The best historical fiction serves two purposes: to entertain and enlighten, and to inspire readers to search out histories, biographies, and other nonfiction books to learn what’s real and what the novelist has imagined. Here are some particularly well-researched, well-written historical novels, many set in places far from the United States:

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British.

Indu Sundaresan, in her debut novel The Twentieth Wife, tells the fictionalized saga of Mehrunnisa, the beautiful daughter of a Persian refugee, who becomes the twentieth and most beloved wife of the emperor Jahangir of seventeenth-century Mughal India.

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Cousins Isabel and Amal piece together the story of Anna Winterbourne, Isabel’s English great-grandmother, who traveled to Egypt one hundred years ago and fell in love with an Egyptian nationalist, in The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif.

Amitav Ghosh’s multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma.

Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez is based on the true story of the political killing of three sisters—Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa Mirabal, known by their political pseudonym Las Mariposas (“The Butterflies”)—who fought the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is the fictional biography of the first premier of Newfoundland, and his often difficult relationship with his one true love, historian and writer Shelagh Fielding.

Thomas Flanagan’s magnificent trilogy—The Year of the French; The Tenants of Time; and The End of the Hunt—traces the bloody course of Irish history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

In Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal, a search in 1855 for a lost Arctic expedition leads the naturalist Erasmus Darwin Wells on a journey of self-discovery.