ISSUE 109
HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW
August 2024
AUTHENTICALLY UNFAMILIAR
Alexander Manshel’s Writing Backwards | More on page 8
FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE ...
Such A Strange Place
A Conversation with M.T. Anderson
Page 10
Expect the Unexpected
Val McDermid's Queen Macbeth
Page 12
Reflections of Identity & History
Hall of Mirrors by John Copenhaver
Page 12
One Writer to Another
Molly Aitken on Directions a Story Can Take
Page 14
An Arthurian Road Trip
Giles Kristian's latest Arthurian Novel
Page 15
Historical Fiction Market News
Page 1
New Voices
Page 4
History & Film
Page 6
HISTORICAL NOVELS REVIEW
ISSN 1471-7492
Issue 109, August 2024 | © 2024 The Historical Novel Society
PUBLISHER
Richard Lee
Marine Cottage, The Strand, Starcross, Devon EX6 8NY UK <richard@historicalnovelsociety.org>
EDITORIAL BOARD
Managing Editor: Bethany Latham
Houston Cole Library, Jacksonville State University 700 Pelham Road North, Jacksonville, AL 36265-1602 USA <blatham@jsu.edu>
Book Review Editor: Sarah Johnson
Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University, 600 Lincoln Avenue, Charleston, IL 61920 USA <sljohnson2@eiu.edu>
Publisher Coverage: Bethany House; HarperCollins; IPG; Penguin Random House (all imprints); Severn House; Australian presses; and university presses
Features Editor: Lucinda Byatt
13 Park Road, Edinburgh, EH6 4LE UK <textline13@gmail.com>
New Voices Column Editor: Myfanwy Cook
47 Old Exeter Road, Tavistock, Devon PL19 OJE UK <myfanwyc@btinternet.com>
REVIEWS EDITORS, UK
Ben Bergonzi
<bergonziben@gmail.com>
Publisher Coverage: Birlinn/Polygon; Duckworth Overlook; Faber & Faber; Granta; HarperCollins UK; Little Brown; Orenda; Orion; Pan Macmillan; Simon & Schuster UK
Alan Fisk
<alan.fisk@alanfisk.com>
Publisher Coverage: Aardvark Bureau; Black and White; Bonnier Zaffre; Crooked Cat; Freight; Gallic; Honno; Karnac; Legend; Pushkin; Oldcastle; Quartet; Saraband; Seren; Serpent’s Tail
Edward James
<busywords_ed@yahoo.com>
Publisher Coverage: Arcadia; Atlantic Books; Bloomsbury; Canongate; Head of Zeus; Glagoslav; Hodder Headline (inc. Coronet, Hodder & Stoughton, NEL, Sceptre); John Murray; Pen & Sword; Robert Hale; Alma; The History Press
Ann Lazim
<annlazim@googlemail.com>
Publisher Coverage: All UK children’s historicals
Aidan Morrissey <aidankmorrissey@gmail.com>
Publisher Coverage: Allison & Busby; Canelo; Penguin Random House UK; Quercus
REVIEWS EDITORS, USA
Tracy Barrett <tracy.t.barrett@gmail.com>
Publisher Coverage: All North American children's historicals
Kate Braithwaite
<kate.braithwaite@gmail.com>
Publisher Coverage: Poisoned Pen Press; Skyhorse; Sourcebooks; and Soho
Peggy Kurkowski
<pegkurkowski@gmail.com>
Publisher Coverage: Bellevue; Blackstone; Bloomsbury; Casemate; Macmillan (all imprints); Grove/Atlantic; and Simon & Schuster (all imprints)
Janice Ottersberg
<jkottersberg@gmail.com>
Publisher Coverage: Amazon Publishing; Europa; Guernica; Hachette; Kensington; Pegasus; and W.W. Norton
REVIEWS EDITORS, INDIE
J. Lynn Else & Bonnie DeMoss <jlynn@historicalnovelsociety.org> <bonnie@historicalnovelsociety.org>
Publisher Coverage: all self- and subsidy-published novels
EDITORIAL POLICY & COPYRIGHT
Reviews, articles, and letters may be edited for reasons of space, clarity, and grammatical correctness. We will endeavour to reflect the authors’ intent as closely as possible, and will contact the authors for approval of any major change. We welcome ideas for articles, but have specific requirements to consider. Before submitting material, please contact the editor to discuss whether the proposed article is appropriate for Historical Novels Review. In all cases, the copyright remains with the authors of the articles. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the authors concerned.
MEMBERSHIP DETAILS
THE HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY was formed in 1997 to help promote historical fiction. We are an open society — if you want to get involved, get in touch.
MEMBERSHIP in the Historical Novel Society entitles members to all the year’s publications: four issues of Historical Novels Review, as well as exclusive membership benefits through the Society website. Back issues of Society magazines are also available. For current rates, please see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/members/join/
HISTORICAL FICTION MARKET NEWS
HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY EDITORIAL UPDATES
With this issue, two longtime reviews editors are departing the editorial team: Doug Kemp and Misty Urban. A big thanks to Doug and Misty for all their contributions to the magazine and their work with publishers and reviewers over many years, and fortunately we’ll continue to see their names in the magazine as reviewers. Doug’s role is being taken on by incoming UK reviews editor Aidan Morrissey, whose contact details are on the masthead. A lawyer by profession as well as a novelist, Aidan runs a fiction writers’ group based in South Shields, UK, and was the lead organizer for the HNS Durham conference in 2022.
NEW BOOKS BY HNS MEMBERS
If you’ve written a historical novel or nonfiction work published (or to be published) in April 2024 or after, send the following details to me at sljohnson2@eiu.edu or @readingthepast by October 7 to be featured here: author, title, publisher, release date, and a blurb of one sentence or less. Please edit your blurbs down to one sentence before submitting; space is limited, and concise blurbs are appreciated. Details will appear in the November 2024 issue of HNR. Submissions may be edited.
In Without the Thunder (Donovan Family Saga Book 4) by Gifford MacShane (self-published, Oct. 2023), an outcast society belle is banished to the Arizona Territory where she falls in love with a Navajo man; can they defeat the woman hell-bent on destroying their happiness?
In Victoria Vassari’s The Doublecross (Weehawken Studio Arts, Dec. 17, 2023), first in the White City Novellas set during Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, Pistol Pete, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, has been framed for murder, and his friends – Little Egypt, exotic dancer on the Midway Plaisance, and Max, Pete’s horse handler – are determined to find out who killed Pete’s inamorata, Annie Brennan, and Archie, Sol Bloom’s assistant. In Book Two, Diamonds in the Rough (Dec. 24, 2023), Little Egypt and her new schoolteacher friend, Lucy, decide to sample the fare at the White Horse Inn and end up with more than they bargained for, like stolen jewels, runaway heiresses, and murder.
Bruce Balfour’s The River of Eternity (Scribbling Gargoyle, Jan. 9) is the first novel in an ancient Egyptian historical epic thriller series based on the Harem Conspiracy assassination of Pharaoh Ramesses III in New Kingdom Egypt.
A tale of dark glamour and sisterhood, Queens of London by Heather Webb (Sourcebooks, Feb. 6) is a look at Britain’s first female crime syndicate, the ever-shifting meaning of justice, and the way women claim their power by any means necessary.
In The Better Half: A Novel of the Nevada Divorce Ranch Era by P.W. Borgman (Ash Canyon Press, Feb. 13), set in 1952, a
socialite’s only hope of escaping her abusive husband is a Nevada divorce, forcing her to return to the land she left behind as an Indian Boarding School runaway.
Daughters of Riga by Marian Exall (The Wild Rose Press, Feb. 28) traces the histories of two girls who meet at the Dutch consulate in Riga in 1940 and whose postwar lives are haunted by questions about what happened there.
David K. Wessel’s debut novel, Choosing Sides (Moonshine Cove, Mar. 7) tells the story of an ordinary family (the author’s own) torn apart by Hitler’s Germany and illustrates in moving prose the dilemma that everyday people faced as the forces of evil took control of their homeland in the 1930s – a time with many social and political parallels to today’s world.
The Civil War tore the country apart, but it also tore families too; while the men were away fighting, women were fighting their own battles at home. This story is told in Her Last Full Measure by Gail Combs Oglesby (MotownGirl Publishing, Mar. 24).
In Shannon St. Hilaire’s To Look Upon the Sun (Wild Sage Books, Apr. 10), set in pre-WWII Germany, 17-year-old Ilse’s only refuge looms in the form of a Nazi maternity program designed to propagate Aryan purity—but she has a secret: her baby’s father is Jewish.
Robert Lee Murphy’s Eagle Talons: The Iron Horse Chronicles—Book One (Audible, Apr. 11), narrated by Brian James Stenberg, is first in a trilogy (first released in hardcover by Five Star in 2014) about a young man’s triumphs and tribulations while helping build the first transcontinental railroad in the American West in the late 1860s.
History meets mystery in this suspenseful journey to find treasure; let present-day Nancy Caldwell lead you to it over the beaches, through the woodlands, and across the decades on old Cape Cod in Barbara Eppich Struna’s The Old Cape Map (Bestrunabooks, Apr. 3).
A captured witch prophesies 5 Tudor Age Queens will be murdered, but can the hunted become the hunter? in Jan Foster’s Destiny Arising (So Simple Published Media, Apr. 19), a thrilling historical fantasy.
Power and Obsession by Catherine McCullagh (Big Sky, May 1) is the gripping story of a young woman sent to spy on her SS boss by the resistance in the dark world of occupied London following Britain’s defeat in World War II — a world that the Germans plan to reshape under King Edward VIII and his American queen, Wallis, a plan the resistance will do anything to thwart.
The Trail of Blood by A. K. Nairn (Broken Man Books, May 13) is a twisty murder mystery, set in the brutal world of the Border reivers in 1516.
In Daniel Pugsley’s Saviour of Babylon (Self, May 14), when Bani learns his father King Hammurabi is ill, he must return to Babylon and prevent bloodshed between his brothers.
Hatfield 1677 by Laura C. Rader (Acorn Publishing LLC, May 21) tells the true tale of the 1677 Native American attack on Hatfield, Massachusetts, and the two men who tracked and rescued the captives taken.
Alice McVeigh’s Pride and Perjury (Warleigh Hall Press, May 30) includes twelve deliciously witty short stories inspired by Pride and Prejudice.
43 years of detailed research by author Angela Locke is the background to Tamarisk: Love and War in France (Top Hat, May 31), a powerful novel which evokes the French Resistance in the last year of the European war, the tragedies of the post-war world, all set against a haunting story of love and separation.
As told in The Sun Shines Even In Winter: A Novel of Invasion and Espionage In World War I by Mark E. Fisher (Extraordinary Tales Publishing, June 1), it’s 1914, and after the Germans invade Dieter’s home in Lille, France and imprison his family and fiancée in an internment camp, his uncle, a lieutenant-general in the Prussian army, tells him, “Spy for the Kaiser, and I’ll free them.”
In Leona Upton Illig’s Erawan: A Reckoning in Laos (Three Villages Media, LLC, June 7), Americans in post-war Laos discover that the stumbling block to a new U.S.-Lao rapprochement lies not in an external enemy, but within themselves.
A Sea of Spectres by Nancy Taber (Acorn Press, June 30) is a multiPOV multi-timeline novel in which, on the choppy coastline of Prince Edward Island, an ocean-phobic detective evades the deadly lure of a phantom ship by delving into her family’s history and harnessing her matrilineal powers of premonition.
Debbie Wastling’s The Soundtrack of Their Lives (Bell Publishing, July 1), a family saga of working-class folk from Hull, East Yorkshire, is a musical heart-wrenching novel about family pain; it starts the longlasting grudges of a dysfunctional family, with the bombing of the city being the least of their problems.
As Napoleon rises from the ashes of the French Revolution, one woman dares to spy against him: Book Three of the Château de Verzat series pulls Geneviève, a fearless and resilient fighter, from the vineyard to the front lines in Debra Borchert’s Her Own War (Le Vin Press, July 14).
In Running in the Shadows by Skye Alexander (Level Best/Historia, Aug), jazz singer Lizzie Crane is looking forward to performing at a 1926 spring equinox gala hosted by a wealthy art collector, until she discovers the body of a talented artist tied to a tree and shot full of arrows––and police think Lizzie’s best friend murdered him.
In Beth Ford’s In the Time of Spirits (Independently published, Aug. 6), when devout spiritualist Addy marries a medium in 1890s America, she has to confront the possibility that what she believes is fake – and that her husband may even be a criminal.
Set during WWII, in The Seventh Room by Nicola Bell (Independently published, Aug.), Book 1 of Ishtar’s Gate, a young midwife joins the SOE to set Europe ablaze, an Oxford graduate infiltrates the German General Staff only to become involved with the ill-fated German Resistance, and a maverick spymaster with his eyes fixed on the veiled menace of the Soviets puts them both into play in the stone-cold crucible of Colditz Castle.
In Liz Harris’s The Silken Knot (Heywood Press, Sept. 5), the day in 1948 that Iris Hammond married Pierre Rousseau and moved to live with him in Dinan, Brittany, was the first time she’d met Pierre; both Pierre and Iris were soon to discover that their expectations of the marriage differed greatly.
Caught in the terrible winds of history, Tom Canty, the pauper from Mark Twain’s classic The Prince and the Pauper, now a teen, knows only a boy with his wily skills can aid his best friend, King Edward VI, and rescue his first love, Lady Jane Grey, in Frederic Fahey’s The
Scoundrel’s Son (Goose River Press, Sept. 15).
Set in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Mila Evanovich’s No Bread Tomorrow (Independently published, Sept.) unravels against the backdrop of political unrest, the Third Reich’s invasion, and three sisters harboring secrets so dangerous that, if discovered, could lead to their swift demise.
In Molly Green’s Courage for the Cabinet Girl (Avon/HarperCollins, Sept. 24), Katie Valentine, a secretary, is transferred to the secret underground Cabinet War Rooms where Mr Churchill is directing the war to achieve victory at all costs.
Elizabeth Boyle’s O Little Town of Bethlehem (Independently published, Oct. 1) brings to life a heartwarming story of three women who find empowerment, redemption, and the healing balm of friendship found in a small, turn of the century town lost in time.
In Deborah Lee Prescott’s Taken Away (Dorrance Publishing, Autumn 2024), young Elfie Hoffmann is disturbed by her friends’ embrace of the Hitler Youth; however, when she discovers her father has Jewish heritage, Elfie grows in her courage to reject all that the Nazis stand for, even as she faces an uncertain future.
Lost between the timeless lines of Homer’s epic, the Trojan women finally stand to be counted and will change the fate of Troy forever in Daughters of Bronze by A. D. Rhine (Dutton, Nov. 26).
The Book and the Knife Part One: Thegn of Berewic by Paul Cobb (Troubador Publishing, Nov. 28) is set around a powerful medieval book that will put a ruler on a throne – but which ruler and what country, and what links the book to the struggle between England’s two foremost families and the events leading up to the Norman invasion of 1066?
As told in Disguised Love by Marie E. Bast (Bonnet & Buggy Publishing, Dec. 1), after their parents’ death from cholera in 1849, Swedish immigrants Ingrid and Lars are forced into a fake marriage to rescue their siblings from an Iowa orphanage and adoption, but the fake marriage is only until Ingrid can earn enough for passage back to Sweden and her fiancé; thing is, the vow is not pretend for Lars or his drive for the cheap land.
A skeleton discovered buried beneath a city sidewalk leads a group of student archaeologists to the 19th-century spiritualist movement and the journey of three women seeking answers from beyond the grave in Riddle of Spirit and Bone by Carolyn Korsmeyer (Regal House, Feb. 4, 2025).
NEW PUBLISHING DEALS
Sources include authors and publishers, Publishers Weekly, Publishers Marketplace, The Bookseller, and more. Email me at sljohnson2@eiu. edu or tweet @readingthepast to have your publishing deal included. You may also submit news via the Contact Us form on the HNS website.
Misty Urban’s Regency-set historical romances The Knight Falls First, The Baronet’s Bartered Bride, The Doctor’s Indiscretion, The Gentleman’s Leading Lady, part of her The Ladies Least Likely series, sold to Tanya Anne Crosby at Primera, in a five-book deal, for publication in 2025 and 2026.
A new 3-book deal from Avon HarperCollins to Molly Green, all set in the Second World War. Book 1 is Courage for the Cabinet Girl (see
details above under New Books by HNS Members). Book 2 will be set in a country estate near Bath, and Book 3 is still to be confirmed.
The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Marymount Manhattan College professor Jennifer N. Brown, a dual-timeline suspense novel intertwining a modern murder mystery at an academic conference with the story of the “Mad Maid of Kent,” a 16th-century nun executed for foreseeing the death of Henry VIII, sold to Brigitte Dale at St. Martin’s via Kristin van Ogtrop at Inkwell Management.
The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, sequel to Shakespeare and Renaissance literature professor Grace Tiffany’s My Father Had a Daughter (2003), following Judith Shakespeare in her adult years as a midwife and apothecary during the English Civil War, sold to Harper’s Sara Nelson for winter 2025 publication, via Julia Livshin at Julia Livshin Literary Agency.
A mystery in turn-of-the-20th-century New York with two queer businesswomen as sleuths, Cathy Pegau’s A Murderous Business sold to Vanessa Aguirre at Minotaur, in a two-book deal, by Natalie Lakosil at Looking Glass Literary & Media. Publication will be July 2025.
The Garden of Redemption by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, about two Black women serving in the Women’s Army Corps overseas during WWII, following them through their later careers in the US, sold to Nicole Counts at One World, by PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit.
Andrea Catalano’s The First Witch of Boston, biographical fiction about Margaret Jones, the first woman prosecuted and hanged for witchcraft in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and her love story with husband Thomas, sold to Danielle Marshall at Lake Union Publishing in a two-book deal, by Danielle Egan-Miller at Browne & Miller Literary Associates.
OTHER NEW AND FORTHCOMING TITLES
For forthcoming novels through mid-2025, please see our guides, compiled by Fiona Sheppard: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/guides/forthcoming-historicalnovels/
COMPILED BY SARAH JOHNSON
Sarah Johnson is Book Review Editor of HNR, a librarian, readers’ advisor, and author of reference books. She reviews for Booklist and CHOICE and blogs about historical novels at readingthepast.com. Her latest book is Historical Fiction II: A Guide to the Genre
NEW VOICES
Panoramic vistas of the past have been conjured up by debut novelists Flora Carr, Emily Dunlay, Nathan Gower, and Lisa Medved.
The idea for The Engraver’s Secret (HarperCollins Australia, 2024) by Lisa Medved came to her ten years ago when she “visited the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, which is the former home of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens,” she says. “An engraving by his chief engraver, Lucas Vorsterman, was on display alongside a brief description which suggested the two men were close then had a falling out.”
Medved was intrigued. “I did some research and read about a littleknown story about their disagreement over who owned the original engraving plates and who could reproduce the images. I took a small historical fact and used it to create a fictional story. On my train journey home from Antwerp, I began dreaming up a tale about lost 17th-century treasures and an academic trying to discover their whereabouts.”
She explains, “The Engraver’s Secret is told through the eyes of two female characters. Rubens expert and art academic, Charlotte Hubert, arrives in Antwerp to research Rubens and learn about the father she’s never met. The engraver’s daughter, Antonia Vorsterman, is drawn into the life of the Rubens family in 17th-century Antwerp. The 400-year link between Antonia and Charlotte, which forms the foundation of the story, is a 17th-century map folio with unusual markings and cryptic clues. Antonia is certain it will help release the burden of her family’s past. Charlotte is convinced it holds the key to the location of lost treasures.
“I spent over seven years researching and writing The Engraver’s Secret. The first draft, completed in 2015, was essentially an actionpacked, modern-day crime story which dipped into the 17th century. However, having lived in Europe since 2008, and with a degree in history and fine art, and a life-long passion for historical fiction, I was keen for the story to be more firmly anchored in the 17th century.
As I redrafted the story, I strengthened the historic elements and contrasted the differences between the two eras.”
A great deal of her inspiration came from historical sites in Antwerp. “The Rubenshuis is an atmospheric place with rooms filled with ancient oak ceilings, leather embossed wallpaper, and artworks by Rubens, his peers and other artists.” Another inspirational place for Medved was the Plantin-Moretus printing museum where Rubens and the engraver Vorsterman once worked, with its original printing presses and 16th-century manuscripts.
However, it was during a day trip to Antwerp that she discovered “the city’s beautiful Begijnhof, founded in 1544 where single women lived as a religious community,” she says. “Although begijnen have not lived there for several decades and the buildings are now used as private housing, I used some artistic licence to create a group of modern-day begijnen living there for my story. The Begijnhof is such a peaceful place, which contrasted perfectly with my characters who become caught up in a dangerous search for lost treasures.”
The first scene of Emily Dunlay’s Teddy (Harper/Fourth Estate, 2024) was written “long before the novel was fully formed and was a woman getting ready for a party, taking extra care with her makeup and nails, trying to make everything perfect,” the author states. “I wanted to write about a woman constructing herself through fashion and beauty, and what would happen when she inevitably slipped. I had the character of Teddy in mind for a long time before I had the right novel to put her in, but I eventually realized the late 1960s were a natural fit for the setting—I’ve always been interested in that time period, and particularly the political scandals of the time with women at their centers: the Profumo Affair, Martha Mitchell’s involvement in Watergate, President Kennedy’s affairs.”
Dunlay points out: “It was a perfect time period for Teddy because she needed to exist in a restrained, restricted world but with the possibility of liberation just over the horizon, and the temptations of Dolce Vita-era Rome, plus the celebrity-obsessed world of the nascent paparazzi and the paranoia of Cold War politics would force Teddy to confront her demons. I was also inspired by Cold War-era spy fiction, specifically the female characters who typically appear as side plots or background—the wives at home, the femmes fatales briefly encountered in the course of a mission. Surveillance and blackmail were popular preoccupations for fiction and film at this time, particularly in crime fiction and Italian giallo [suspenseful murder mystery] films, so those themes made their way into Teddy, too.”
On a personal note, Dunlay clarifies that she is from Dallas, “which made it a natural home base for Teddy, and I’ve lived abroad for the past ten years, so I felt I could lend some of that experience to Teddy’s time in Rome.”
Flora Carr, author of The Tower (Hutchinson Heinemann/Doubleday, 2024), believes that “there are some historical figures who will always evoke strong opinions. Mary, Queen of Scots is one such figure—depending on your stance, she is often either the doomed, romantic Scottish queen, or else the scheming Jezebel to Elizabeth I’s Virgin Queen.”
Like many fans of 16th-century history, Carr thought she “knew the broad strokes of Mary Stuart’s life: her tumultuous three marriages;
Lisa Medved
Flora Carr
Nathan Gower
Emily Dunlay
© Louise Haywood-Schiefer
her flight to England after the Scottish lords rebelled; and her long captivity in England, culminating in her death by execution, when she appeared on the scaffold dressed in the defiant scarlet red of the Catholic martyr.”
But when Carr “stumbled across a stray reference to a mostly forgotten period of her life,” she says, “I realised how little I knew.” Carr had never realised that Mary had “been imprisoned in Scotland, and yet her short time at Lochleven Castle was arguably the linchpin of her life’s trajectory, which forms the basis of my debut novel.”
Carr describes the scenario: “At the age of 24, Mary was imprisoned at Lochleven for eleven months, in a tiny Scottish castle situated on an island in the middle of a vast loch, and it was an incredibly dramatic, action-packed year, including her forced abdication and various death-defying escape attempts. When we think of Mary Stuart, her story is often defined by her relationships with men (for example, her husbands or half-brother). But at Lochleven, Mary spent the majority of her time with her female attendants, including two chambermaids and the devoted lady-in-waiting Lady Mary Seton, and it was those dynamics I was most interested in. I wanted to look at a sliver of Mary Stuart’s life through the lens of female friendship.”
Furthermore, Carr knew that she had to write The Tower from the moment she first visited Loch Leven in person. Loch Leven is now a wetlands nature reserve and the ruins of Lochleven Castle, which date back to the 1300s are maintained by Historic Environment Scotland and accessible only by passenger boat. She had already begun her research, “but standing at the edge of the loch, within this vast, atmospheric landscape, I knew for certain I could set a whole novel there. And, in a brilliant twist of fate, the boat I first crossed the loch in to reach the castle ruins was named Mary Seton.”
The Act of Disappearing (MIRA, 2024) by Nathan Gower “opens with an image: a photograph taken in 1964 of a woman falling from a train bridge into the Ohio River, clutching to her chest what appears to be a baby,” he says. “The rest of the book is a race to discover all the mysteries embedded in that image. But where did the inspiration for the photograph come from? Well, the seed of the idea came from a conversation I had with my maternal grandmother—my Mamaw— when I was a young boy.
“It may be worth noting: memory is a fickle thing, ever changing like light in a mirror maze. I’ve thought about this memory with my grandmother many times—even dreamed about it—so I can never be sure to what extent my brain has changed or overwritten it.”
However, what he remembers “goes something like this,” he relates. “I was with Mamaw at a community festival in my small, western Kentucky hometown. We were sitting on the shore of the Ohio River, looking up at a truss train bridge stretched between Kentucky and Indiana. Mamaw was dreamy-eyed and distant, and she said absentmindedly, ‘I wonder what it would be like to fall from up there.’ That moment was a bit shocking and scary for me as a child. What did she mean? What would make someone—particularly someone of my Mamaw’s generation—think such a thought, let alone say it aloud? Well, decades later, one day during the height of the pandemic, I had a dream about that conversation with Mamaw, and when I woke up, an image came to me—the bleeding edges developing into focus like a Polaroid: a woman falling from a train bridge, clutching a baby to her chest.”
Gower, wrote down an early description of what he saw, “and that description became the opening image in the book, the hook that grounds the rest of the story. To be clear, the book is not about my grandmother or any other member of my family—but it does touch on issues that are very important to me personally and within my family history—issues like depression, anxiety, and parental responsibility.”
Carr, Dunlay, Gower and Medved have blended historical fact with strong characters and challenging issues to enable their readers to be introduced to a new perspective of the periods that they have written about.
WRITTEN BY MYFANWY COOK
Myfanwy Cook is an Associate University Fellow. She enjoys facilitating writing workshops and is a keen reader of historical fiction that makes her view the past in a different light. Please contact (myfanwyc@btinternet.com) if you discover debut novelists you would like to see featured.
HISTORY & FILM
The Substance and Subtlety of Shōgun
There seem to be few new offerings today, television or film, that simultaneously offer production value, superior acting, and depth of viewer engagement. Everything is a tired retread, a sequel, a prequel, a reboot, a Message. Hollywood shills call them “familiar IP,” a positive spin on: we made money on this before; we’re not risking anything original. As one critic admitted, “TV, for the past decade, has been in out-of-control copycat mode, and the returns have been diminishing.”1 I’d not realized how low the bar had fallen (step over, it’s on the floor) until I came across FX’s Shōgun. It reminded me of what prestige television can and used to provide more regularly –eager anticipation of each new episode and immersion in a storyline and the lives of characters whose experiences are both unfamiliar and fascinating. Perhaps it exemplifies the silver lining to the cloud of mediocrity – the gems shine brighter by comparison.
Shōgun, of course, isn’t “original” material and could’ve fallen into the trap of the “tired retread” or inept “reboot”; the novel on which this latest series is based was published in 1975 and saw its first miniseries adaptation in 1980. The miniseries won award after award, with viewer numbers so phenomenal that over 40 years later, critics were justified in asking, “Could there possibly be any point, beyond the entertainment industry’s thirst for familiar IP, to revisiting this story in 2024?”2 The third book in James Clavell’s Asian Saga, Shōgun was immensely popular, quickly selling over six million copies. I saw the 1980 series at some point, but remember almost nothing except that Richard Chamberlain played the main role. I've not yet read the novel, primarily due to time commitment. To employ an illustration: a patient anxiously awaits the doctor’s prognosis –how long do I have to live? The doctor replies, “Let’s just say there’s no point starting a Clavell novel.”
This one (circa 1200 pages) provides a great deal of dramatic fodder across an epic canvas: feudal Japan, immediately preceding the Edo period. Clavell had an interesting perspective when it came to Japan. As a British Army officer during WWII, he was captured by the Japanese and endured unspeakable conditions as their prisoner in a camp in Singapore. He considered his survival a miracle occasioned only by the timely dropping of The Bomb. One could be forgiven for thinking his war-time experiences might foster an aversion for Japan, its people, and culture, but instead, they were the impetus for Clavell’s Asian Saga. It began with thinly-veiled autobiography of his time
imprisoned (King Rat), and by the time Shōgun was released, Clavell was having dinner at the White House to honor the Japanese Prime Minister, since his work was a “cross-cultural phenomenon” that had improved the post-war perception of Japan with Westerners.3
Clavell’s novel may take place in Japan, but the worldview is Eurocentric. It’s a quintessential “outsider” perspective on a culture. In 1600, Englishman John Blackthorne, pilot of the ship Erasmus, is taken prisoner in a Japanese fishing village, along with the rest of his perishing crew. Their status is uncertain. Japan is in a state of flux. The Taikō (a sort of chancellor) is dead, and his heir is a child. A Council of Regents made up of five warrior lords has stepped into the vacuum, but theirs is a tenuous balance. As the title cards of the 2024 series tell viewers: “All of them would seek the title that would make their power absolute … Shōgun.” Title cards also tell us that the English are late to the game; the Portuguese gained a foothold decades earlier and have grown rich off of Japanese trade. As Catholics, they present a staunch barrier against the Protestant English. Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), whom the Japanese refer to as Anjin (pilot), soon finds himself a pawn in the power play of Lord Yoshi Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) against the other four members of the Council.
The cast of characters is large, so we’ll introduce those of most import. There is Mariko (Anna Sawai), a noblewoman who has converted to Christianity and serves Toranaga. The daughter of a traitor, she wants nothing more than an honorable death. Instead, Toranaga gives her another duty: translate for the Anjin, since she has learned Portuguese from the priests who converted her, a lingua franca for Blackthorne. Mariko’s husband, Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe), is a fearsome samurai who is able to conquer everything but the aversion his wife holds for him. His father, Hiromatsu (Tokuma Nishioka), is Toranaga’s general, trusted advisor, and best friend. Toranaga’s oldest son, the puppyish Nagakado (Yuki Kura), and the constantly calculating vassal Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) round out the cast. Ranged against them are the Council of Regents, led by Lord Ishido (Takehiro Hira), and Ochiba-no-kata (Fumi Nikaidô), the mother of the heir and childhood friend of Mariko’s.
All of these characters are based on historical persons. Blackthorne is a stand-in for William Adams, an English navigator on a Dutch ship that arrived in Japan in 1600. Adams later rose to become a direct retainer of Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu, the historical model for Toranaga. Another of Shōgun’s strengths is its ability to provide a plotline that doesn’t condescend to viewers, without requiring a minute knowledge of early 17th-century Japan to follow along (though it helps). By the time Shōgun’s action takes place, Japan had been at war off and on for centuries. The emperor, who originally ruled from Kyoto, had essentially been a puppet of the shogunate since the 12th century, and the country experienced various periods of near chaos as warlords came and went, all seeking their own power, none interested in the unity Japan had enjoyed under the earlier emperors. But by the late 1500s, the country had finally experienced a level of peace and stability for several decades. This came to an end when its ruler died and left a council of five regents to govern until his son, an infant, came of age.
This is the context for Shōgun’s characters and its political machinations – the reason Toranaga displays reluctance to pursue another shogunate and risk a period of relative peace devolving into yet more chaos for the country. The other side of the coin is the strengthening of Japan’s position in an encroaching larger world, seemingly possible only when unified under a single, strong military ruler. This is the duality that Toranaga’s characterization must exhibit, and Sanada is perfect to personify it. He
constantly leaves the audience searching for what he may be thinking, what his plans and motivations are, where this is going next. There are many areas where the series excels, but perhaps the most important to viewer engagement is the complexity and emotional depth conveyed by the actors’ portrayals. Toranaga’s relationship with Hiromatsu is entirely convincing – there is the comfortable familiarity of two comrades who have seen years of battle together, but also deep affection, respect, and humor. Such portrayals make later events all the more emotionally engaging … and devastating.
While there is pervasive realism for all characters here, another aspect that sets this series apart is its treatment of the female characters and respect for historical context (and reality). These are women who are strong – but not in the tired trope of being abrasive and condescending to all males while “kicking butt” in ways that laughably defy the laws of physics. In one of the few scenes where a female character is forced to fight, as one critic noted, “since this is not a Marvel movie and she is just one woman against fifteen men, she is unable to overcome them.”4 One feels her despair at the futility of the exercise and knowledge that the only reason she survives is because the men, due to her rank and position, stand back and choose not to kill her. So instead of unrealistic physical force, these are women who exude strength and command respect through their very nature: dignity, determination, wisdom, loyalty, and an iron-clad grip on emotion. Sawai’s Mariko is stoicism personified: a paragon of self-control, of calm within despite chaos without. She is also representative – if she can help Blackthorne (and, by extension, the Western audience he represents) understand her motivations, he will better understand the culture which fashioned her. It is Mariko who explains to Blackthorne the concept of the “eightfold fence,” a self-constructed inner stronghold to which the most vulnerable parts of self can retreat, allowing focus on one’s duty in the outside world, no matter how difficult, painful, or cognitively dissonant. It’s also a metaphor for “the Japans,” as Blackthorne knows them. In a modern, Western world determined to glorify selfishness, crass conduct, unchecked attention-seeking, and the inability to appreciate even the greatest of gifts, Shōgun plunges viewers into a different realm. Interspersed with the power play and blood (of which there’s certainly a respectable amount), it focuses on self-sacrifice (sometimes in the most literal and visceral sense), of seeking stillness, pausing to ponder and appreciate beauty, to understand where true meaning can be found.
Shōgun's world is a complex and intricately structured one. In a word, this series is subtle. It subverts expectations in the best of ways – though there is plenty of action, it eschews forgettable blow ‘em up set piece battles. This is about strategy. The 1980s miniseries had characters speaking Japanese with no subtitles; the idea was to offer the viewer the same level of confusion and uncertainty as Blackthorne, who couldn’t understand until he learned the language. A conscious choice was made with this Shōgun to provide the viewer with more information than Blackthorne can glean, but subtly. It is primarily in Japanese with English subtitles. This was done to allow the viewer to understand the nuances of the Japanese characters and the complicated political and personal situations – to give viewers the information necessary to see the Japanese perspective. It’s also a more subtle take on putting Blackthorne in the backseat, intentionally minimizing his importance (since he’s a straight white male European). This wasn’t Clavell's portrayal or that of the earlier miniseries. Blackthorne isn’t the hero here – like so many of the characters, he’s just a pawn. And while the Japanese characters, to varying degrees, understand their places on the chessboard, Blackthorne is a piece who often doesn’t even recognize he's being maneuvered, much less comprehend the overall strategy of the gambit.
The costuming is impeccable, and despite being filmed in Canada rather than Japan, as was the previous miniseries, as one critic noted,
"production design is flawless. Cinematography is gorgeous."5 Another pointed out, "Style is easy. Substance is hard."6 Shogun excels in substance. It is often unpredictable, with the occasional unforeseen gut punch, and it takes its time to create its emotional investment and immersive experience. One of the few criticisms leveled at the series is its pacing, that it can occasionally be slow moving. Yet I see this as a feature rather than a bug. "Shōgun asks us to become a different type of spectator, more patient, less distractable ... Shōgun is not just a voluptuously mounted historical epic, it’s a daring experiment in the kind of narrative we can immerse ourselves in."7
The experiment seems to have been a resounding success, currently sitting at 99% positive with critics and 91% with viewers.8 Still, success can breed its own dangers. Shōgun's ending, which mirrored the book's conclusion, was close to perfect in its execution. This was intended to be a limited series, a one 'n done. Yet due to its unanticipated success, there is talk that a Season 2 might not be outside the realm of possibility. Usually one wants more of a good thing, but in this case, the story has been told, and the viewer is left with a conclusion that doesn't need or warrant revisiting. I don't want more, with the inherent risk of diminishing quality. Please don't ruin a good thing. Instead, learn from Shōgun, and apply its subtlety and substance to the telling of other — perhaps even new? — stories.
REFERENCES
1. Maciak, P. (2024, 8 April) "Shōgun Is Reinventing the TV Epic." The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/180392/shgun-fx-tv-showreinventing-epic
2. Berman, J. (2024, 7 February) " FX’s Shōgun Isn’t a Remake—It’s a Revelation." Time. https://time.com/6692336/shogun-review-fx/
3. Schott, W. (1975, 22 June) "Shogun." New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/1975/06/22/archives/shogun-from-james-clavell-with-tea-and-blood.html
4.Kain, E. "Shogun Episode 9 Crimson Sky Recap: This One Hurt." Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/04/17/shogun-episode-9-crimsonsky-recap-and-review-this-one-hurt/?sh=74e42436e317
5. Roeper, R. (2024, 26 February) "New 'Shogun' series tells the engrossing tale with cinematic-level sweep." Chicago Sun-Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/ movies-and-tv/2024/02/26/shogun-review-hulu-fx-series-anna-sawai-hiroyukisanada-cosmo-jarvis-james-clavell
6. Lawler, K. (2024, 27 February)"Review: Dazzling 'Shogun' is the genuine TV epic you've been waiting for." USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/ entertainment/tv/2024/02/27/shogun-review-fx-series/72657765007/
7. Maciak, P. (2024, 8 April) "Shōgun Is Reinventing the TV Epic." The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/180392/shgun-fx-tv-showreinventing-epic
8. Rotten Tomatoes. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/shogun_2024
WRITTEN BY BETHANY LATHAM
Bethany Latham is a professor, librarian, author of three monographs and a number of scholarly articles. She is HNR's Managing Editor and a regular reviewer for Booklist
AUTHENTIALLY UNFAMILIAR
Melissa Bissonette on Alexander Manshel’s Writing Backwards
From its beginnings, historical fiction has struggled for respectability. In 1814, John Wilson Croker, an early literature gatekeeper who preferred his history raw, took pains to distinguish Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley from the rest of the genre, which was “mere romance, and the gratuitous invention of a facetious fancy” – that fancy being, more often than not, a female one, concerned with costumes more than truth. He detested works “in which real and fictitious personages, and actual and fabulous events are mixed together to the utter confusion of the reader, and the unsettling of all accurate recollections of past transactions.”1 Even as the novel gained respectability over the 19th century, historical fiction, as a category, largely lagged behind. Until recently, if a bookstore shelved The Scarlet Letter, War and Peace, or Beloved among historical fiction, pearls would be clutched to tweedy bosoms.
