Ten top counter-factual novels

D.J. Taylor is a novelist, critic, and biographer whose Orwell won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. His most recent books are Kept; Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation; Ask Alice; Derby Day, which was nominated for the Booker Prize and was selected as a Washington Post Best Book of the Year; and the newest novel, The Windsor Faction.

For the Guardian he named his top ten counter-factual novels, including:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (2007)

Another version of mid-century American history in which Roosevelt neither loses to Lindbergh nor signs a peace treaty but recommends that a Jewish state should be established not in Israel but Alaska ("Alyeska"). Cue an inspired criminal caper, written in the style of 1940s noir, in which detective Meyer Landsman pursues a murder enquiry back to what looks like a Jewish version of the mafia.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is one of Molly Driscoll's top six alternate-history novels.

--Marshal Zeringue