseller list.

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (Battle of Gettysburg)
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war. The Killer Angels is unique, sweeping, unforgettable – a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America's destiny.

These is My Words by Nancy E. Turner (19th-Century Arizona)
As a child, a fiery young woman, and finally a caring mother, Sarah forges a life as full and as fascinating as our deepest needs, our most secret hopes and our grandest dreams. She rides Indian-style and shoots with deadly aim, greedily devours a treasure trove of leatherbound books, downs fire, flood, Comanche raids and other mortal perils with the unique courage that forged the character of the American West. Rich in authentic details of daily life and etched with striking character portraits of very different pioneer families, this action-packed novel is also the story of a powerful, enduring love between Sarah and the dashing cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot.