Agincourt
By Bernard Cornwell

Harper, 451 pp., $27.99

Here's a nifty curriculum proposal. When students study Shakespeare's Henry V with its famous "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers" speech, they should also read Bernard Cornwell's Agincourt for background. The reigning king of historical fiction (Y-chromosome division) depicts the events leading up to the famous battle on Oct. 25, 1415, when a smaller English army defeated the French. Cornwell's central character is Nicholas Hook, an outlaw English archer. But the real star is the savage nature of 15th-century warfare. Cities are sacked, throats slit, fingers chopped off. Ah, chivalry. —Deirdre Donahue

Germania
By Brendan McNally

Simon & Schuster, 371 pp., $26

Brendan McNally, a former journalist, mixes history and dark comedy in his debut novel mostly set in spring of 1945, before and after Adolf Hitler's suicide. The dark comedy is supplied by an astonishing set of German Jewish quadruplets McNally imagines. Before the war, they performed as the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers, singers, dancers, acrobats and hypnotists. During the war, they use paranormal powers in clandestine efforts that bring them in contact with top Nazi leaders. The novel re-creates an obscure slice of German history: the three- week reign of Grand Admiral Karl Donitz as Hitler's successor. — Bob Minzesheimer

Shannon
By Frank Delaney

Random House, 393 pp., $26

Frank Delaney (Ireland and Tipperary) returns to his native land in Shannon, a historical drama set in 1922, when civil war began spilling Irish blood. Shannon is Ireland's mighty river and the surname of an American priest who goes on a pilgrimage to the land of his ancestors. Father Robert Shannon is a shell-shocked World War I hero, his psychic wounds worsened by exposure to Boston's corrupt Catholic Diocese. As the priest meets all kinds of Irish people, both delightful and damaged, he's unaware of a plot in Boston to ensure he never returns. Delaney makes his lovely, battered country a character of its own. — Susan Kelly

Revelation
By C.J. Sansom

Viking, 550 pp., $26.95

C.J. Sansom will reaffirm your faith in publishing. The British writer is that amazing. P.D. James agrees: She ranks Sansom's 2003 Dissolution— a murder mystery set in Tudor England — among her top five crime novels. Now Matthew Shardlake, the star of Dissolution and two other historical mysteries, returns in Revelation. Here the hunchbacked lawyer confronts a serial killer obsessed with the Bible's Book of Revelation — and possibly with Henry VIII's sixth wife, Catherine Parr. Sansom again serves up a suspenseful plot, plus a feast of information about the period. It's a joy to read. And reread. — Donahue