This has been a banner year for historical fiction and it’s not over yet. Here, for your holiday consideration, are six recently published historical novels that would make fine gifts — or fine rewards when you reach the end of that long shopping list.

Even if you’re not familiar with the work of W. Somerset Maugham, Tan Twan Eng’s THE HOUSE OF DOORS (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $28.99) will draw you into its mesh of secrets and subterfuge. Inspired by the esteemed British writer’s sojourn in 1920s Malaya, it sets Maugham’s increasingly tense romantic relationship with his male “secretary” against the clandestine infidelities of his hosts, Robert and Lesley, a married couple firmly entrenched in the gossip-prone European colony on the island of Penang. Background tension arrives via the political maneuverings of the local Chinese, courting danger through their support of Sun Yat-sen’s independence movement. But what piques the author’s interest is the tale of a scandalous trial in which Lesley’s best friend was charged with murdering a man whom the best friend, in turn, accused of attempted rape.

“Why is it,” Lesley demands, “that when you men make sacrifices it’s always we women who must suffer the most?”

The female characters in Ye Chun’s STRAW DOGS OF THE UNIVERSE (Catapult, 336 pp., $27) would agree with that sentiment. Sixiang’s father fled the famine-plagued Chinese countryside for the prospect of work and wealth in post-Civil War California. Early on, Guifeng sent money home to his wife and daughter; then nothing. The only trace of him that remained was a rumpled photograph.