Though H. Rider Haggard is today best remembered as one of the foremost figures in the action-adventure genre, he also produced several top-notch works of historical fiction in his time. Lysbeth unfolds in sixteenth-century Holland, where the Protestants in the region were subjected to brutal oppression and persecution at the hands of the Spanish. For an exhaustively researched account of this little-discussed period that will make you feel as if you’d lived through it yourself, give this gripping historical novel a read.