The anxiety, the need to draw a thick red line between what qualifies as “literature” and what qualifies as “historical fiction” has not changed, although where that line is drawn certainly has. The point of balance between fiction and facticity continually shifts, inciting the outrage of the likes of Croker and some 21st-century school boards. Since authenticity grounds historical fiction, the battle has often
been precisely what our truth is – whose truth, which history. In an essay from 2023 titled “Why Historical Fiction Matters,” Steven Mintz wrote, “Historical fiction isn’t history, but it can reveal the historical truths that lie beyond the evidentiary. It is an expression of our ongoing, unending quest to understand our forebears who formed us, scarred us and, to a certain extent, freed us.”2
Even before the pandemic, Megan O’Grady wrote in the New York Times that historical fiction seemed suddenly more urgent. “Making sense of our lives and of the unfathomable world in which we find ourselves has necessitated an understanding of what has come before–a clarification of the game and its stakes but also its rules and positions. A new kind of historical fiction has evolved to show us that the past is no longer merely prologue but story itself, shaping our increasingly fractured fairy tales about who we are as a society.”3
Alexander Manshel, author of Writing Backwards, begins with that “belief in fiction’s ability to access, reconstruct, and even recuperate the historical past” (page numbers from Writing Backwards, 19).
Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia University Press, 2023) addresses a broad public audience. Manshel charts a rise in the prestige of literary historical fiction, using the shortlists for American literary prizes as his gauge. “In the United States,” he writes, “literary fiction has never been more historical—nor historical fiction more literary—than it has been over the last forty years” (17). While historical fiction accounted for about half of all novels shortlisted for a major American prize between 1950 and 1979, and up to two-thirds of those lists by 1980, it reached “a whopping 80 percent [of all shortlisted novels] in the first decade of the twenty-first century alone” (4).
And in these last decades, writers of color have been on these lists in greater numbers. “In some ways,” Manshel told me, “the works of historical fiction that are being most celebrated today are by writers of color working to amend or even disrupt and rewrite the historical record as we understand it.”4
Writing Backwards reads the work of many celebrated writers of color of the last twenty years, including Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing), Colson Whitehead (The Underground Railroad, Nickel Boys), Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer), Margaret Wilkinson Sexton (A Kind of Freedom), and Min Jin Lee (Pachinko). Each explores histories more frequently told from a white vantage point, whether sympathetic or not. To some extent, these writers leverage our knowledge of unresolved issues in the present to complicate the reader’s desire for positive endings in the fiction. Colson Whitehead’s structural choices, for example, “heighten the pathos of historical pain, but it also emphasizes the limits of historical fiction as a means of addressing the challenges of the present. History may provide a clear analogy, but Whitehead’s historical fiction reminds us that only looking backwards means that the crucial moment of action… will always have already passed…. The moment to ‘enlist’ or intervene is always already over” (161-2). In this and other instances, Manshel draws attention to novels that have destabilized some of the more conservative, nationalistic tendencies of prestige fiction.
While other writers have addressed the fundamentally conservative impulse behind the domination of the World War II novel, Manshel considers its “truly remarkable concentration of literary prestige” part of an ongoing “cultural struggle over which war emblematizes Americanness in general. Is it World War II and the Greatest
THE "AUTHENTIC FICTION" PARADOX is at the core of historical fiction. The details have to be second-hand.
Generation fighting against Nazi forces? Or is it the Civil War, a war fought over enslavement, where Americans are fighting Americans? Is it the Vietnam War, a proxy war where the US is not at all the hero?” Complicating the narratives and aesthetics of prize-winning WWII fiction, “Black, Asian American, Latinx, and indigenous writers have been working to amend the public memory” to include the ways their communities participated in or were excluded from the heroism of the Greatest Generation.
Manshel links the significantly increased recognition of minority or marginalized writers on the literary prize shortlists to the rise in prestige of historical fiction. On those lists, novels by writers of color are far more likely to be historical fiction than are novels by white writers (for example, 75% for Black writers and 90% for Indigenous writers, compared to about 50% for white writers). One positive interpretation of this dynamic looks to the shift in our understanding of racism(s) as systemic. To seek to understand inequality, now, is necessarily to seek to understand how it came to be.
The multi-generational novel epitomizes that project of reading the present through the past. “If we’re looking to literary fiction to teach us about the historical past, to recover lost histories, and to recognize people that we’ve previously overlooked, the multi-generational family saga does it all,” Manshel told me. Bestsellers Homegoing and Pachinko have plenty of company, including Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) and, most recently Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History (Fleet, 2024, see review in this issue of HNR), which uses the author’s own family tree to explore nationality, belonging, and displacement. The novelist’s choice to proceed in linear chronological order (as does Gyasi and Lee) or alternate among them (as does Sexton and the Apple TV version of Lee’s book) can imply dramatically different relations “between narrative progress and political progress” (196), advancing and repeating, recovery and relapse.
To return to the problem Whitehead poses, that whatever happy ending the reader wishes for is tempered by the realities of both past and present, these books challenge the reader to learn and to empathize despite what we may know or think we know. (Though I remember seeing the film Titanic in a movie theater in 1997 and overhearing another woman complain, “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known it had a sad ending.”) Is this a version of the collision of facticity and fiction that all historical novels wrestle with? Authors’ notes frequently provide bibliographies and detail which letters are transcriptions and which fictions, though the novel itself must blur that distinction. The New Yorker writer Jennifer Wilson praised Messud’s novel quite specifically for its reliance on a family history written by her grandfather. “Messud has used that document to craft something more interesting than a historical novel: a novel about history and the stories we tell ourselves about the role we play in it.”
5 To some extent, that self-consciousness about history pervades historical fiction, rather than being a tool by which to rise above it.
The “authentic fiction” paradox is at the core of historical fiction. The details have to be second-hand. The HNS website states that “To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described. Or written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events, and therefore approaches them only by research.” 6 Scott’s Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since set the standard (60 years, roughly a man’s life expectancy) and the Walter Scott Prize continues to enforce this
limit. Scholar James F. English, whose work dovetails with Manshel’s, capped his exploration at 20 years before publication. Others will say the work must be set before the time of the author’s birth. These calculations merely attempt to quantify the distance which makes the world alien. Jerome De Groot speaks of the fundamental strangeness of historical fiction: “The historical novelist … explores the dissonance and displacement between then and now, making the past recognisable but simultaneously authentically unfamiliar.”7 Authentically unfamiliar.
Manshel closes his book with an intriguing discussion of the novel of “recent history,” books like Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), which “betray a historical self-consciousness” and which are “less interested in fictionalizing the present than they are in using fiction to cast the recent past as historical with a capital H” (206). These are deeply invested in the literal mediation of events through the CNN chyron, newspaper headlines, and social media posts. Recognizable but simultaneously authentically unfamiliar.
“As readers,” Manshel concludes, “we are always interested in the end of the story. But of course, as we’ve learned, there is no end of history. We’re always living in the middle of history.”
REFERENCES
1. The Quarterly Review, July 1814.
2. “Why Historical Fiction Matters: The History that Lies Behind Pure Fact.” Inside Higher Ed, March 5, 2023.
3. “Why Are We Living in a Golden Age of Historical Fiction?” New York Times, May 7, 2019.
4. Interview with Alexander Manshel, May 2, 2024.
5. Wilson, Jennifer. “Paradise Lost: The search for a home that never was in Claire Messud’s new novel.” The New Yorker. May 13, 2024, 63-65.
6.https://historicalnovelsociety.org/guide-our-definition-ofhistorical-fiction/
7. The Historical Novel. Routledge, 2010, 3.
WRITTEN
BY MELISSA BISSONETTE
Melissa Bissonette lives in western NY where she teaches 16th-19th century theater, poetry, and fiction. Her novel Daughter of the Law, set in 17th-century London, traces the biography of Frances Coke Villiers.
SUCH A STRANGE PLACE
Kristen McDermott in conversation with M.T. Anderson
A shy, idealistic monk, an expert relic thief, and a dog-headed man walk into a basilica. What sounds like the setup for a joke from The Canterbury Tales is actually the premise – based on a completely true story – for M.T. Anderson’s captivating first novel for adult readers. Nicked (Pantheon, 2024) relates the unbelievable but historically documented 11th-century plot to steal the bones of Saint Nicholas from a church on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Turkey and install them in a minor cathedral on the edge of the boot heel of Italy.
Anderson has been writing books for young readers for almost three decades, winning multiple awards and gracing top-ten reading lists in schools all over the world, particularly for his bestselling, prescient YA science fiction novel Feed (2002), and his National Book Awardwinning YA historical duology, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing and Traitor to the Nation (2006/2008). According to the author, Nicked is just barely fictional, and wasn’t originally meant to be a novel at all. His first inspiration was to write a nonfiction book for teen readers retelling the many “weird old stories” about the early Christian bishop who became the saint associated with children and Christmas, but whose origins were (like most saints) strange, violent,
and anything but cheery.
“Saint Nicholas was a bishop at the very moment the Byzantine Empire went from being ultra pagan to ultra-Christian in one astounding generation. There are stories, for instance, of Nicholas attacking shrines to Artemis,” Anderson explained in a recent interview. “Sailors were encouraged to pray to Saint Nicholas (after his death) instead of Poseidon. And I was struck as a teenager by how one story, in which Nicholas paid the dowry for a poor man’s three daughters to avoid their being sold into prostitution, got bizarrely transformed into the Christmas tradition of Nicholas bringing gifts to children.”
The more he researched the saint’s legends, however, the more he realized that Nicholas of Myra (who lived in the 4th century CE) was not just a pivotal figure of the Empire’s transition from paganism to Christianity; 700 years later, the fate of his relics became a powerful symbol of the complex reorganization of the Mediterranean by the defeat of Byzantium by the Seljuq Turkish Sultanate.
The bones of this particular story appeared to Anderson as his research took him down a “rabbit hole” of interlocking histories, legends, and personal memoirs, extending from the time of Nicholas to the well-documented voyage in 1087 by a group of Apulian sailors to steal the saint’s bones from their resting place in Myra (the southwest coast of present-day Turkey). He carefully studied the three medieval sources that describe the caper, finding them to be remarkably consistent in the events that culminated in the transfer of the bones to their current resting place, the Basilica of St. Nicholas at Bari, Italy. One of the sources, written by a monk named Nicephorus who refers to himself as his Benedictine order’s “lowliest clerk,” struck Anderson as remarkable because of its openness about the deceptions used by the sailors to seize the relics from the people of Myra.
“Are these people heroes or rogues?” Anderson recalls wondering. Noting that Nicephorus proudly recorded all the deceptions the thieves inflicted on Myra, even threats and torture, Anderson realized that the Barese authorities “had to describe the active resistance of the caretakers at Myra in order to authenticate that they had indeed stolen the real body.” The Church justified the theft as “rescuing” the relics from a site endangered by the Seljuk Turkish occupation.
The moral ambiguity of this “holy larceny,” present in the actual historical record, was a common theme in many pilgrimage narratives of the Middle Ages. And that intersection of criminality and piety gave Anderson the hook he needed for the novel. The theft of Nicholas’s bones would be revealed through the point of view of three remarkable characters: the humble (and historical) Nicephorus, the (fictional) relic thief Tyun, and the “dog-headed man” Reprobus, whose remarkable appearance lends the narrative its unique blend of realism and tall tale.
However, Anderson insists that Nicked is far from historical fantasy. In fact, he has hewed as closely as possible to the medieval record in his telling of events, only changing details to create suspense and to clarify the competition between humble Bari and the bottomless coffers of the Republic of Venice (even today, both cities claim to own the relics). Even dog-headed Reprobus is a person whose real existence would never have been questioned by any 11th-century
I THINK our culture has moved
from bitter stories about what’s wrong with people to a desire for stories of communities
where people love and support each other.
reader, and therein lies the engine that drives Nicked. “I’m not writing fantasy, but insisting that we take medieval nonfiction at face value,” he explains, expressing a desire to convey to modern readers the rich mixture of cultures in contact with one another during a time that most Western readers believe that the European Church was the primary source of culture. It’s important to break down the idea that cultures are hermetically sealed from each other,” Anderson explains, noting that “willful inaccuracy,” as he describes it in the novel’s afterword, is actually a valuable key to understanding the medieval mind. “The world is such a strange place – we can’t close our eyes to that.”
For this reason, the growing friendship between Nicephorus and Tyun symbolizes for Anderson not only the blend of cultures attending the “conversation with Islam that was going on in the Mediterranean region,” but also to embody the challenges that the world of commerce and deception poses to religious faith. Anderson conceived the relic-thief as “someone approaching this adventure from a different faith system,” and imagined Tyun as a citizen of the Great Xia Empire, captured and taken into the Middle East. His liminal status – a pagan Eurasian in the Mediterranean, a man whose country and culture no longer exist – make Tyun an ideal trickster figure, to highlight the central question about whether the theft was God’s work, a clever scam, or some mixture of both.
That uncertainty at the heart of the narrative, depicted in frequent clashes between the idealistic Nicephorus and the canny, cynical Tyun, creates what Anderson calls a “noir-ish” relationship between the two. An element of suspicion-fueled erotic attraction weaves through their double- and triple-crosses, as Tyun and Nicephorus struggle to trust one another. Nicked therefore adds to the heist caper and the travelog the elements of a queer rom-com, all of which transform a complex historical event into an entertaining romp.
Anderson, when he’s not writing, is a dedicated globe-trotter who combines his world travels with meticulous research for his historical fiction. He visited the two main settings – Bari and Myra – as part of a tour with his friend Dr. Erin Thompson, who works with international organizations dedicated to restoring stolen cultural artifacts to their original regions. As he explored the area that was fought over by the Byzantine and Seljuk empires a thousand years ago, he observed tour buses of Russians and Ukrainians (this was in the first year of the present war), united in their reverence for St. Nicholas, describing it as “a deeply moving scene -- the arching between the contemporary and the medieval.”
Anderson takes seriously the historical novelist’s obligation to represent other cultures fairly and accurately. “It’s vital to be aware at all times of how little you know. I really tried to understand the full complexity of the interplay between these different cultures, but in the end, this is a task too vast for a novel. It’s head-spinning.” His annotated bibliography for the book has reached nearly 2000 pages (“When I die, my bibliographies will be my castle made of pop bottles,” he jokes). The task of the historical novelist, he notes, is “to see if through the excellence of our research we can find a new way to pry apart what we think we know, to defamiliarize it so that we can see it again in its fullness.”
The author himself is present in the novel to help us toward this goal. Anderson uses a tolerant, charming voice for the gently intrusive
narrator, imitating the narrative style of medieval travel and saints’ narratives. “I think it was instinctive, but I was picking up on medieval formats,” Anderson explains, noting that the chronicler Nicephorus introduces himself at the beginning of his narrative. For modern readers, this lends the novel a metafictional playfulness associated with masters of the genre like A.S. Byatt and John Barth (“a shadow that falls over me,” Anderson says).
Ultimately, Nicked is an affectionate, inspiring narrative about the power of human communities to create opportunities for wonder. “Post-pandemic,” Anderson claims, “I think our culture has moved from bitter stories about what’s wrong with people to a desire for stories of communities where people love and support each other.” He notes that, compared to the dystopian tone of his earlier novels for teens, “this is a more joyous book,” and that the novel’s supportive band of thieves and sailors reflects our current interest in creating “found families.” “I’m involved in public life in my small town and have been moved to witness people who seem at first glance to be cranky and divided, all getting to know each other and understand each other.”
Anderson has only begun to tell the story of Nicholas; his next project will be a nonfiction book for teen readers that treats the saint as a nexus of information about the cultural landscape of the medieval world, and the discipline of textual treasure-hunting. The tumultuous clash between the medieval Christian and Islamic worlds is “a story that deserves to be told: what does it mean to interface (as modern people) with a sense of faith that is so powerful and transformative?” For young readers and adults alike, the afterlife of the saint that most modern readers associate only with the Victorian figure of Santa Claus is an ideal vector for that history.
WRITTEN BY KRISTEN MCDERMOTT
Kristen McDermott is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University and a reviewer for HNR. Her in-progress novel, Stratford’s Will, was awarded Honorable Mention in the YA and Children’s Fiction category of the 2024 Historical Novel Society First Chapters Competition.
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
BY LUCINDA BYATT
Lucinda Byatt talks to Val McDermid about Queen Macbeth
Of all the semi-legendary figures in Scotland’s history, Lady Macbeth is the one we all think we know most about – or do we? Shakespeare’s version was a convenient fabrication, the events portrayed to flatter King James VI and I, and liberties taken with both names and facts: for the record, Macbeth (whose historical name is actually Macbethad) did kill King Duncan, but on the battlefield and not in a murderous conspiracy spurred on by his wife. But while historical detail may be sparce on these early rulers, it gives an author licence and “plenty of space for the imagination”. That author is Val McDermid, Scotland’s “Queen of Crime”, whose Queen Macbeth (Polygon, 2024) is the most recent addition to the “Darkland Tales” series from publisher Birlinn.1
In a recent interview for this feature, McDermid says: “When I was approached by Polygon to take part in the Darkland Tales series with Lady Macbeth, I was immediately drawn to the project.” McDermid read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1972 as the first Scottish state-school pupil to study there, so there is considerable feeling in her next words: “Over my years of exposure to Shakespeare, I’d grown increasingly sceptical of the motivations and actions of Lady Macbeth. History is written by the victors, and it seems to me that since men have generally been in the driving seat, women have often taken the rap because that suited the patriarchal version of events. I liked the idea of writing something that might make more sense of the historical narrative than woman-blaming!”
Scotland as a nation didn’t exist as such in the tenth century: it was a patchwork of “kingdoms”, a place of rivalries and changing alliances, influenced not least by the Viking presence and the constant threat of the English. It is here that McDermid’s that we first encounter Gruoch (aka “Lady Macbeth”) as the wife of Gille Coemgáin, Mormaer of Moray, some time before she meets and finally marries Macbeth. In a tightly constructed sequence of flashbacks, we learn of the events that have left Gruoch in hiding at the end of Macbeth’s seventeen-year reign, now at the mercy of bitterly opposing factions, one led by her and Macbeth’s son Lulach and the other by Duncan’s son Malcolm, supported by Macduff. The locations in the novel will be familiar to some, and certainly to the author who grew up in Fife: a priory on St Serf’s Isle, in Loch Leven, just north of Kirkcaldy, where the Chaldean monks or Culdees give temporary refuge to the queen and her three women, a seer, a healer, and a weaver; and then various recognisable places as they escape across the central belt, heading to the West.
