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Originally Posted by sunnysmiles
What about Taipan , Shogun I cannot think of the authors name.
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James Clavell. He's one of my dad's favourite authors, so I grew up reading his books. Very "thinly disguised non-fiction", with lots of real-life stuff woven into his Asian saga.
King Rat and
Shogun are not only excellent reads, but also a very good movie (with Alec Guiness) and TV miniseries (with Toshiro Mifune), respectively.
Noble House with Pierce Brosnan is also pretty decent.
Tai-Pan… well, not so much, despite the presence of Joan Chen, who's completely wasted in the role.
If the OP likes early US history,
Barbara Hambly's written quite a few.
There's
The Emancipator's Wife, which is about Mary Todd Lincoln and was shortlisted for a Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in a Civil War Novel, or whatever they call it, and
Patriot Hearts, about four prominent women attached to the early presidents: the wives of Washington, Madison, Adams, and Sally Heming for Thomas Jefferson.
Plus she's got two historical sleuth series: Benjamin January, with an ex-slave surgeon/musician in antebellum New Orleans, and under the pseudonym surname Hamilton, a new pre-Revolutionary colonial one with future First Lady Abigail Adams. The January series has very mild paranormal elements, however, which I think the OP didn't want? But it's just the barest trace: a couple of voodoo curses and maybe some precog/hauntings rather than full-on vampire/werewolf stuff.
Best recs: Emancipator's Wife and the January series, which I very highly recommend. The others are good, too, but don't quite reach the same heights, imho. For what it's worth, Hambly teaches history at a college somewhere in California, so she knows what she's doing.
And all the above books except for the first four of the January series are available in low-ish priced e-book editions from Random House, iirc, so you can probably pick them up for around $4-8 with a Kobo coupon if you've a compatible reader.
Oh, and for historical Ireland/England, you might want to try
Morgan Llywelyn. Excellent stuff from all time periods, though with a heavier focus on medieval/ancient. But she's got a couple of post-1700s books focusing on various aspects of Ireland and the Irish/English clash that are available as e-books from Tor/Macmillan.