Here’s something that should be obvious but apparently isn’t: the best historical fiction and the best epic fantasy are doing the same thing.

Both build worlds from the ground up. Both ask readers to inhabit a place with unfamiliar rules, customs, and power structures. Both require authors who can make a foreign reality feel lived-in, logical, and true.

So why do readers treat them like separate kingdoms?

The Shared Craft

Think about what makes great epic fantasy work. The world-building. The political intrigue. The sense that every character exists inside a larger system of power, culture, and belief. The attention to how people actually live: what they eat, what they wear, what they believe, who they fear.

Now think about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Or Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Or Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles.

Same skills. Same ambitions. Different shelves.

A fantasy author invents a feudal system and populates it with factions, alliances, and betrayals. A historical fiction author researches a real feudal system and does the same thing. The reader experience is remarkably similar: immersion in a complex world where the stakes feel enormous and the details feel real.

The Wall Between Shelves

Genre boundaries exist for practical reasons (bookstores need categories), but they create artificial barriers in readers’ minds. Fantasy readers who devour Abercrombie’s political machinations might never pick up C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake series, even though both deliver intricate Tudor-era (or Tudor-adjacent) scheming.

Historical fiction readers who love the scope of Edward Rutherfurd’s multi-generational sagas might never try Tad Williams, even though Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn scratches the exact same itch with the addition of magic.

The wall is arbitrary. And it costs readers on both sides.

Where They Diverge (And Where They Don’t)

The obvious difference: fantasy has magic. Historical fiction has, well, history.

But that distinction is thinner than it looks.

Historical fiction authors routinely take liberties with the historical record. They invent characters, compress timelines, imagine conversations that never happened. They create a version of history that serves the story. That’s world-building by another name.

Fantasy authors, meanwhile, draw constantly on real history for inspiration. Martin’s Westeros is the Wars of the Roses. Kuang’s The Poppy War is the Second Sino-Japanese War. Guy Gavriel Kay has built an entire career on taking real historical periods and adding just enough magic to call them fantasy.

Kay might be the perfect bridge between genres. His books are meticulously researched historical novels wearing fantasy costumes. If you read The Lions of Al-Rassan and tell me it isn’t historical fiction, I’ll argue with you, but I won’t be able to prove you wrong.

A Reading List for Border-Crossers

If you love fantasy and want to try historical fiction:

• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (political intrigue that rivals anything in Westeros)
• Shogun by James Clavell (epic scope, foreign world, culture shock as plot engine)
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (cathedral-building as world-building)
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves (unreliable narrator, palace intrigue, poison)

If you love historical fiction and want to try fantasy:

• The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay (Moorish Spain with a whisper of magic)
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (court politics, zero gore)
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (if you like your politics with a sci-fi edge)
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Napoleonic England meets faerie)

Tear Down the Wall

The best readers are omnivores. The best stories resist easy categorization. And the best thing you can do for your reading life is walk into the section of the bookstore you never visit and pick up something that looks interesting.

Historical fiction and epic fantasy aren’t distant cousins. They’re siblings who grew up in the same house and ended up in different zip codes. It’s time for a family reunion.