When I asked about the evocative descriptions of landscape, McDermid says, “I drew on my existing knowledge of locations and landscapes and my imagination of what they would have looked like back then, how the scattered population would have impacted the land. I actually wrote the book in southern Spain, so I was reliant on Google Maps and memory, and some help from David Greig, who researched a play he wrote about Lady Macbeth some years ago! Writers are mostly very happy to share their knowledge…” 2
McDermid is the multi-award-winning author of 40 crime novels – plus short story collections and non-fiction – that have been
translated worldwide selling upwards of nineteen million copies. Her novels all have contemporary settings, so I asked what it was like thinking back into the remote past, and what did she enjoyed most about the writing process. “I did have the freedom of setting my novella in an era of my choice … What I enjoyed was stepping back in time and imagining the day-to-day lives of my characters. Human relationships, their dreams and fears, their emotions and responses don’t fundamentally change over the centuries. What does change is how those things manifest themselves and that was a fascinating challenge.”
Abandoning her usual toolbox of clinical psychology, forensics, and simply the use of fingerprinting makes a difference to the plot. But as she says, “it was quite refreshing to leave all that behind! The attribution of culpability was a lot simpler then!” Indeed, the famous dagger and the mention of washing blood off hands appear as tropes at various points in the book, but these are just light touches, hints at Shakespeare’s well-known lines.
Gruoch’s companions fulfil important roles, from the ever-practical Ligach to the seer and healer Eithne. For the latter, in particular, the boundary between healing and witchcraft, is both fragile and, for the period, extremely dangerous. McDermid wanted “to explore the idea that what people don’t understand, they invent explanations for. Eithne’s ‘predictions’ are probably based on intuition, understanding of human behaviour and observation; there’s nothing supernatural going on there. I suspect that when women uttered ‘predictions’, people only recalled the ones that came about…”
Some of Eithne’s most precious herbs come from traders who operated along the sea roads in a variety of boats, including the birlinn. Scotland was certainly never isolated from the continent. One fascinating aspect that McDermid draws on is Macbeth and Gruoch’s journey to Rome at the start of his kingship. She tells me that “it’s part of the historical record and was mentioned in several of the sources I read. It’s interesting because at the time, Macbeth’s kingdom was part of the Celtic Christian tradition, not the Roman. But I do wonder whether their arrival at the Vatican made the Curia aware of Scotland as a potential target for conversion, perhaps even smoothing the way for St Margaret [who was canonised] relatively soon after.”
Queen Macbeth is a fascinating and thought-provoking addition to this series of dramatic retellings of stories from Scotland’s past that intersect history, myth and legend. For the time being, however, it may be McDermid’s only foray into the remote past. When asked about another historical novel, she replies: “I really don’t know. It would depend on what was suggested to me… I don’t have anything itching away at the back of my mind!”
However, I can guarantee that Gruoch’s story is firmly lodged in this reader’s mind.
Lucinda Byatt is HNR's Features Editor.
Notes
1. Other titles published in Darkland Tales include, among others, Denise Mina’s Rizzio (2021) and Jenny Fagan’s Hex (2022).
2. Dunsinane by the Scottish playwright David Greig premièred in 2010. Greig’s first novel Columba’s Bones (2023) is also one of the Darkland Tales series.
REFLECTIONS OF IDENTITY & HISTORY
BY KRISTEN MCQUINN
Kristen McQuinn discusses Hall of Mirrors with John Copenhaver
The 1950s were a complex time, filled with political intrigue and deep social and moral imbalances. This is the tumultuous backdrop for John Copenhaver’s latest novel, Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus Crime, 2024), a thoughtful reflection of identity, politics, and the human experience.
Copenhaver set Hall of Mirrors in the McCarthy era, following the timeline established in his previous post-WWII novel, The Savage Kind (Pegasus Crime, 2021), featuring the same main characters, Judy and Philippa. Copenhaver explains that he had more to tell about their story and wanted to follow them in their growth from teenagers to young women. He says that the McCarthy era was “a particularly difficult time to be an independent-minded woman, especially if you’re queer and, in Judy’s case, mixed race.”
Researching and writing about this period uncovered some unique challenges, particularly those facing the LGBTQ+ and Black communities. Copenhaver immersed himself in the socio-political climate of the 1950s, uncovering the intricate ways in which government policies shaped societal attitudes. The McCarthy era is indelibly marked by government-sanctioned discrimination against Black and queer individuals, which bled over into society as a whole. Copenhaver notes, “The McCarthy era, from overt political figures grasping for power like McCarthy to the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, led to the perpetuation of discriminatory ideologies that still linger.” It is in the space left by these attitudes that Copenhaver is able to explore their continuing impact on modern society. He says, “These attitudes still echo today, making it a rich and relevant setting for my story.”
Copenhaver deftly manages the delicate task of balancing historical accuracy with creative storytelling. His story incorporates many of the dark facets of the McCarthy era and how various government agencies acted while simultaneously revolving around a domestic setting through the private lives of Judy and Philippa, as well as those of Roger and Lionel, the novel’s murder victim and suspect. He explains that this
balance was crucial to create an authentic and engaging narrative. The domestic side of the novel really is where the narrative shines, allowing readers a glimpse into the minds of the characters.
The book’s title itself gives readers a deeper perspective and acts as a portal into the themes within, with the concept of reflection and doubling at the forefront. The society that Judy and Philippa navigate is fraught with double standards and questions of identity. Copenhaver elaborates, “I’ve always been interested in mirroring and doubles, a consistent theme in film noir. In this novel, I explore several doubles: Judy and Philippa, Roger and Lionel. Opposites attract, and love aligns, yet mirrors also suggest vanity and the question of identity.”
Identity is further explored in the representation of LGBTQ+ characters, which are a cornerstone of Copenhaver’s writing. Thanks to Copenhaver and other contemporary writers, these characters are being written back into historical fiction. He says that LGBTQ+ representation in his work is an intentional correction of invisibility and, “It’s about enjoying a twisty mystery while considering historical representation.”
The theme of “passing” is also central the narrative. Judy has spent her life passing as a white woman, though in reality she is biracial. Passing has been a complex issue for decades, having its origins in the colonial and antebellum South eras. Initially, the practice of racial passing was used as a means of escaping slavery, but it continued in the post-Reconstruction era as a strategy to avoid systemic racism. Passing carried on into the 1950s, both in terms of racial passing as well as passing as straight for members of the queer community, again as an attempt to escape from the racism and homophobia of the time. Copenhaver notes that passing also “raises questions of identity and agency, highlighting the moral imbalances of societal norms.”
Moral imbalances are further explored through the lens of the political landscape of the 1950s. This time period was marked by the Red Scare and Jim Crow laws which also targeted LGBTQ+ individuals. The merest hint of accusation could be enough to destroy an entire life. Copenhaver reflects, “The Lavender Scare, a subset of the Red Scare, led to the persecution of gays and lesbians in government roles, driven by fearmongering and power dynamics.” Roger’s firing from his job at the State Department and Lionel hiding his true relationship with Roger from the police during their investigations are reflections of the Lavender Scare and systemic racism in action.
While acknowledging social progress since then, Copenhaver
questions the true extent of change. Through the characters’ experiences, he urges readers to critically analyze fear-driven narratives, emphasizing the importance of understanding historical contexts to foster meaningful change.
When dealing with heavy themes, a reflection on grief and loss is only natural. Copenhaver’s personal experiences with grief shape his writing. He candidly discusses the impact of his father’s early death, stating that this formative experience forced him to reflect on loss, mortality, and why bad things happen. He describes his writing as “inherently dark yet affirming, reflecting the complexities of life.”
Copenhaver further notes, “Exploring grief allows for a deeper understanding of human experiences, showcasing the resilience and affirmation that coexist with sorrow.” Philippa, Judy, and Lionel embody various aspects of grief and resilience as they experience the loss of loved ones, of their security, livelihood, and identity. They also are the embodiment of perseverance, carrying on despite hardship and persecution. As Copenhaver’s vibrant, complex characters demonstrate, it is during difficult times that people’s true selves emerges.
Hall of Mirrors emerges as a nuanced exploration of identity, politics, and human resilience within the McCarthy-era, as well as holding up a mirror to our modern lives and challenging us to do better. Copenhaver’s captivating narrative encourages readers to reflect on historical legacies, LGBTQ+ representation, and the enduring quest for identity and belonging.
Kristen McQuinn has degrees in medieval literature from Arizona State University. She works at University of Phoenix overseeing general studies faculty and teaching literature courses. She lives in Phoenix with her teenage daughter.
ONE WRITER TO ANOTHER
BY NIAMH BOYCE
Niamh Boyce talks to Molly Aitken about the many directions a story can take
Bright I Burn (Canongate/Knopf, 2024) retells the story of Dame Alice Kyteler, the first woman accused of witchcraft in the British Isles. Though infamous within Ireland, the witchcraft trial is not as wellknown outside of the country. It occurred in Kilkenny in 1324, when Bishop Ledrede accused the Dame, a wealthy Flemish merchant, of leading a sect, of making sacrifices at the crossroads and poisoning her husbands. The case was the first time someone was burned to death for witchcraft, a fate endured by Petronelle de Midia, said to be Alice’s maid. While my novel Her Kind (Penguin Ireland, 2020) centres Petronelle and her fate, Molly Aitken’s novel Bright I Burn reimagines Alice’s life, delightfully disrupting cliches about medieval women. A money lender, Kyteler was incredibly powerful, yet like many women she has entered history by the skin of her teeth – had she not been accused of witchcraft we would not even know of her existence.
Aitken remembers encountering Alice Kyteler in school, where she was spoken about “briefly, scathingly, as if she were an evil creature, a stereotypical fairy tale witch… She was clearly a complicated figure,” says Aitken, “not at all the expected narrative of a good woman
wrongfully accused, and this intrigued me… If she was another victim, I wouldn’t have written this novel. I’m interested in the women of history that subvert the stereotypes we have about gender in the past.”
There are no stereotypes in Bright I Burn. Aitken is a beautifully lyrical and original writer who has brought Alice Kyteler to life as a force of nature. Animals, especially cats, have a strong presence in the book. The novel begins when young Alice encounters a lynx, and the connection drawn between the lynx and Alice forms an intoxicating thread. “The first scene I ever conceived of for the novel was the opening where Alice as a child meets a wildcat,” says Aitken. “To me this encapsulated the true Alice. This creature that ought to run free but is instead domesticated into a patriarchal society. Of course, she thrives in this society and bends it to her will, but she’s still constrained by it, and forced to adapt. The cats throughout the novel were a symbol of this domestication of a wild creature. Cats are also mentioned in the accusations made against her. As far as I could tell, this was the first time cats had been associated with witches. It would be a wasted opportunity not to use them.” In her early teens, Aitken read Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1992), and it was very influential. She felt constrained by her Catholic school and the Irish village she lived in which, not unlike Alice Kyteler’s Kilkenny, was rife with misogynistic gossip.
Bright I Burn is meticulously researched. Aitken used the archives and also mentioned Femina by Janina Ramirez (2022) as a wonderful source about the women of the Middle Ages, though she notes that Alice Kyteler wasn’t mentioned. Many “witch trial” books either omit the case or leave it to the footnotes. Perhaps it is the date, and its isolation as a once-off case – the Kilkenny trial happened two hundred years before the so-called witchcraft craze. “It just goes to show how little she’s known,” says Aitken, “despite how influential she was in her day, or even how impactful her case was on later European witch trials.”
Molly Aitken’s novel has a refreshingly sensual and earthy approach to its protagonist’s sex life – Alice was famous for her four husbands. “The Fires of Lust by Katherine Harvey (2021) was an excellent examination of sex in the Middle Ages,” says Aitken. “It really showed me how incorrect the stereotypes about sexuality in this time were. It was refreshing to write a character who was so unashamed of being a sexual being. I particularly relished this because it’s not something we imagine about the women of Ireland’s past… Bright I Burn is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious woman. I want readers to feel a fire has been lit in them. I want them to feel we should celebrate women’s ambition and embrace our own rage at times. Today, we’re still policing ourselves in these arenas, but actually there was a woman seven hundred years ago who was unashamedly herself.”
One challenge of bringing this kind of story to life is conveying 13thcentury Kilkenny to the reader without weighing the story down with research and socio-political information. It’s a challenge that Aitken meets brilliantly, especially through the structure of the novel –where there are short sections with titles like “At the fish seller’s stall,” “Whispers,” “How to check your baby is alive…” These succinctly and powerfully convey the world Alice moves through. It lends a light- handed feel to something very ingeniously structured.
There are many aspects to the trial of Alice Kyteler, so many powerful people involved from Pope John to the King of England. Like many historical novels, it was a story that could have started at any point and gone in so many directions. As one writer to another, one who had also written about the case, I was very interested in Aitken’s approach to the novel, wondering did she find it difficult to choose exactly where to enter Alice’s life? Where to begin the story and where to end? Aitken was very frank and generous in her answer.
I GAVE ARTHUR A HARD TIME in the previous two books, so I felt that he deserved one last swing of Excalibur, one final charge into glory.
“I struggled with where to begin a lot. Initially I wrote her entire childhood, but in the end only one scene survived from that. But her childhood just didn’t contribute enough to the themes of power, sexuality, ambition and rage that I was exploring. I suppose this is the difference between fiction and non-fiction. The ending was much easier. I knew when the trial took place and what happened. There were also tantalising theories about what occurred after the trial. So I had to explore the most mesmerising possibility, as well as giving what I hope was a satisfying ending for readers, a final stand-off let’s say.” Without giving anything away, the end is thoroughly satisfying – I imagine, Alice would be pleased.
Multi-award-winning Irish writer Niamh Boyce’s Her Kind (Penguin Ireland, 2020) has just been released in the US. It was nominated for the EU Prize for Literature. She lives in the Irish midlands where she’s completing her third novel.
AN ARTHURIAN ROAD TRIP
BY GORDON O'SULLIVAN
Gordon O’Sullivan discusses Giles Kristian’s latest book
Giles Kristian has travelled back to the world of his two excellent novels Lancelot (2019) and Camelot (2021) with his new work Arthur (Bantam, 2024). Completing what is effectively a loose trilogy, the author told the Historical Novels Review in a recent interview that “all three books in my Arthurian retelling deal with a different set of characters, meaning that they are more like companion novels than sequels in the normal sense.” The author adds that “you could read any of the three without having read the other two… it’s a very selfcontained story.” Yet, there’s no doubt that if you have read the two previous Arthurian novels, your enjoyment of Kristian’s new tale will most certainly be enriched.
In Arthur, while many years have passed and the cruel Saxons now dominate the land, there is still a yearning for a certain legendary British hero. In his third novel in the series, the writer wanted to “play with the enduring and very romantic part of the legend which says that in our darkest time, when we need him most, shall Arthur come again.” So how did it feel returning to his world? “It was like indulging in a familiar and favourite piece of music. It was comforting to sink back into the rhythms, the ebb and flow, the word-weaving, and the rich description” of that realm.
What drew the writer back to territory that he had already explored? “I gave Arthur a hard time in the previous two books, so I felt that he deserved one last swing of Excalibur, one final charge into glory.” Having told the tales of Lancelot and then Galahad, the author felt that he both “owed it to the reader and to Arthur himself to delve into the life of the man at the centre of it all.” Kristian’s idea was to imagine that “Arthur hadn’t died of his wounds, nor was he healed in Avalon” and to ask “what if Arthur had lived? What kind of man would he have become?” And more importantly for this hero’s
journey, “could he be tempted back…to wield Excalibur one final time?” Inspired perhaps by the screenwriting that he’s so busy with at the moment, the author’s road map for his new novel was “the Arthurian fiction equivalent of a road-trip movie.”
Giles Kristian knew that he wanted Arthur to be different in form from the two previous novels in the series so he “decided to split the story into two narrative threads”, a new departure for the author “that in itself excited” him. He created one section set long in the past that would both reveal the “hero’s origin story and his humanity” and “enhance the emotional resonance” of the other narrative set in the present. When writing his dual timeline narrative, he considered it vital to make sure that both stories were “equally compelling. I can honestly say I enjoyed writing both parts equally.”
Readers around the world remain fascinated with the Arthurian legends in all their variety. Why does the author think that the legend endures? “Because it evolves. Each of us who seizes on the Arthurian canon finds something within it that speaks to us.” But that doesn’t mean that the writer has to stick to the established mythology. “I’ve had fun subverting some aspects of the legend, giving subtle nods to characters and episodes in the age-old stories with my own versions and conceivable explanations.” In fact, Kristian found real joy “in the act of taking up the old threads from the myths we all know and spinning them into something new.”
The author’s historical fiction novels all have a strong mystical or religious core to them including the “mystic meddling of Merlin” in Arthur. Kristian admits that he enjoys “dabbling in ideas of things behind the veil.” Why? “I think it’s important to at least try to give an impression of how thin the veil between worlds was to people in the past. The belief in a thing is what gives it power. It can permeate everything, both in the external and the internal worlds, and often influences my characters’ actions.” In his books, superstitions and “beliefs in things beyond that which can be seen are dialled up to eleven.” This focus on spiritual beliefs is not however an end in itself but an important “part of the characterization, the worldbuilding, and the evoking of atmosphere” in his novels.
Sadly for this reader, Arthur appears to be the end of Kristian’s version of the Arthurian legends so where’s he going next on his writing travels? The author is currently hard at work “writing a Viking video game called Norse with developer Arctic Hazard” which will be out next year. While it’s been a relatively draining creative process, it’s also been “fun delving back into the Viking world and creating some new characters whom I hope gamers will come to know and love.”
Finding the time to also collaborate with his writing partner, Philip Stevens, on a screenplay adaptation of one of his books while also working on an original screenplay for another project, it’s fair to say that Giles Kristian is busy!
Might he still find time for more historical novels in the future? He doesn’t give too much away. “It’s too early to say it aloud. I like to give an idea a little time to breathe before sharing it with the world. All I can say is that there are plenty of stories still waiting to be told.” However, the author does hint at potential future pleasures for fans of his Arthurian novels, “having now done Arthur, there’s a nagging feeling that Merlin is expecting his turn.” That’s a trip that Kristian’s readers would love to take with him.
Gordon O’Sullivan is a freelance writer and researcher.
REVIEWS
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
Due to an ever-increasing number of books for review and space constraints within HNR, some selected fiction reviews and all nonfiction reviews are now published as online exclusives. To view these reviews and much more, please visit www.historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews
ANCIENT HISTORY
BABYLONIA
Costanza Casati, Michael Joseph, 2024, £18.99, hb, 432pp, 9780241609637 / Sourcebooks Landmark, 2025, $27.99, hb, 448pp, 9781464228216
This is a tale full of passion, loyalty, love, lust and war, steeped within a tradition going back millennia. The author deftly tells the tale of Semiramis, a girl coming from nothing, and how she climbs up society’s ladder proving that the vision of your future, although it may not necessarily be what you want, will come, as it may, with a waterfall of blood and gold.
This novel is subtle with historical elements and allusions, therefore creating a plot that draws you in from the very first page. It is not noticed that the novel spans over many years of a lifetime; it feels as if it is happening in one short, sharp instant, creating an impressive impact. The author’s language and word choices are filled with nuance and clarity, letting the reader know that they are in for a treat and that they should savour every word. You will fall in love with the characters as they arrive, and as they go, you will have learned something about them and yourself. The empire of Babylonia and Assyria is a perfect backdrop for this ‘rise to greatness’ story, where it is within hardship that a person finds out who they truly are.
