In the last couple of weeks, a couple of emails about forthcoming books hit my inbox, prompting the subject of this post. I saw this novel, May Cobb’s All the Little Houses, on Readworthy from BookBub’s List of the Best Historical Mysteries for January:
The same day, Penguin Random House sent out a website link with their Most Anticipated Historical Fiction for 2026. The books offer an assortment of time periods and locales, including Colson Whitehead’s latest, due out in July.
Both are described as set in the 1980s.
A 50-year rule is often used to define historical fiction (that is to say, fiction set at least 50 years before the time of writing), but individual readers may prefer a shorter (or longer) window. The Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards have been working with a different definition for some time; while I don’t know exactly what their limits are, their Historical Fiction category winners and nominees have included books set in the ‘80s (Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere, 2025 winner) and even the ‘90s (Janelle Brown’s What Kind of Paradise, 2025 nominee; Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto is Back, 2022 winner).
The people making those categorizations are probably from a younger generation than I am.
Technically, even if you do go by the 50-year rule, the 1980s are approaching fast in historical fiction’s rear-view mirror. The year 1976 was fifty years ago. At the same time, going by the comments on a post I’d written last summer about a current historical fiction trend, for some of those who lived through and remember the ‘60s, it can be hard to accept that that era now fits within the standard HF umbrella.
Along these lines, I read a recent post on Leigh Stein’s Attention Economy Substack with great interest. She writes how today’s readers are seeking escape (given current events from 2026, who can blame them?), and editors at publishing houses want to deliver. And their desire for when to escape to can be generational. To quote:
The historical fiction market is evolving. The next time you’re in Barnes and Noble, count how many historical novels you can find. The golden era of World War II novels with covers depicting women walking away with planes overhead is over […]
When I think of historical fiction, I am always thinking of the age of the reader, and whether she’s reading to understand the era that shaped her mother, or whether she’s reading for nostalgia. A baby boomer in 2015 picked up a World War II novel to read about a time when her parents were young adults. The younger boomers and the older Gen Xers are reading Lessons in Chemistry and Kristin Hannah’s The Women.
Aging millennials have Atmosphere (set in the 1980s, when our moms were our age!) and they are also experiencing the onset of nostalgia: see Deep Cuts, which opens in 2000. I know it’s painful to think of the 2000s as “historical” because you’re still twenty-seven in your heart, but as millennials proceed through their forties, we’re going to see more nostalgia for the 2000s and 2010s.
For me, a solid Gen Xer, the 1980s would be my “nostalgia” decade. There are many disastrous events of national or international significance from that time; the '80s included the AIDS crisis, Chernobyl, and the Challenger explosion (sadly 40 years ago this week; I was one of many kids home from school that day who saw it live on TV). But when it comes to the pop culture that characterized the '80s, I can understand “nostalgia” better. We had mixtapes, MTV, great movies, video games that seem so rudimentary compared to what we have now, the freedom to play outside unsupervised as long as we were home by dinner (my friends and I rode our bikes for miles), Flashdance-style sweatshirts and leg warmers, the days of BITNET (a precursor to the web) when everything was text-based and took forever but was still fun since it was so new. The big hair, shoulder pads, and peer pressure are things I kind of hated, but they’re hallmarks of the time for me, like it or not.
(One reason the '80s will never die is because of all the hair spray holding them in place.)
I can understand the appeal of reading novels set in the '80s even though, mixed in with all the fashion excesses and pop culture, fiction for adults—rather than the YA I was back then—tends to deal with more complex topics. Like the bigger political and social events mentioned above. Plus we have the winding down of the Cold War, which caused widespread optimism at the end of the '80s; the ups and downs of yuppie culture; the early '80s recession; and women gaining political power. Back then, Roe v. Wade was still in effect, we had little to no digital presence to be constantly tracked, and we weren't glued to our cell phones. In short, times were very different.
A few months ago, I’d reviewed a novel, Tamar Shapiro’s Restitution, that moved between the 1950s, 1989, and the early 2000s, about a family both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was eye-opening to see that middle period – which I lived through but didn’t impact me personally – through a new lens.
This is all worth considering when envisioning the factors that drive trends in historical fiction. Even if they don’t seem all that long ago, the ‘80s are coming for readers, and they’ve already started to land. Do you feel ready?
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