This year, there have been dozens of first-rate historical novels — so many that choosing even the 25 best would have been a chore. Which makes it that much harder to whittle the list down to 10. After much regretful tossing, here’s my roster, arranged alphabetically.

ABSOLUTION, by Alice McDermott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pp., $28). You don’t expect to find a McDermott heroine — a woman steeped in the Irish Catholicism of New York and its suburbs — in a place as foreign as Southeast Asia. But you do expect to find her assessing the intricacies of guilt and responsibility wherever she might be. And among the wives of American expatriates in 1963 Saigon, watching the Vietnam hostilities intensify, there’s quite a lot to assess — particularly when it comes to the complicated and compromised leader of this group of women.

THE FRAUD, by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press, 454 pp., $29). Smith’s title refers to a bizarre, long-drawn-out inheritance trial that captivated late-19th-century Britain and incited much argument about honesty and class loyalty. It’s also a sly dig at William Ainsworth, a once-popular, real-life novelist (swiftly eclipsed by his friend Charles Dickens) whose tartly observant, aspiring novelist housekeeper, Eliza Touchet, is drawn to the trial’s key witness. Formerly enslaved on a Jamaican plantation, Andrew Bogle is now a resolute defender of the clearly fraudulent plaintiff.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE, by James McBride (Riverhead, 385 pp., $28). A chorus of rambunctious voices pulls McBride’s readers back to a down-at-the-heels community of African Americans and immigrant Jews living together in the mid-1950s in Chicken Hill, a neighborhood on the fringes of a small Pennsylvania town whose intolerant citizens barely acknowledge their existence. A bighearted Jewish shopkeeper’s suspicious death and a hard-working Black child’s brush with the law are the pivots for a deeply engaging plot. Looming on the horizon is Pennhurst, a once-feared asylum with conditions so dreadful it was called “the shame of Pennsylvania.”

THE HOUSE OF DOORS, by Tan Twan Eng (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $28.99). Inspired by W. Somerset Maugham’s sojourn in 1920s Malaya, Eng’s narrative sets the secrets and subterfuges of his hosts, a married couple firmly entrenched in the gossip-prone European colony on the island of Penang, against the esteemed British writer’s desperate attempt to salvage his dwindling finances by writing about a scandalous murder case. Background tension is provided by the political maneuverings of the local Chinese, many of whom have clandestinely supported Sun Yat-sen’s independence movement.

KANTIKA, by Elizabeth Graver (Metropolitan, 287 pp., $27.99). This account of one extended family’s tumultuous exile is a fictional riff on the life of the author’s maternal grandmother. The novel begins among the Sephardic elite of early-20th-century Istanbul, whose sense of security (not to mention their fortune) vanishes with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and it finishes in the 1950s in the polyglot neighborhoods of Queens, where some of them have finally found refuge. Along the way, there are stops amid the precarious bustle of émigré enclaves in 1930s Barcelona and Havana.

NORTH WOODS, by Daniel Mason (Random House, 372 pp., $28). An inventive pastiche of history and fabulation set on a densely forested property in western Massachusetts. The land remains true to itself, but as the centuries pass its inhabitants are a diverse and ever-changing lot: a pair of lovers escaping the Puritan colony, a Revolutionary-era soldier-turned-apple-grower, twin sisters locked in a deadly rivalry, a sexually thwarted painter. Enhanced by poems, ballads, letters, real estate listings and even medical case notes, the narrative progresses up to the present. Yet the natural world — embodied by a wild creature that may or may not be a ghostly catamount — continues to withhold crucial mysteries from the people who seek to tame it.

RIVER SPIRIT, by Leila Aboulela (Grove, 311 pp., $27). The hypocrisies of colonialism and religious fanaticism are explored from many perspectives in this kaleidoscopic portrait of late-19th-century Sudan. When a charismatic leader claiming to be the Mahdi, prophesied as the redeemer of Islam, rallies an army of malcontents and true believers that rampages throughout the countryside, old bonds and old certainties are imperiled, and then smashed to bits. The intrepid young woman at the center of the story is caught up in the resultant turmoil, sold into slavery yet determined to be reunited in Khartoum with the scholar she has come to see as her personal savior.

SOUTH, by Mario Fortunato. Translated by Julia MacGibbon (Other Press, 384 pp., paper, $18.99). The forces of both world wars and Italy’s seemingly endless political turmoil buffet the members of two eccentric bourgeois clans in Fortunato’s archly observed family saga. The novel’s very different small-town Calabrian patriarchs (known only as the Notary and the Pharmacist) preside over a teeming cast in which the servants and hangers-on often vie for center stage. It is, as Fortunato’s omniscient narrator observes, “like a page out of Proust but without any aristocrats.”

THIS OTHER EDEN, by Paul Harding (Norton, 221 pp., $28). Malaga Island was first settled in the late 18th century by a formerly enslaved Black man and his white wife, and over the years it became a refuge for outcasts of different races and conditions. In 1912, its people were forcibly evicted by the state of Maine, and their homes destroyed. Some were sent to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, while the rest were dumped on the mainland and told never to return to the island. From this tragic event, Harding (a previous winner of the Pulitzer Prize) has created a devastatingly lyrical fictional portrait of a tight-knit community dismissed as degenerate by those who would “save” it. With heartbreaking empathy, he evokes their daily rhythms, their fears and fascinations and, above all, their improvised harmony with both the sea and one another.

THE WITCHING TIDE, by Margaret Meyer (Scribner, 327 pp., $28). Martha Hallybread, the midwife heroine of Meyer’s first novel, leads a precarious existence: Unable to speak, she communicates via an improvised system of gestures as she plies her trade and wanders the fields collecting an array of healing herbs. How, then, to protect herself and the household she serves when her East Anglian village is caught up in the feverish mid-17th-century hunt for hidden servants of the devil? Meyer’s painstaking research into this period of mass hysteria yields a tension-filled narrative dominated by an impassive stranger known as the witchfinder and his ever-so-proper (and ever-so-cruel) female aide. From one day to the next, friends become enemies and innocent gestures become signs of depravity. No one is safe; everyone is suspect.