Clare Lehovsky
CLASSICAL
CAESAR’S GENERAL
Alex Gough, Canelo, 2024, £16.99, hb, 320pp, 9781804362099
As the second book in this series about Mark Antony, this volume can stand reasonably well on its own. The author introduces the situation that Mark Antony is confronted with and sets the scene for what’s going to happen to Caesar’s general. This book begins with Antony campaigning for Caesar, then returning to Rome to embrace the politics of the period while civil war is brewing. He is increasingly concerned about Caesar’s aims
and intentions, but also trying to look out for himself in the bigger picture.
Alex Gough successfully integrates historical facts with the plot, and although slightly imbalanced at times, he makes up for it with a useful timeline and glossary at the back of the book if one is interested. He explains the politics of the time quite well, as well as its place within Roman religion and the balance prominent figures had to achieve to win popularity in elections and also in warfare. He brings famous historical people to life, such as Caesar, Cicero, Dolabella, and Fulvia, with ease and obvious passion for the ancient Roman world and a commitment to the primary sources. We are easily transported to that time, and even though many of us know what’s going to happen, this story is written through fresh eyes, both by the author and now Antony himself.
Clare Lehovsky
MEDEA (UK) / THE WITCH OF COLCHIS (US)
Rosie Hewlett, Bantam, 2024, £16.99, hb, 432pp, 9781787637290 / Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024, $16.99/C$25.99, pb, 464pp, 9781728299013
Women in mythology are often treated as little more than footnotes. Medea flips that notion on its head. She is a woman with power, and men and the gods and goddesses are rarely kind to powerful women. When Jason and the Argonauts arrive in Medea’s home city of Colchis, she betrays her family to ensure he retrieves the golden fleece in exchange for his help to escape her father’s clutches. Her actions are driven not by her own desires but by Jason’s manipulation. Despite the horrific acts she commits, she believes her love for Jason will conquer the odds, and her marriage to him will prove that she’s more than just a witch. However, after they have children, she and Jason decide she must hide her powers and be only a wife and mother. But even as the wife of the famous hero, Medea is never treated well; is hated even, by everyone. Is it not reasonable that she, in turn, treats people with the same hate they’ve bestowed upon her? When her life is upended by a rumour that turns out to be true, Medea falls apart. She summons her powers, and they return, stronger than ever, as she begins to extract revenge on everyone who’s done her wrong.
Medea is a reworking of the Greek tragedy, and Hewlett doesn’t shy away from any of the appalling events that make Medea into a memorable character. In this new telling, Medea’s fate is reshaped, showing a different perspective of a woman wielding her goddessgranted powers. Readers are more than happy to follow her down her dark path, understanding that while she may do evil, she
is not evil. Medea is an excellent novel, very much a page-turner.
Kelly Urgan
DAUGHTERS OF OLYMPUS
Hannah Lynn, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024, $17.99, pb, 448pp, 9781728284293
Hannah Lynn’s novel retells the myths of Demeter, Greek goddess of grain, and her daughter Persephone/Core. Traditionally, Zeus is Persephone’s father without any background story. Lynn vividly fills that void, describing Demeter’s adoration of her younger brother Zeus when he rescues her from Cronus’s belly and then the transformation of that naïve hero worship into hate when he uses that trust to draw her off alone and rape her. So deep is her trauma, she withdraws to an island and for millennia fearfully protects her daughter from the gods’ notice—or so she thinks.
The narrative point of view shifts to unworldly Core, who chafes at her restricted life, cramped by her mother’s trauma. Eventually, Core seeks more in life with results at first happy and later devastating to both mother and daughter. All three of the Olympian brothers, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, commit acts of violence against the mother-daughter pair. The prologue announces, “This is the story of a mother’s loss and a woman so completely torn to shreds by her family that the whole Earth would suffer because of it.” This feminist rendering shows the lasting scars rape inflicts. Demeter may only want safety for her daughter, but in the process, she forces an unending, powerless girlhood on her daughter. Both Core and Demeter must break out of these anxiety-born limitations of character and grow—ironic for two goddesses whose touch makes flowers burst forth. Lynn’s portrayal of both characters grants them this complex development. To do so, she must draw a heavy line between these daughters of Olympus who feel fully human to the reader and the rest of the Olympians, even the other goddesses, who are unchangingly self-centered and vile.
Judith Starkston
HERA
Jennifer Saint, Flatiron, 2024, $28.99, hb, 400pp, 9781250855602 / Wildfire, 2024, £20.00, hb, 400pp, 9781472292209
Following her previous novels on the Greek myths, Jennifer Saint tells the story of Hera, Queen of Olympus. After overthrowing the Titans and their father, Cronus, the immortal goddess Hera and her brother, Zeus, establish their reign on Mount Olympus, where she expects to rule by his side. But when Zeus subdues Hera in moment of lust, she vows to make him pay for his betrayal. She will enlist every ally she can find on the dizzying heights of Olympus and in the dark, fetid underground where Gaia dwells to reclaim her right to rule alongside an increasingly power-mad Zeus. Saint, who studied classics at King’s College, London, has a preternatural ability to get inside the minds and internal experiences of her albeit mythological characters. Here,
Hera is the immensely sympathetic foil to an increasingly unhinged Zeus, who forces her to marry him and become the goddess of marriage, a position she never wanted. As the centuries unfold, Hera silently endures and plots to take down Zeus, who spends his time seducing and/or raping immortal and mortal women, fathering more gods and goddesses—like Apollo and Artemis— who take up thrones on Olympus, much to Hera’s disgust. She will birth her own monster from that rage, who dwells in the hidden caves and tunnels in Gaia’s depths, but who also eventually succumbs to Zeus’s power. In dreaming of overthrowing her brother to establish “a world under the benevolent rule of goddesses, instead of power-hungry gods,” Hera soon realizes that Zeus’s meddling with mortals could threaten their existence—and serve up the vengeance long denied her. Hera is a delicious treat that readers will gobble up. Saint’s prose is lyrical, lush, and eloquently frames the endless contest between Zeus and Hera as a contemporary commentary on men and women.
Peggy Kurkowski
BIBLICAL
AHOTI: A Story of Tamar
Miriam Feinberg Vamosh and Eva Marie Everson, Paraclete Press, 2024, $22.00/ C$28.95, pb, 234pp, 9781640608986
The Old Testament story of Princess Tamar, the only named daughter of the powerful King David, gets a fresh and expanded treatment from Vamosh and Everson in this tale of tragedy, intrigue, healing, and hope. Tamar, young, beautiful, and a healer and diviner of dreams, has troubling dreams which confuse and frighten her. Raised in the royal palace, she is desired by the brutish Amnon, her father’s oldest son and heir, and is tricked into visiting Amnon’s supposed sickbed. Violated and cruelly cast out by Amnon, she is taken in by her brother Absalom.
Concern about her fate causes her to travel in secret to Gibeon, to her paternal grandmother, who advises her not to hide and suffer but to live with Absalom, bide her time, and discover her true enemies. She returns to her brother’s home, but in a nightmarish twist, Tamar is betrayed by Absalom, made a scapegoat and then accused of being complicit in a plot to challenge the royal succession. Forced to flee Jerusalem and create a new identity, she experiences years of hardship, pain, and longing as she perfects her calling as a healer and searches for answers.
The authors weave a colorful, dramatic, and engrossing story, using a nice blend of accurate historical detail, Jewish folklore, and biblical sources to bring their characters to quick life: King David, the exiled queen Maacah, the scheming Absalom, the faithful maid Mara, the seers Nathan and Gad, the crippled Mephibosheth, and the everwatchful Bathsheba. Tamar is a sympathetic character whose courage, faith, and will to survive political upheaval, judicial murders,
and personal humiliation lead her ultimately to the palace of King Solomon and an unexpected redemption.
Michael
I. Shoop
1ST CENTURY
BIRDS OF PREY
Damion Hunter, Canelo, 2024, £10.99, pb, 378pp, 9781804365793
It’s the tenth year of the emperor Domitian; between the execution of Lucullus and the arrival of the new governor Proculus to Britain, the Roman occupational forces are stretched thin. Faustus Valerianus, twelve years after his first arrival, is now a senior centurion of the Second Augusta and trusted in his appointment. As he’s part Briton (of the Silures), his situation in the west of the country is assured. Up to a point. A hunting accident leading to a change in kings of the Silures, combined with discoveries of arms and supply smuggling, makes the legate of II Augusta Caecilius nervous. It took a personal tragedy and Faustus’ own sister Silvia becoming deeply involved in the brewing conflict to question loyalties and values. Can peace be maintained, and at what cost?
This is a well-written story. The scene setting is very vivid while the characters are believable and have layered motivations. The army life of Rome is well presented, and the pacing between action and politicking balanced.
Alan Cassady-Bishop
NERO
Conn Iggulden, Michael Joseph, 2024, £22.00, hb, 416pp, 9780241587324 / Pegasus, 2024, $27.95, hb, 416pp, 9781639366545
Rome, AD 37, and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, in a furious temper, tacks horses for his chariot and argues with his pregnant wife. He storms off to certain death, leaving wife Agrippina to face her own mortality as she labours to birth their son. So begins a narrative that shifts from character to character, as they are picked off by the bloody brutality of Roman life. The people seem real. They gamble, sweat, apply makeup, and play games with their children. Gnaeus, a prize-winning athlete, is clumsy in the house, his wife alerted to his homecomings when she hears him crashing about. Such homely details transform historic names into people we can believe in.
But Roman life is gruesome, and this is not a book for the squeamish. Death is as vivid as life. It’s not only battle; women get their share of peril in buttock-clenching childbirth scenes. It’s not all blood and gore, though. The portrayal of the man who would become Emperor Caligula – famed for sadistic tyranny – is a masterclass in subtle writing.
The narrative shifts from person to person, plunging into multiple thoughts, both illuminating motives, and cleverly depicting other players. Scenes alive with personality sweep through the rules of three emperors.
The narrative kept me engaged as I waited for Nero and his famous fire – implied on the cover legend: “NERO: Rome wasn’t burned in a day...” So, I don’t want to spoil the end, but I felt the book was mis-titled. However, this is a quibble. This is excellent historical fiction. It brought the past to life, left me keen to read the sequel, and interested in the author’s note on facts. Recommended, provided you can stomach Rome’s bloodiness.
Helen Johnson
THE STONE CUTTER
Brock Meier, Blue Sevens Publishing, 2023, $26.95, hb, 443pp, 9781958902028
Meier’s enchanting prose opens with an old man and two shepherds who cross paths. In return for sharing a meal, the old man shares a story. From there, the tale of Nahor, a young man training to become a master sculptor and his chance encounter with a wandering rabbi that will be remembered throughout history unfolds. After losing his livelihood to a tragic accident, Nahor travels to the farthest reaches of the world searching for a mythical treasure that can restore his future. Despite earning different types of treasures along the way, his vision is locked on restoring what’s been lost. Desperate for answers, Nahor provokes a demon for answers and instead finds himself beset upon by great evil.
Meier sets the stage well, from caravans calculating their distance across the desert, by the chanting of epic poems, to assessing the quality of pearls in Gwongjau. Meier’s research provides a solid foundation, and his figurative language evokes emotion and sparks drama. It’s easy to root for Nahor, hoping he finds what he’s looking while also feeling your heart break when he pushes himself too far, still wounded by his losses. My only disappointment is the story of Yeshua’s resurrection and how he “appeared first to Kepha” (aka Peter), brushing aside the women who followed Yeshua and his appearance first to Mary Magdalene prior to the other disciples.
Styled in epic fashion, the story deftly travels through early AD cultures. There is adventure, romance, meticulous historical detail, and a journey of faith which will entertain and intrigue a multitude of readers.
J. Lynn Else
2ND CENTURY
DAUGHTER OF THE SEVEN HILLS
Margaret McNellis, Silver Arrow Books, 2024, $15.99, pb, 386pp, 9781737257974
Daughter of The Seven Hills has something for everyone. The story of a girl, Aurelia, born into one of Rome’s noble families and sneaking around the notorious city circa 100 CE, is filled with romance, action, adventure, and loss. When Aurelia finds herself pregnant with a soldier’s child, a station below her birth, she is forced to make a choice which could cost
her everything. The love of her life is shipped to Britain to fight on the front lines, and her most cherished companion, a slave named Vita, will risk her life to make sure that Aurelia is safe. With an impending marriage to an unfeeling man looming on the horizon, Aurelia feels she has no option but to sacrifice her baby to honor her family’s wishes. She’s just made up her mind to settle into her new, dull life when she learns that her new husband and uncle are hatching a traitorous plot against the empire. As the pressure mounts, Aurelia’s plans fail, and with Vita in tow, she has no other option but to flee the city of her birth and undertake a journey in search of her true love.
In a riveting tale of sacrifice and finding one’s identity among the shambles of an old life, author Margaret McNellis brings Aurelia and ancient Rome to life vividly in this thrilling narrative. Readers will cry between smiles and cheer on the protagonists every step of the way. Hold your breath because the battle for Britain—and freedom—is now underway.
Ellaura Shoop
3RD CENTURY
GEMINI
Anthony Tye Rodrigues, GutenBookPress, 2023, $19.60, pb, 322pp, 9781645942184
Late 3rd century AD, Roman-occupied Britannia. Licinianus and Severiana are twins, born into the once-powerful Vindex family. Twins in their family have always been given gifts by the Gods. Gentle and peace-loving Licinianus is eventually given the gift of becoming an unparalleled warrior. His sister Severiana is given the gift of saving children. The two share a bond stronger than any other, including Severiana’s bond with her husband. As war rages and Licinianus fights battle after battle, an incident back at home infuriates the family and has Licinianus plotting revenge. In turn, Severiana’s gift of saving children could possibly save the whole family.
This is a masterclass in the intrigue, betrayal, and endless wars in the Roman Empire at the time, showing the cruelty that was prevalent on both sides of every battle. The story changes back and forth between the points of view of Licinianus and Severiana. This adds great depth to the story, as they are often in very different circumstances. Severiana’s experiences as the wife of an injured soldier ring true even today. Licinianus is someone who is not interested in war, but still becomes the greatest warrior of them all. The contrast of that is not lost on him. The cultures, religions, and customs of the time, and the sheer brutality of battle, are portrayed truthfully. The rampant enslavement during that era and the way it is treated so casually, even by our main characters, can be shocking, but is true to the period. Severiana goes through a brutal experience herself, and the author portrays it in a realistic way. The detailed descriptions of battle tactics and religious customs show that this is meticulously researched. Although it is
the second book in the Villa at Oak River trilogy, it easily stands alone. Highly recommended. Bonnie DeMoss
4TH CENTURY
EXSILIUM
Alison Morton, Pulcheria Press, 2024, £9.99/$12.99, pb, 370pp, 9791097310387
Alison Morton is the author of the Roma Nova series of thrillers, in which a fragment of the Roman Empire survives to the present day in a small Alpine country. Exsilium tells the story of how that nation came to be. In the late 4th century, people who worship the Roman gods face persecution by the Christian emperors. Maelia Mitela, whose husband died fighting for a more tolerant emperor, is threatened with the confiscation of her estate and wants to secure her children’s future, but she hesitates to make a second marriage to lawyer Marcellus Varus. Lucius Apulius, a senator and ex-military tribune, is devastated by the death of his wife in childbirth. He is determined to lead a group of twelve families to his late wife’s homeland, where they will be free to worship the ancient religion. Lucius’ daughter Galla demands a divorce from her unfaithful husband and escapes Rome along with her father, Maelia, and the others. A natural leader, she becomes her father’s confidante and the chronicler of the journey to the group’s new home.
Exsilium is an extraordinary novel, and Morton’s knowledge of the late Roman Empire is amazing. She draws the reader into this largely unfamiliar world and makes it come alive. The three protagonists are all strong characters who the reader cares about, and there are wonderful secondary characters as well. I especially enjoyed reading about Galla’s warrior sister Lucilla, and I hope she will get her own novel someday. The journey is told in incredible detail, and you fear for the characters as they try to avoid Germanic tribes and imperial recruiters. The main Roma Nova series is alternate history, but Exsilium takes place within the “real” timeline until the last chapter. I am now looking forward to reading about these characters’ present-day descendants.
Vicki Kondelik
5TH CENTURY
THE CANDLEMAKER’S WOMAN
Marj Charlier, Sunacumen Press, 2024, $19.99, pb, 316pp, 9781734564372
Marj Charlier’s The Candlemaker’s Woman provides a nuanced portrayal of a 5th century CE “barbarian” tribe pushing into the disintegrating Roman Empire. Barely pubescent Melia is sold by her parents as the price for safe passage into Gaul (modern France). Now “owned” by a brutal candlemaker, Melia endures unceasing sexual assault and emotional battery, yet
becomes expert in candle making, develops friendships with other slaves in her community on the fringes of the Roman Empire, and meets Reggie, a brewmaster-slave she could love.
When her own Suevi tribe crosses the frozen Rhine on Christmas Eve, 406 CE, the longedfor reunion launches a hard odyssey with its own brutalities as her people search for refuge in a devastated landscape. Now legally free, Melia must build her own identity as an independent woman, survive the abuses of her own people, and prove her worth in a misogynist world.
Charlier’s tale is a page-turner, a vivid picture which questions the typical barbarian vs. civilized Rome narrative. In this unflinching description of the slave trade, sensitive readers can see the plight of modern victims. Anti-Slavery International (antislavery.org) estimates that nearly 50 million people now live in conditions of slavery similar to Melia’s, including forced labor, forced marriage and sexual trafficking. One quarter are children. A map of 5th-century Europe would have been helpful. Readers may want to find one to follow Melia’s difficult journey to home, inner strength, and sustaining love.
Pamela Schoenewaldt
BECOMING ST. PATRICK:
His Mission
Eric Foster, Matador, 2024, £11.99, pb, 472pp, 9781805142300
A sequel to the wonderful Becoming St. Patrick: His Slavery, this story starts where the first book ended: with Patricius at home, in Bena Venta, with his parents.
Guided by God, Patricius is ordained a priest and sets about returning to Ireland, the country of his slavery, to attempt conversion of the Irish people from paganism to Christianity. His journey is opposed by the Catholic Church, so he finds his own way of funding his mission. Arriving in Ireland and reverting to his slave name, Patrick, he is faced with hatred from a section of the Druid community, who force him to move on from his original landing place. Finding a welcome with an outlaw community, he sets up his first church. He finds friendship and help from a number of sources, and eventually is able to convince kings of the valuable lessons in Christ’s teachings.
Impeccably researched, this is an excellent vehicle for building a story of St. Patrick, based on the saint’s own words, and cleverly weaving these into a coherent and believable tale.
The story told is both fascinating and informative. Unfortunately, for this reviewer, the novel is not as good as the first. The start is very ponderous. Whilst it is enthralling to learn the history of Druidism, the Rites of Exorcism, or even the process of anointing a bishop as well as many other things, there is far too much detail that continuously slows the pace, at times almost to a stop. There is also repetition of details and thoughts, and an overuse of anachronistic expressions (from the 17th and 20th centuries) in speech.
Despite these shortcomings, it is a book well
worth reading for its fine interpretation of what the life of a saint might have been.
Aidan K. Morrissey
9TH CENTURY
A KINGDOM TO CLAIM
Sian Ann Bessey, Shadow Mountain, 2024, $18.99/C$24.99, pb, 352pp, 9781639932474
As a gentle love story set in tumultuous 9th-century Wessex, this vibrant novel teems with life. It tells the fictional tale of Aisley, a young Saxon noblewoman who is a healer, and Brecc, a Saxon warrior who has sworn his steadfast and loyal fealty to King Alfred. They live in a land riven with ongoing warfare between the Saxons and the invading Vikings that threatens their very way of life. From holiday celebrations to market places to battlefield scenes, Aisley’s and Brecc’s worlds intersect regularly and often in dangerous circumstances. When plots and betrayals threaten to rip them apart, they both remain staunchly and bravely loyal to Wessex and to each other.
This novel is filled with memorable characters who surround our intrepid couple. They include fictional characters such as a jesting male friend who defends them both with his own life, a fiercely loyal stable hand, and a courageous fishmonger, among others. They include real historical figures who have been brought to life, such as King Alfred as a man who is wise in both warfare and Christian humility, and Guthrum, a Danish invader who made his own mark on English history.
The familial, political, and military crises that tie all these characters together bind them in a tapestry that masterfully displays the times in which they live. The sights, smells, and textures of Wessex in 878 come fully alive in this fast-paced, entertaining, informative, and inspirational novel. Well worth reading!
Karen Bordonaro
10TH CENTURY STORMCROW
Ben Kane, Orion, 2024, £18.99, hb, 352pp, 9781398714601
Ireland, AD 995, and Finn Thorgilsson, son of a Norse settler, goes to move cattle to the summer pasture. When he returns home, his father is dead, murdered. Finn swears vengeance, gets aboard a longship, and launches on a saga-like series of adventures.
Two things lift this story from the run-ofthe-mill Viking adventure: the quality of the writing, and Finn’s friend. The story is written in Finn’s voice, but the star is his friend, Vekel. Vekel is different. Vekel is a seiðr: a prophet, a sorcerer – and a cross-dresser. He goes to sea wearing a dress, make-up, and necklace.
This is not something that Kane made up in order to be fashionable now. Evidence shows that prophecy in the Viking world was women’s province. A man pursuing this calling was expected to be effeminate. Many
stories feature encounters with a prophet, but they are enigmatic ciphers, rarely explored in themselves. While Vekel commands this ‘otherness’ of a seer, he is also Finn’s childhood friend, and Finn’s close-up view makes him human. Vekel is refreshingly different – and very entertaining. Otherwise, Stormcrow delivers the expectations of a Viking warrior story. Ireland’s many small kingdoms, with Norse enclaves, provide opportunities for lots of fighting.
I thought the fight scenes well-written. I confess to skimming overly drawn-out fights in other books, but the ones here kept me focussed with a variety of fast, sharp – and very believable – action. It would be a spoiler to reveal too much, but I thought the motivations in Finn’s romance were insufficiently justified. I also felt the ending had too little closure: it was clearly a set-up for a sequel. But I would read it – especially if Vekel remains onboard.
Helen Johnson
11TH CENTURY
NICKED
M. T. Anderson, Pantheon, 2024, $28.00/ C$37.99, hb, 240pp, 9780593701607
Bari, 1087. Brother Nicephorus, a monk with a pure heart, has had a sacred dream in which St. Nicholas is calling him to minister to the sick outside of his monastery. However, the powers that be decree the dream as a different sign: The bones of St. Nicholas must be “rescued” from their current resting place and brought to Saint Benedict’s in Bari! Surely, that will cure the pox sweeping across the coast. Along with a relic thief and his crew of pirates, including a dog-headed man, Brother Nicephorus is sent out into a world of deception, manipulation, and dark secrets.
The book is both based on an actual event and is a “willfully inaccurate” (per the author’s afterword) heist yarn. It’s also partly an exploration of the history that’s remembered as mythical, versus what’s been crafted by the writers of history. The prose is sometimes an after-the-fact retelling and other times not, so it’s hard to sink into the narrative style since the tale itself doesn’t fully define what it wants to be. At the start, the book propels forward on dialogue-heavy footing. While there’s a peppering here and there of setting detail, it was much scantier than I prefer as a historical reader.
The night of the heist, a large section where a bunch of characters are running around trying to evade townspeople, goes on too long and becomes monotonous. Meanwhile, the queer romance aspects really aren’t strong. There’s little chemistry or time taken to develop a believable relationship. Perhaps this is because the plot jumps between scenes of perpetual action. Overall, the book is a blend of religious mysticism, dryly humorous hijinks, and high seas adventure that culminates into a light read but which might have worked better in a historical fantasy setting.
J. Lynn
Else
12TH CENTURY
AMONG SEA WOLVES
Jean Gill, 13th Sign, 2024, £12.99/$18.99, pb, 342pp, 9791096459476
Adventure abounds in this exuberantly entertaining tale of seafaring Vikings from the Orkney Islands on their way to Jerusalem in the 12th century. While it is the second book in a series, it can be easily and fully read and enjoyed on its own. In this instalment, the secret handfasting oath between Skarfr, a warrior and a skald (poet), and Hlif, the ship’s housekeeper, ward of the commander, and a seeress, unfolds dramatically. Subplots concerning a wronged noblewoman, thralls (Irish slaves), and shifting political alliances and power struggles play out back in Orkney as the sea wolves (the Viking seafarers) travel on their path of pillage and pilgrimage.
The pace is lightning-fast as new troubles confront the characters on almost every page. Moving from one dilemma to the next, the plot’s speed is unrelenting but also extremely propulsive. The characters multiply as the story continues, but their connections to each other give weight to the telling and drive the plot forward. Unexpected encounters with strangers, new cities, and foreign lands further deepen the sense of a churning landscape full of danger but also adventure.
A larky, fast-paced plot, coupled with characters who could come straight from the sagas, results in sheer entertainment. Recommended for anyone wanting to spend a few hours in the company of intrepid heroes on daring journeys.
Karen Bordonaro
THE LOST QUEEN
Carol McGrath, Headline Accent, 2024, £10.99, pb, 314 pp, 9781472297372
1191. A third crusade is inexorable: King Richard of England (and Duke of much of France) takes up arms to win back Jerusalem, held by the Muslim Sultan Saladin, joining forces with most of the crowned heads of western Europe.
As he prepares, Richard’s spirited mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, intent on preserving her dynasty, delivers him his future bride – not Alice of France, as many wished for political expediency, but regal, tenacious and duskily beautiful Princess Berengaria of Navarre. Enduring an arduous journey through the bitter, frozen Alps, and southern Europe to Messina, Sicily, with her virago of a chaperone, the fledgling princess finds only
the rosy bloom of adventure on each new experience, brushing aside an attempt on her life foiled by her guard and finally wedding her heart’s desire in newly conquered Cyprus.
His star in the ascendant, Richard overlooks that his choice will fracture the leadership alliance of the crusade, underestimating the vengeful reckoning that will constantly resurface. An imagined character, Avelina of Middleton, also reaches the Holy Land in Berengaria’s entourage, disguised amongst a party of English nuns seeking a holy relic –hoping to find her missing husband alive in Saracen territory. This proves to be an inspired writing device: told chiefly through the worlds of Berengaria and Avelina, interleaved with the experiences of Blondel, a poet-musician-spy, and Sir William, Avelina’s long-lost soulmate.
Carol McGrath’s elegant prose weaves a sumptuous tale of Templar knights and fine ladies, courtly love, exhilarating adventure and stalwart heroism as exquisitely crafted as a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Berengaria emerges as intelligent and indefatigable, fighting to reconcile her dearly won agency with the complicated, tested and enduring devotion she cannot deny for her lord and king (if never with the contradiction inherent in holy war). Magical.
K. Darbey
13TH CENTURY
THEIR CASTILIAN ORPHAN
Anna Belfrage, Timelight Press, 2024, £10.99/$12.99, pb, 410pp, 9789198829877
The turbulent times of Welsh rebellion against English rule in the 1290s come vividly to life in this captivating novel. Against this backdrop, the story tells of an orphaned boy raised by his doting foster parents, encompassing birth, death, love, and sorrow across a vast landscape of turmoil and upheaval. Lionel, the orphan, believes himself to be of Castilian heritage. His foster parents, Noor (Eleanor) and Robert, are Castilian/Welsh and English, and are in service to Edward, King of England, who is trying to stamp out continued uprisings of the rebellious Welsh while also preparing to go to war in France. Robert’s half-brother, Eustace, adds a strong level of menace to the lives of both Robert and Lionel because Eustace feels cheated of the full feudal heritage that he believes is his due. Woven into this main narrative are many other strands that follow characters who demonstrate how Welsh, Castilian, French, and English people already lived together, married each other, and fought both together and against each other at this place and time in history.
A fast-paced plot and deeply empathetic characters involved in very emotional circumstances will give readers an adrenaline rush when reading this book. Hard to put down, it will both entertain and inform readers in a way that will let them learn more about life during this particular period in history, but also feel
the ongoing humanness of people everywhere in every time. Highly recommended.
Karen Bordonaro
14TH CENTURY
WOLVES OF WINTER
Dan Jones, Aries, 2024, £16.99, hb, 405pp, 9781838937942 / Viking, 2024, $30.00, hb, 416pp, 9780593653791
The Hundred Years’ War garnered the kings of England a crop of astonishing victories, but they never seemed decisive, and the war dragged on until at the end the King of England retained only Calais on the southern side of the Channel. In Dan Jones’ earlier book, Essex Dogs, he covers the campaign that led to the first great English victory at Crecy (1346); in the sequel, Wolves of Winter, he covers the long, bloody, muddy anti-climax of the winter siege of Calais.
This series is Jones’ first foray into fiction. As a prolific popular historian, not only is his research impeccable, but he is eager to share it with his readers. So we learn about the early development of artillery, the ransom system, the technicalities of siege warfare, and much more. Yet this never weighs down the narrative. He weaves a fast-moving, human story, following the fortunes of a company of ordinary English soldiers. This is very much a worm’s eye view of history, seen by the people who do the hard work and bear the discomforts and the suffering.
My only problem with the book is that mediaeval siege warfare was so filthy and awful that I could only take it in short stretches. I am sure it is very authentic.
Edward James
I, CHRISTINE
Marcia Maxwell, Independently published, 2023, $16.99, pb, 460pp, 9798850654399
Christine de Pizan narrates her story as a pioneering woman writer in 14th-15th century France. It begins when she is widowed and struggling to feed her children and her mother. Her late husband was astrologer and physician to the king, and one of his court friends helps by arranging a position for her to copy books in the king’s library. Her reputation as a poet comes to the attention of royalty, and she wins poetry contests reading her work to the court. Soon she is being given commissions by royal family members to produce illustrated copies of her work. But becoming known in court circles means she is bound to make enemies. She becomes involved in a disagreement with a courtier over Roman de la Rose, which Pizan sees as very misogynistic. And her position at court means she gets caught up in the civil war in France between different factions of the royal family when the king becomes mentally ill.
I knew little about Pizan and appreciated learning more about her story. Maxwell is very good at portraying the small details of medieval life, such as clothing, preparing meals, and décor; she obviously did a lot of research. But
the novel needs editing, and I’m not sure that a first-person narrator was the best choice for the book. It means that in order for the narrator to witness and describe goings-on at the court, she is constantly traveling back and forth between home and the royal palaces. I had trouble keeping the characters straight, who was related to the king and how, for example, so a list of characters would have helped. Pizan’s life is a more than worthy subject for a novel, so I applaud Maxwell’s attempt, but I did not find this version compelling.
B. J. Sedlock
THE SOLITARY SPARROW
Lorraine Norwood, Atmosphere Press, 2024, $18.99, pb, 352pp, 9798891321304
St. Michael’s Mead, 1322. After assisting a difficult birth resulting in death, Meg is left wondering what else she could have done. For men’s illnesses, there are doctors of phisik and surgeons, while women, none of whom have a university education, are the ones left to care for “women’s matters.” So what can a country girl do, particularly one born with a facial disfigurement and known locally as the “Devil’s Daughter”? Meg was cast out to dwell among the village pigs for years until the old village healer adopted her as an apprentice. Meg dreams of being a doctor for women, and when William of Oxford sees her skill and aptitude, he agrees to continue her education. She travels to London with William and his son. There she discovers William has a “special (and illegal) undertaking” in his teaching method, which threatens their lives if the church should find out.
The historical landscape through England and France flourishes with beguiling detail. However, eye-rolling wasn’t present in literature until (at least) the 16th century when Shakespeare used the gesture as an expression of lust. This is a time of bloodletting, balancing humors, and astrolabes. What Meg learns, which sounds like fantasy to modern readers, were accepted beliefs in the 14th century (imagine being taught a virgin’s urine will look white and sparkling). And when Meg’s experiences clash with such teachings, she begins to question if there’s something essential missing. Meg is a sympathetic heroine who overcomes physical and emotional abuse from those who see her deformity as a mark of her mother’s sin. She’s told her face will scare patients and taint the unborn. While she meets resistance at every turn, Meg persists in pursuing her dream. This is an engrossing read. Highly recommended.
J. Lynn Else
15TH CENTURY
A GOOD DELIVERANCE
Toby Clements, Faber & Faber, 2024, £18.99, hb, 352pp, 9780571348305
1468, nearly Pentecost. Sir Thomas Malory, seasoned courtier, is arrested by King Edward’s men whilst enjoying the haven of his sunny
Warwickshire garden. Roughly trussed to a mule, he is escorted to Newgate Prison and thrown without mercy, for his years, into a befouled cell, his only comforts a tiny rush dip light and the company of a flea-bitten feral cat. Knowing himself a scapegoat, his death horribly foreshadowed by such manhandling, Sir Thomas prays in abject terror as the locking-bar slams shut.
One imperative plagues his fevered brain: he must be remembered. Recalling the knights whose valour inspired his youth, immortalised in his prison writings (later collectively named Le Morte d’Arthur), he grimly summons a patina of dignity. (For yes, his writing saved his sanity when previously arraigned in this very cell – thanks to the ubiquitous treachery of these malignant times.) He agonises, in utter wretchedness, that his own story will fade into obscurity.
It has been brim-full of experience, if not quite as envisaged in idealistic salad days as Sir Richard Beauchamp’s page of honour. As blood-soaked veteran of war, survivor of the siege of Calais, witness to the atrocities heaped upon the ‘Armagnac witch’ – just a skinny, bruised girl with faith unimaginable –the later seemingly unassailable respectability of knighthood, hearth and home tasted all the sweeter. Home, so excruciatingly missed. A sudden apparition?... No footsteps, yet an urchin at the door proffers ale! Sir Thomas almost sobs with gratitude.
Toby Clements unflinchingly lays bare all the casual barbarity of a feudal society decaying from the core, not least the cruel, convoluted politicking of nobles – and of kings. A bored gaoler’s son tolerates a gabbled near-confession to hear of muchmythologised Agincourt glories, redemption he cannot possibly imagine to a soul in direst torment. Haunting.
K. Darbey
FOR THY GREAT PAIN HAVE MERCY ON MY LITTLE PAIN
Victoria MacKenzie, Bloomsbury, 2024 (c2023), £8.99, pb, 176pp, 9781526647931
As the author says in her note, this is a work of fiction, based on B. A. Windeatt’s translation of The Book of Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Spearing’s translation of Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. It culminates in the meeting of the two religious mystics in 1413, an historical fact. It has had glowing reviews and endorsements, which say things like ‘[a] powerful novel’ (Sunday Times), ‘the best first novel I have read in years’ (Roddy Doyle), ‘a vibrant portrait of female courage’ (The Observer). All of which is true.
However, I found I could not always distinguish between the two women’s voices. The meeting of the two women is very short, with most of the text taken up with the writings of the two women, given alternately. That
said, it does give an insight into medieval life and culture, and the mindset of the times. I enjoyed this book, and it did give me information about two women and their times that I was interested in. It is well-written, and is, as far as I can tell, historically accurate. I can recommend it to those interested in religion, the medieval period and Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, as well as those, like me, who are just interested!
jay Dixon
THE TRAITOR’S SON
Wendy Johnson, MadeGlobal, 2024, $20.99/£16.99, pb, 404pp, 9788412595376
Richard Plantagenet, later to be crowned as Richard III, grows up in Baynard’s Castle in London. After his father’s attempt to seize the throne from Henry VI fails, Richard and his brother George must flee from Henry VI’s queen, Marguerite, and are sent to safety in the Low Countries. He is driven by a desire to disprove the Red Queen’s slander that his father was a traitor.
When his brother Edward is crowned as Edward IV, everything changes—titles, palaces, ceremonies, servants, gifts. Yet new jealousies fester among the brothers York. Everyone is up in arms over Edward’s secret marriage to the Lancastrian widow Elizabeth Wydeville, yet Richard feels a surprising empathy. Edward’s court is ‘blighted by the stink of treason’.
Entrusted to his cousin Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, he forms a bond, but his loyalties are tested. Will he support his royal brother or his cousin, later to be nicknamed the Kingmaker?
This novel contains some beautiful timeand place-appropriate metaphors—his parting with Warwick ‘as final as the raising of a drawbridge’. He remembers his father’s last embrace, ‘a sweep of heavy wool, breathing scents of oily leather’.
Maligned by Shakespeare and by the Tudors, we tend to think of Richard III as a hunchbacked monster. Johnson’s Richard is honest, filial and eager to please as a child, struggles to keep his spinal condition secret as a youth, and is utterly loyal to his brother king. Indeed, Johnson was one of the leading lights in the movement to rehabilitate Richard, which culminated in finding his skeleton underneath a Leicester car park in 2012.
For all our familiarity with this history, Johnson puts personalities and emotions into the picture. The characters are sympathetic, especially Richard, and the mediaeval lifestyle is well painted.
Susie Helme
THE IMPORTANCE OF WIVES
Keira Morgan, Publishing FRF Éditions, 2024, $14.99, pb, 398pp, 9781777397449
This novel tells the story of a courageous woman of the 15th century, Anne of Brittany. In 1488, before her 12th birthday, Anne
inherits the duchy of Brittany after her father’s death. Her guardians, Marshal de Rieux and Madame de Dinan, try to force her to marry the Sire d’Albret, a cruel and lecherous man. When Anne refuses, her guardians claim they are the legitimate rulers of Brittany and declare civil war against Anne. At the same time, the French invade because they want to annex the duchy, with its strategic position across the Channel from England. Faced with war on two fronts, Anne will not give in to the demands of her guardians and has herself crowned as duchess. She marries Maximilian, King of the Romans, by proxy, but when the military aid he promised doesn’t materialize, she has second thoughts about the marriage, which can be dissolved. Realizing that what her people want is peace, Anne must make a decision. Will she marry a Frenchman to end the war?
Keira Morgan depicts Anne as a heroine to admire. She is strong and determined to preserve her duchy’s independence. In Brittany, unlike France, women were allowed to inherit the throne, and Anne wishes to be a strong leader for her people, even though she is female and still a child at the time. She knows she must marry and produce heirs, but she wants to choose her own husband, and she doesn’t want to sacrifice Brittany’s laws and customs to a foreign ruler. This is the third in Morgan’s Chronicles of the House of Valois series, but it comes first in chronological order, so it can easily be read first. The author provides a detailed list of characters, which is very useful. Highly recommended.
Vicki Kondelik
MASQUERADE
O. O. Sangoyomi, Forge, 2024, $27.99/ C$36.99, hb, 352pp, 9781250904294 / Solaris, 2024, £16.99, hb, 400pp, 9781837862276
In the 15th century, nineteen-year-old Òdòdó works with her mother and other older women as a lowly blacksmith helper in Timbuktu. Strikingly beautiful and self-assured, she is noticed by the warrior king of the vast region to the south, called Yorùbáland. The king arranges her kidnapping and clandestine transport to his capital city, where he plans to soon make her his wife.
Òdòdó must quickly learn to live a life of luxury. She also faces jealousy and disdain from her future mother-in-law, as well as from the king’s first wife, the king’s most trusted generals, and even commoners and slaves. She desperately wants to bring her mother to her new home before the wedding—but no one can find her mother.
Larger problems vex her king and his massive armies. An unexplained ivory glut threatens the empire’s economy. Quite suddenly, well-armed slaves revolt, and blacksmiths throughout the land stop producing weapons for the king’s soldiers. Portugal launches an invasion from the north across the Sahara. Òdòdó’s insights and clever suggestions help the king resolve these challenges. His enthusiasm for a lavish wedding grows, and
he secretly trains her in warrior skills, unheard of for women. Her detractors notice and become ever more dangerous.
Sangoyomi presents the largely unknown, but fascinating history of the actual Yorùbá empire, its spiritual beliefs, and how it functions. Details about the lives of the wealthy and poor, their foods and clothes, their joys and resentments run through the story. Òdòdó’s intensely personal transformation, while often brutal right up to the last pages, suits that time, place and culture. This debut novel about the pre-Nigerian empire and people will stay with readers long after they close the book. Highly recommended.
G. J. Berger
16TH CENTURY
THE THRONE
Franco Bernini, trans. Oonagh Stransky, Europa, 2024, $30.00/C$40.00/£14.99, hb, 384pp, 9798889660149
Niccolò Machiavelli is famously known for his work, The Prince. The Throne is Franco Bernini’s first in a planned trilogy that fictionalizes Machiavelli’s life. In 1502 Florence, we meet Niccolò escaping from someone he thinks is a creditor through the window of the home where he lives with his wife and daughter. He is quickly captured and brought in, not to a creditor, but to the gonfalonier who needs him for a mission.
The Florentine Republic is under threat of invasion by Cesare Borgia (called Valentino), and Niccolò is sent to Imola as an envoy to spy on Valentino and report on any invasion plans. It is here that Niccolò meets the beautiful and tragic Dianora, Valentino’s prisoner captured during his invasion of Forlí. While Niccolò is busy with his covert activities and secret coded messages home, he becomes obsessed with Dianora and devising ways to see and talk with her. Valentino, angered by the ‘lies’ written about him, has asked Niccolò to write his life story, but Valentino bends the narrative to his truth. Now Niccolò walks a fine line between his conscience to write the truth and pleasing Valentino. He is also walking a dangerous line with Dianora with his obsession and secret meetings. The two are falling in love knowing the consequences of death.
With an abundance of political intrigue, assassins, pursuit of power, and underhanded dealings, The Throne gives a detailed and impressive narrative of this Renaissance world. Niccolò comes across as inept and immature at times, but he can also display traits of cleverness, bravery, and wisdom. In addition to Dianora, money, and lack thereof, is his constant concern. I anticipate Niccolò will change and mature into the Machiavelli portrayed by history throughout the trilogy, since the ruthless political theories he is known for are not yet evident in The Throne
Janice Ottersberg
THE SERPENT AND THE ROSE
Catherine Butterfield, Independently published, 2024, $19.99/C$26.99, pb, 316pp, 9798350928013
This is a beautifully written novel about Marguerite de Valois, princess of France during the 16th century wars between Catholics and Huguenots. Her scheming mother, Queen Regent Catherine de Medici, marries her off to the Huguenot King Henri of Navarre in an attempt to make peace between the religions, but instead, the wedding leads to the horrific St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Marguerite saves her husband’s life, but her mother keeps her confined to the palace, unable to join him in Navarre. Meanwhile, the powerful Duke of Guise, Marguerite’s rejected suitor, takes cruel revenge on her. When she finally joins her husband, Marguerite finds she must endure his many infidelities. Eventually she finds true love with her stable master, Jean d’Aubiac, but, given the difference in their stations, their love is destined to end badly. Finding herself a political pawn at the French court, Marguerite realizes that the only way to survive is to outwit her mother and beat her at her own game.
Butterfield’s novel is written in the form of Marguerite’s diary, which works very well. The reader gets inside her head and sympathizes with her. Marguerite is an intelligent, welleducated woman who makes her court at Navarre a center of theater, music, and literature. She is determined to live as a woman in a man’s world, and to survive amid the warring factions. I especially loved the inclusion of the young Shakespeare as a character, basing Love’s Labour’s Lost on the events of the first visit of Marguerite and her ladies to Navarre. The central conflict, between Marguerite and her mother, is powerfully depicted, and, since you see it from Marguerite’s eyes, you are never certain whether Catherine is cruel by nature, or if she thinks she’s doing what’s best for her family. I highly recommend this book.
Vicki Kondelik
THE QUEEN’S LIES
Oliver Clements, Atria/Leopoldo, 2024, $28.99/ C$38.99, hb, 416pp, 9781982197483
Book four in the author’s Agents of the Crown series finds renowned alchemist and sometime-spy, Dr. John Dee, up to his neck in deceit and double-dealing as a power struggle for the crown of England unfolds. It is 1585. Mary Queen of Scots has been locked up by Elizabeth I for eighteen years when yet another plot to assassinate the English queen is uncovered—leading to more trouble ahead for Mary. Elizabeth’s private secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, has intercepted correspondence that implicates the Scottish queen, and he would like nothing better than to try her for treason. However, Elizabeth has other concerns, and a devious plan that only gradually becomes clear after she dispatches Dee’s wife with a mysterious court lady to attend Mary. At the same time, Dee is battling danger from all sides before he can join
his wife: he is robbed, his plans for a secret weapon are stolen, his home ransacked, his cook murdered, and his son kidnapped.
This Elizabethan-era thriller moves along at a brisk pace with short chapters, shifting points of view and colorful language. Not to mention murder and mayhem on every page, although the author’s lighthearted touch keeps the story from taking itself too seriously. The dilemma facing Elizabeth is woven into the plot with poignant urgency. Namely, the threat that Mary poses needs to be mitigated, but without a public execution that would undermine the very foundation of monarchy—the divine right of kings. So, Dr. Dee to the rescue, in a roundabout way. Some of the period details lend The Queen’s Lies a sense of time and place, but this tale is mostly fantasy entertainment and reimagined history.
Deborah Cay Wilding
THE KING’S WITCHES
Kate Foster, Mantle, 2024, £16.99, hb, 336pp, 9781529091786
It is 1589, and Anna, the princess of Denmark, is heading for Scotland with her dour lady-inwaiting, Kirsten, to meet her betrothed, King James VI. But the journey does not go to plan. Violent storms threaten their very survival, and their dangerous predicament is blamed on witchcraft. At the same time in North Berwick, a young woman called Jura, whose healer mother has just died, goes to work for Baillie Kincaid and his family. Kincaid is seemingly a pious man, but his repulsive and unsolicited attentions quickly fall on the new maid.
It is against this backdrop that the novel begins its journey, in a story told through three first-person narratives in the present tense, switching between Anna, Jura – who has inherited her mother’s healing skill – and the mysterious Kirsten.
The story is based on historical truth. King James VI, who became James I of England, did indeed sail across to Denmark to fetch his bride. He was also famously notorious for his cruel persecution of so-called witches. And the North Berwick witch trials were very real.
Using the perspectives of the three women – two of whom are fictional – and imagined official letters, the author does a wonderful job in retelling this terrible period of British history. It is unbelievable to us now that such superstition and persecution was rife back then. The methods to extract ‘confessions’ were hideous. The novel is personal and very, very readable.
Foster cleverly weaves the three strands to create a compelling, page-turner of a story which throws up surprises along the way, while sticking to a historical framework which is embellished to great effect. The sights, smells and sounds of 16th-century Edinburgh are captured brilliantly. I was glued to this story from start to finish.
Margery Hookings
THE QUEEN’S AVENGER
Anna Legat, Sharpe Books, 2024, £8.99, pb, 202pp, 9798325133541
This is a powerful tale set between the years of widow Mary Stewart’s arrival from France as Queen of Scotland and her escape to England from her island prison on Loch Leven.
Mary’s story entranced me as a teenager and still does despite many retellings. This time the author has used a fictional Bavarian abbot to tell it after he dies in a Bavarian monastery, and his manuscripts describing his part in the betrayals of Mary of Scotland. The result is a thrilling ‘now’ and ‘then’ story, though ‘now’ is the late 1590s. But that distance provides insight. The abbot’s secret writings are found by the monk Gunther, whose discovery places him in grave danger.
Through these papers, the novel explores Catholic Mary’s conflict with many of her earls and clergy over Calvinism, her marriage to Darnley, the strange nature of this union, betrayal by those close to her, the murder of Rizzio, and both Darnley’s and Bothwell’s involvement in her fate. It is a thoroughly researched novel, and because of the imaginary Gunther and his clandestine discovery of a mysterious set of codices, I was pleased to see an author’s note explaining the novel’s research. It is an enlightening note.
This is a pacy novel filled with nuances regarding Mary’s inner conflicts. Both Gunther’s story and the manuscripts make for tense, colourful and engaging reading. Many scenes really are incredibly vivid, in particular Mary’s imprisonment on Loch Leven and her escape. Characters just leap from the page, all fabulous re-creations. The result is an atmospheric, thrilling novel, one that is wellstructured and extremely cleverly written. I sincerely hope there will be sequels. Any lover of Elizabethan thrillers will enjoy this novel, which is vivid, strong and faithful to known history.
Carol McGrath
THE ASSASSIN OF VENICE
Alyssa Palombo, Crooked Lane, 2024, $30.99/ C$40.99/£29.99, hb, 320pp, 9781639107872
is comprised of ten men, each elected for only one one-year term. They make decisions as a group, and the strictly limited terms are designed to avoid corruption. The Council of Ten has eyes everywhere, and when they perceive a threat to Venice, punishment is swift and final. Valentina’s life outside her role as courtesan involves Bastiano, the man she loves, and their child, Ginevra. She keeps Ginevra hidden safe from the dangers of Venice with a family in the country. Bastiano also works for the Council, and what they do is never discussed.
Valentina is not only beautiful; she is clever, savvy, and very shrewd. The games she must play involve the high stakes of life and death, for herself and those she loves. When she senses Bastiano is troubled, she is determined to discover why and help him; but it is not only Bastiano—something in Venice isn’t right. Malatesta, a Council member, is overstepping his role and becoming more sinister and menacing. An assassination order he gives Valentina leaves her devastated with no option but to obey. She suspects he is acting without the Council’s knowledge.
This is a propulsive read, full of intrigue. Remarkable details about the lives of courtesans in 16th-century Venice are well researched. These women may be at the mercy of men and society, but they employ furtive ways to take back their power. Valentina is a fierce heroine that readers will love.
Janice Ottersberg
DAUGHTER OF FIRE
Sofia Robleda, Amazon Crossing, 2024, $16.99/ C$24.99/£8.99, pb, 302pp, 9781662517976
felt like a distraction. Some sections are hard work, although others explore fascinating avenues of history. Catalina’s inner turmoil regarding her half-Spanish heritage and allegiance to her father is compassionately explored and makes her more easily accessible to the reader. This is a well-researched novel telling of a time period which doesn’t often appear in fiction.
Fiona Alison
THE WOLF’S SHADOW
G. J. Williams, Legend Press, £9.99, pb, 304pp, 9781915643292
It is 1558, and Mary I is under the illusion she is about to give birth. In reality she is dying. Princess Elizabeth attends her sister in London. Meanwhile the body of Thomas Seymour, who had been executed nine years earlier, is discovered hanging from an oak tree at Hatfield House. How could he return from the dead only to die again? Doctor John Dee, his assistant Margaretta, and his pupil Christopher are charged by William Cecil with unravelling the mystery, and also with finding Cecil’s missing son and saving Elizabeth from scandal. And what exactly is ‘the curse of the wolf’?
Venice in 1538 is a city of masks, deception, and nefarious political dealings. Valentina Riccardi is among the most soughtafter courtesans who move in the wealthy and cultured social sphere of nobility and politicians. Who better than Valentina to serve as assassin when the Council of Ten needs a suspected spy eliminated? Responsible for the safety and security of Venice, the Council
Sofia Robleda spotlights the life of a young woman of mixed Spanish/Guatemalan heritage who comes of age in 16th-century colonial Santiago and finds love with an indigenous Mayan king. Catalina de Cerrato is raised by her father, a member of the ruling Spanish elite, but it is her deceased mother who speaks to her soul, urging her to honour the spirits of the K’iche’ and to safeguard the Popol Vuh (Book of Council), handed down through her noble Mayan family. At her 16th birthday party, Catalina is enchanted by Lord Juan de Rojas, cacique (king) de Q’unmarkaj, who demands she return an heirloom jade necklace and the Popol Vuh. When she doesn’t comply, he curses her until she relents, but when she goes to retrieve the book from its hiding place, it has been ruined by damp. Distraught by her failure to live up to her promise to her mother, Catalina agrees to recreate the stories by communing with the ancestor spirits, along with her cousin, Cristóbal, and Lord Juan. Speaking of the old gods or practicing the old religion in any way is heretical according to the new Catholicism, instituted after the conquest of the Aztek Empire in 1521. Robleda relates Catalina’s quest, and her struggle to accept her heritage and her place in the world, whilst venturing into long scenes of magical realism. For this reader, the story was slow to begin, with an uneven writing style and a few awkward phrases, and the jade necklace
This is a fabulous mystery, pacy, tense and very atmospheric. G. J. Williams certainly can take a reader into a convincing reinvented midTudor-era England. I particularly enjoyed her gritty descriptions of London such as ‘A sharp wind came down the river from the east and with it the stench of the sewage the muckrakers had thrown in overnight’. Her descriptions of death are chilling, especially the stink of cadavers.
The Wolf’s Shadow is a novel with depth of characterisation, both those of real historical personalities and the invented ones. Margaretta’s brother, her complaining mother and fleabag cat, Cadi, are wonderful depictions, as are the ailing Dr Dee and Cecil himself. The mummers at the centre of the narrative leap from the page as vividly as the dwarf, Petit Pierre, can skim a wall. This mystery takes a series of incredible twists and turns and will keep a reader turning pages until all is revealed. The narrative is complicated, but even so, admirable, thorough historical research underpins this story, in particular that involving the Seymours of Wolf Hall. Be prepared to read a tale that will entertain and surprise. This is an atmospheric, thrilling historical adventure.
Carol McGrath
17TH CENTURY THE PUTNAMS OF SALEM
Greg Houle, Blydyn Square Books, 2024, $19.99, pb, 334pp, 9798869123206
Houle takes the reader to a 17th-century New England village thrown into turmoil after witchcraft accusations were made by a circle of young girls claiming to be tormented by local witches. A doctor is called to a Salem
church when the Reverend Samuel Parris’s daughter and niece are found running about the parsonage in distress. The doctor is unable to help them.
The Reverend Parris’s Caribbean-born servant, Tituba, is accused of making witch cake for the girls and questioned by the authorities. When Thomas Putnam Jr., a leading Salem citizen, believes his twelveyear-old daughter and wife are afflicted by the devil, he assumes a major role in setting up the hearings and prosecutions of the witch trials in the local tavern.
Houle is in an advantageous position to examine how this tragedy unraveled in Salem over three hundred years ago. He is a direct descendant of Thomas Putnam Jr. and his daughter, Anna, and he grew up in New England. In his book, the author examines both the personal fears of Thomas Putnam and Anna as well as the wider community and its problems in 1692. Houle gives the reader an excellent picture of life in a rural Puritan village. There were squabbles among neighbors, a theocratic form of government, and a constant fear of hostile natives. The use of the common diction of the period adds color and flavor to the conversations.
Overall, the character development is good. Major characters grow and change as the story evolves, though the voice of Anna Putnam appears more mature than a twelveyear-old girl’s understanding. At the end of each chapter, in initialized print, one of the two narrators reflects on their personal troubles and anguish over the witch trials. Mr. Putnam’s insights add to an understanding of his thoughts.
Frances E. Stephenson
THE KING’S MESSENGER
Susanna Kearsley, Simon & Schuster UK, 2024, £20.00, hb, 348pp, 9781398514362 / Simon & Schuster Canada, 2025, C$24.99, pb, 544pp, 9781668025130 / Sourcebooks Landmark, 2025, $17.99, pb, 352pp, 9781492689058
In the opening decades of the 17th century every prominent person who died was poisoned—if we are to believe the multitudinous pamphlets and rumours abounding at the time. The historian, as a custodian of truth, must studiously refute such conspiracy theories, but a historical fiction author is free to play with them for the sake of a good story.
Susanna Kearsley, in her latest book, takes one such and runs with it, seamlessly weaving true history, shadow history, and historical personages on the loom of her tale and into the lives of her own creations.
Andrew Logan, King’s Messenger, is sent to Scotland to arrest Sir David Moray, the man suspected of murdering Prince Henry, King James’ eldest son, with poison. Logan is accompanied by the scrivener, Laurence Westaway, there to record all Moray might say on the journey south. Westaway’s daughter, Phoebe, persuades Logan to let her travel with them to look after her ailing father. These three are joined by Hector the stableboy, who hero-
worships Logan. They must escort Moray to London, and somehow evade his well-armed relatives who are in close pursuit and intent on freeing him. But Logan has a secret. He has a barbed gift that gives him occasional glimpses of the future. He sees events he cannot change. Logan and Phoebe are the main characters, distinguished as such by both being given firstperson perspectives. There are also occasional third-person chapters from the supporting cast, including Moray and Queen Anna.
Although the book opens with tension and darkness, the story progresses to become warm and uplifting, replete with kindness, friendship and romance. But to quote the book: ‘Happy endings are of little comfort to characters who die afore the tale is done.’ This is a well-told historical adventure leavened with a classic romance.
Eleanor Swift-Hook
THE BEDLAM CADAVER
Robert J. Lloyd, Melville House, 2024, £12.99/$19.99/C$26.99, pb, 426pp, 9781685890957
1681, Restoration London. The king’s brother James, a Catholic, is heir to the throne, but there is rumoured to be a ‘black box’ containing evidence that the king’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, is the rightful heir. In the heat of summer, rich young women are being kidnapped and murdered. First is Diana Cantley, then Elizabeth Percy Thynne. Harry Hunt, formerly of the Royal Society, comes falsely under suspicion. Harry’s quest to clear his name takes him all over the 17th-century city, to the doors of Bethlehem (Bedlam) Hospital, into the studio of painter of royal mistresses Peter Lely.
It’s a historical thriller, an interesting retelling of a real historical murder, with a cast of characters famous from history—King Charles II, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke (architect of Bethlehem Hospital)—and other dignitaries introduced by the artful device of a dissection demonstration at Gresham College. But it’s the wrong cadaver, which makes for a brilliant inciting incident. This period of history is full of intrigue, with Protestants and Catholics vying to put their candidate on the throne.
On the run for his life and his reputation, Harry is swept by the Thames as far as Rotherhithe, affording us a tour of the Docklands area with all the infrastructure and the guilty detritus of colonialism and the slave trade. I love how he communicates with Hooke from a distance.
The sense of time and place is beautiful, even including a public execution at Tyburn. The exposition of the political debates and events of the period is well done. There’s a lot to get across, and Lloyd does it mainly through dialogue, without sounding forced.
Susie Helme
A WOMAN OF OPINION
Sean Lusk, Doubleday, 2024, £16.99, hb, 394pp, 9780857528032
This is a fictionalized autobiography of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the renowned 18th-century woman of letters, traveller, and thoroughly unconventional and eccentric character. While most of the narrative is in her own voice, there are occasional chapters from her sister Frances, who was to develop a severe mental condition later in life. Mary is a feisty, determined figure who bulldozes her way through society. The daughter of a duke, she had an inherent sense of her own abilities and status. The sometimes spiky and difficult relationship with her much less forceful husband, who is a Whig politician and diplomat, is superbly portrayed, and his frustrated anxiety at her devices and desires and their fractured affiliation is also portrayed beautifully, as is their later epistolary-based relationship and accommodation towards each other in their advanced years.
Sean Lusk employs an engaging and pleasing voice in the narrative, with Mary’s wry observations on the quiddities of a patriarchal society, while not questioning her own privileged position. Maybe towards the conclusion of the novel as Mary ages, the story becomes a little pedestrian and loses some of its drive and verve. Lusk includes an excellent and detailed author’s note at the conclusion of the story, where he details what is based upon the known circumstances of Mary’s life and where he has been led to invent plot elements to enhance and provide dramatic structure to the tale. Possibly at times too much has been invented, certainly when he has fabricated and inserted characters that had an important role in his account of Mary’s life that just did not exist. Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and highly proficient novel.
Douglas Kemp
BLUE HAWK
Chloe Turner, Deixis Press, 2024, £13.50/$23.99/ C$32.99, hb, 297pp, 9781917090049
Gloucestershire, 1663: when Joan’s father, a millworker with a taste for strong drink, uses an inheritance to set himself up in business as a clothier, the fortunes of his motherless family take a downturn. Joan, unusually, is literate and numerate, having been educated by the vicar. She also has a talent for dyeing wool, helped by the enigmatic widow Mrs Freme, of whom the community is suspicious; the shadow of an accusation of witchcraft hangs over her and later Joan, as women who do not conform to the subservience their community expects. Joan’s relationship with her sister Alice is an uneasy one and the most gripping telling of sibling rivalry I have read in some time. Alice is jealous of both
Joan’s budding relationship with Daniel and of her emerging prowess as a clothier.
But Joan is a victim of her times: only when the family is faced with destitution does her father allow her to manage their affairs, though she is only in her teens. Daniel is initially dismissive of Joan’s ambitions, and later baffled by them. When Daniel’s father is hounded from his home for his nonconformism, his son takes the king’s shilling to defend Catherine of Braganza’s dowry of Tangier. Joan is only free, it seems, to pursue the dreams when the man she loves and misses is absent.
Turner has written a compelling portrait of a close-knit rural community of millers, weavers and dyers on the cusp of industrial change. Her research is impeccable and her prose beautiful, especially in the descriptions of dye plants. It would not surprise me to learn that she has practised traditional plant-based methods of dyeing wool, so convincingly does she describe them.
Katherine Mezzacappa
COURTING THE SUN
Peggy Joque Williams, Black Rose Writing, 2024, $24.95, pb, 388pp, 9781685134129
During the mid-1600s, Sylvienne d’Aubert spends her childhood in Amiens, France, attending convent school, going to the bakery, climbing trees and contemplating marriage to a talented young shoemaker. Everything changes in 1670 when, on her 16th birthday, she receives an invitation to attend the court of King Louis XIV.
Once the naïve country girl arrives in Paris and is introduced into the whirl of palace intrigues and royal excess, she’s assigned to serve the king’s favorite mistress—that is, until the king makes public his true relationship to the pretty teenager. And it’s much closer than anyone could have possibly imagined. The announcement is quickly followed by an unwelcome marriage proposal and even stricter limitations on every facet of Sylvienne’s existence, with greater difficulties ahead. For a brutal confrontation leaves her with only two choices, both of them dangerous, as her childhood fantasies collide with the reality of royal life.
Written from Sylvienne’s perspective, scenes in Courting the Sun unfold slowly— where she went, who she saw, what she did. Readers familiar with the period will appreciate the appearance of well-known historical figures, along with the mention of popular books, playwrights, and composers of the era. However, this is not a witty, exciting romp through the palace of Versailles, though Sylvienne does spend some time there. Rather, the author has crafted a coming-of-age story with a bittersweet ending that, nonetheless, leaves the main character hopeful as she faces an uncertain future.
Deborah Cay Wilding
ALL THE COLOURS YOU CANNOT NAME
Joad R. Wren, Seren Books, 2024, £9.99, pb, 300pp, 9781781727201
London at summer’s end in 1666, its shellshocked population just beginning to emerge from the worst ravages of the bubonic plague. James White is a printer in the city, struggling with slack business and the still evident horrors of the pestilence. The contingent nature of life at that time with the plague and all the other uncertainties of the 17th century makes White feel constantly vulnerable and exposed, especially as he has a highly uxorious attachment to his wife Ellie.
They are still suffering from the sudden death of their baby son Jeremiah. Then the plague arrives in their home, followed eventually by another infamous catastrophe.
The author deploys a very much a 17thcentury mentality as James White reflects upon life, plague and the daily constant threats and worries he faces. This is not an easy posture to take by Joad Wren, but he incorporates these (to us) alien notions of daily life seamlessly into the narrative, so that the story moves along with good dramatic tension and progress without becoming bogged down, though there are prolonged plague-driven feverish theological speculations by James.
Wren navigates his London with an almost mystical veneration similar to that found in the fiction of Peter Ackroyd or Iain Sinclair. There is a poetic narration and observation, decidedly literary, but still accessible and engaging. There are some revealing descriptions about the laborious methods of printing in those days – which was an unwieldy, physically demanding and slow process. This is an excellent novel, and just a word about the cover of the book, which comprises a painted scene of London: it is very attractive and appropriate.
Douglas
Kemp
18TH CENTURY
ALL THE WORLD BESIDE
Garrard Conley, Riverhead, 2023, $28.00/ C$37.99, hb, 352pp, 9780525537335
Conley’s debut novel brings us to a small Massachusetts town—the symbolicallynamed Cana—while dramatizing an affair between two married Puritan men and its fallout. In 1730, Nathaniel Whitfield is a charismatic minister whose powerful words on the pulpit had brought about a religious awakening and persuaded 200 souls to follow him to a new settlement. Physician Arthur Lyman and his family, recent arrivals from Boston, weren’t part of the original chosen group and are made to feel like continual outsiders. The two men are close friends and something more, which fills Nathaniel with intense guilt, while Arthur finds ways to draw closer to his lover.
Their secret, however, doesn’t remain so. After viewing the pair’s late-night meeting in the forest, in a scene reminiscent of
Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s daughter Sarah gets firsthand evidence of problems within her family. Gradually, Nathaniel’s depressive wife Catherine realizes the truth, and so does Arthur’s forthright wife, Anne. The two families’ unwitting complicity and silence, preferring not to voice a relationship they can hardly explain, ring true for the era. Even more, Nathaniel’s role comes with high expectations for another Christian revival, but his longings for men make him feel completely unworthy.
Conley confidently acknowledges the reality that queer people lived and loved in all past eras, one of his admitted goals, while imbuing his story with considerable depth about how religion can simultaneously exalt and constrain us. Notably, he looks beyond the core relationship to show its repercussions on family members, especially Sarah and her young brother, Ezekiel. (Actually, the later sections focus so much on others that the plot feels a bit diffuse.) In a particularly intriguing subplot, Sarah gets held back by her gender after discovering a surprising talent. This novel has a lot going on, and it mostly works, all evoked in thoughtful language bordering on mystical at times.
Sarah Johnson
HEATHCLIFF’S FORTUNE
Gordon Robert Howdle, The Book Guild, 2024, £9.99, pb, 374pp, 9781915853752
This novel is set during the two-year period in Wuthering Heights when, having overheard Cathy’s decision to marry someone else, Heathcliff abandons England to seek his fortune with which to enact a revenge scheme. Shedding the gothic melancholy of Yorkshire for a time with the help of his lucky amulet, Heathcliff makes a name for himself as a brave and honest gentleman, first as a seaman and then as a writer and spy for the East India Company, as he applies himself with a single-minded purpose to amass great wealth as quickly as possible.
Deeply researched and reminiscent of classic novels in pacing and structure, the story unfolds like the chronicle of a living person. It is so thoroughly enmeshed in the history and political mise en scène of the Anglo-French War in India that it can be easy to forget Heathcliff is a fictional character, inserted into actual events, and difficult at times to tell where history ends and fiction begins. Readers sensitive to colonialist themes may be troubled by the historically realistic approach to racial and cultural insensitivity of the era, but those deeply interested in the finer historical minutiae will appreciate the thorough research and detailed footnotes.
Cleverly framed with Emily Brontë’s own narration from Nelly Dean to bookend the tale, Heathcliff’s Fortune imagines a detailed rise and fall for the eponymous hero, which Brontë herself may not have had the resources to fully realize, and for which readers need not be familiar with the source material beforehand.
Rose Prendeville
REMEMBER, REMEMBER
Elle Machray, Harper North, 2024, £16.99, hb, 336pp, 9780008559533
This debut novel is rooted in a trial in 1772, in which it was ruled that an enslaved Black man living in England could not be sent back to Jamaica to be sold. Using historical records, Machray has then taken key moments in British history at that time and woven an alternative history. Machray reimagines the gunpowder plot as the protagonist, Delphine, searches for justice – or vengeance – for her adopted brother, Vincent, a prize fighter who had sought his freedom through the courts.
Delphine, who had herself escaped enslavement four years earlier, lives in and out of London’s underworld and high society, a well-imagined and well-researched series of interconnections spanning brothels, gentlemen’s clubs, smuggling and secret societies. The novel opens with her attempts to help her brother do the same, and even though at first he triumphs, he is then brought down at the moment of liberation.
It is at this moment that the novel turns from fact to alternative fiction, with Machray weaving in themes as disparate as smuggling, treason and the horrors of the slave trade.
There are some beautiful lines in this book that stick long after the page is turned: “Hearing his name uttered so many times, like an incantation, forces Delphine to acknowledge that her brother is much more than a man, now”.
For this reader, although Remember, Remember was overall an enjoyable read, the ending did not convince, as the book became more and more fantastical and the number of characters at times overwhelmed the forward thrust of the narrative. Nevertheless, this is an exciting debut novel, which weaves historical facts with compelling themes that were as hotly debated then as they are now – the importance of justice, identity and resistance, even when it seems that all is lost.
Katharine Quarmby
SONG OF THE SAMURAI
C. A. Parker, Running Wild Press, 2024, $19.99, pb, 402pp, 9781960018007
In 1745 Japan, Kinko Kurosawa, a Zen Buddhist priest, is banished from his monastery for an impropriety and sets out for a distant monastery that will accept him in exchange for his extraordinary musical skills. A talented player of the shakuhachi, a flute used in meditation, Kurosawa is in great demand and can expect a warm reception for his skills and teaching. But there is more than beauty to be found in his music. And his ego may be getting in the way of being the player and the priest he believes himself to be.
The novel’s prologue invites the reader to think this is an adventure story – perhaps a political thriller or a mystery – but those elements, while present, are only the pretext for a different kind of journey. As Kurosawa – sometimes called by his given name and sometimes by his family name – slowly makes
his way to his new home, he encounters musicians, lovers, teachers, fellow monks, spies pretending to be monks, and one hermit preparing for spiritual warfare. All have their lessons to teach to one beginning to listen.
Sometimes the narrative seems bogged down by explanatory asides. But the explanation may be needed for a mostly Western target audience. Once the reader lets go of judgment concerning whether this is a thriller or a mystery or some other standard genre, they will be led along a spiritual path and submerged deeply in the culture of 18thcentury Japan and of Buddhist discipline in particular. The other matters, political and social, are also interesting, and mostly resolved, but it is the personal journey at the heart of this novel that will draw the reader in.
Martha Hoffman
THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE
A. J. West, Orenda, 2024, £16.99/$26.99/ C$35.99, hb, 301pp, 9781916788152
Comical yet poignant, this thriller of gay romance darkens as it progresses. We start with the arrival in London, in 1715, of handsome young Thomas True, determined to start a new life that will allow him to enjoy his own inclinations. Builder Gabriel Griffin is a widower who still talks to the ghosts of his deceased wife and child but now only seeks romantic company amongst men. Soon Thomas and Gabriel meet in Mother Clap’s Molly House, a world apart of cross-dressing and innuendo. Love ensues, but it is repeatedly frustrated as Gabriel desperately tries to identify an informer called the Rat, whose evidence has led to the arrest of ‘mollies’ and their execution for sodomy. Newcomer Thomas may be the Rat – or is he being framed?
West has provided a large cast of supporting characters but, for me, not all were well differentiated. The plot’s twists and turns did not always seem logical – for example, a group of vigilantes persecuting the mollies are initially important, but then their role in the plot peters out; the City Marshal takes bribes from Mother Clap, but when prompted by two travelling ‘justices’ (more like witchfinders) he is happy to seek the closure of her house. These factors somewhat undermine the suspense.
‘There are well-researched London settings–the Fleet Ditch from which a body must be pulled, a near-drowning in the Thames, the lawless region of Alsatia, the Molly house itself. The dialogue is punchy and believable. I have a slight doubt about what kind of ‘Justices’ would have had a nationwide jurisdiction. Still, I found the book generally enjoyable: ingeniously plotted, vivid and memorable.
Ben Bergonzi
RED RUNS THE WITCH’S THREAD
Victoria Williamson, Silver Thistle Press, £9.99, hb, 176pp, 9781738436439
1722 – Paisley, Scotland. Widow Christian
Millar refuses to sell her almost-but-not-quiteperfect white thread to a dealer, who offers her a pittance for what he calls ‘witch’s thread’. The reason for Christian’s manic obsession with trying to produce perfectly white thread is slowly revealed as her story unwinds.
Her tortured visions of blood and her fear of the screaming black ravens that sound so very like those of a baby all stem from an experience when she was eleven – some 25 years earlier. She was an unwilling witness to the sights and sounds of the bloody birth of her sister, and the seeds of her terror are watered into fruition when a maid starkly explains to her the terrible things that men and women do in the dark and what her own fate will be once she becomes a woman, once her own blood starts flowing.
This is a story of childish fear that turns into adult dread; of shame, guilt and lies that result in the death of babies and the hanging and burning of seven witches; of a woman tormented by nightmares; of a mind unravelling; of a woman trying to cleanse her own tortured soul.
The title of this gothic, uncanny novella is pure genius, and I can guarantee that you will remember this beautifully written though disturbing book long after you have closed the covers. Highly recommended.
Marilyn Pemberton
19TH CENTURY
WEST OF SANTILLANE
Brook Allen, Independently published, 2024, $19.99, pb, 374pp, 9781732958579
In the early years of the 19th century, sheltered Virginia planter’s daughter Julia Hancock is delighted when Captain William Clark of the famed Lewis and Clark discovery mission comes a-courting. They marry, overcoming objections from Julia’s father rooted in Clark’s uncertain prospects. But the match is very much in line with Julia’s adventuresome aspirations. The newlyweds move west, to St. Louis, Clark’s new post, and make a life in the still frontierchallenged capital of the Louisiana Territory. Early 1800s St. Louis is well-described, as are period costumes, appearances and household settings. But Julia finds that differing attitudes on slavery drive a wedge in her marriage. She abhors the institution and does what she can to improve the lives of her husband’s “people.”
Julia’s first-person account is a convincing tale of how Meriwether Lewis’s and William Clark’s years following the mission might have gone. Julia’s internal narrative on topics like the fleeting nature of time and separation anxiety is satisfying but shines most brightly when she searches through her feelings on slavery. The mission still looms large over Julia, her husband and Lewis, including relationships with the crew, recompense, and most importantly, publication of their account of their iconic journey to the Pacific. The historical sources and inputs relied upon by the author are impressive and provide the foundation for a well-researched story with keen insights into the hardships of life in the
early days of US westward expansion, more than two centuries ago. Author Brook Allen has taken a little-known historical nugget, the life of Julia Hancock, and turned it into a terrific story involving major historical figure William Clark: a fine example of “you are there” historical narrative that her readers will relish.
Brodie Curtis
HOPE NEVER KNEW HORIZON
Douglas Bruton, Taproot Press, 2024, £11.99, pb, 190pp, 9781739207786
Wexford, Ireland, 1891; Amherst, Massachusetts, 1850; London, 1880: what seem at first to be three unrelated narratives intertwine in this immersive and original novel, its unifying title drawn from the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
The song of a whale beached on the coast of Ireland lives on through generations, when its skeleton is transported to London as a centrepiece of the new Natural History Museum, heard by those sensitive enough to its presence, even when the whale is reduced to dismembered bones. A kind of immortality is achieved too for the workmen who installed the skeleton, high above visitors’ heads, for their names are recorded in the cement that holds the whale’s bones together.
In Massachusetts the Irish servant of the Dickinson family observes the passionate attachment of Emily Dickinson for the woman who is to become her brother’s wife. She protects Emily’s secret and suffers with her when the postboy does not bring longed-for letters. In London, Frederic Leighton hires a beautiful, intelligent young actress as his model; later she works also for George Frederic Watts.
Leighton coaches her to change her working-class speech and gives her a new name, Dorothy Dene. He introduces her to an artistic milieu far beyond her origins, one which includes George Bernard Shaw, who of course did not pass up such promising material, writing Pygmalion
Bruton’s talent lies in the closeness of his observation and his ability to make historical figures, whom we think we know, live, breathe and suffer. This is an extraordinary book that will remain in my consciousness for a long time. It’s the kind of book that makes a reader, if a writer, a better one.
Katherine Mezzacappa
THE LOST WOMEN OF MILL STREET
Kinley Bryan, Blue Mug Press, 2024, $14.99, pb, 305pp, 9781737915232
Set during the American Civil War, The Lost Women of Mill Street is the story of two sisters displaced from their work in a cotton mill. When Union soldiers arrive in Roswell, their Georgia town, Clara, Kitty, and all who worked there are deemed traitors to the Union because the mill was making tents and
clothing for Confederate forces. Everyone is displaced and detained, forcing Clara and Kitty on a journey that leads them to Cincinnati, Ohio. Clara, the older of the two, has been waiting to hear from her fiancé, Benjamin, who traveled west to Nebraska to set up a farm and now fears he will never find them. But being forced to leave the mill might be a good thing for her younger sister, Kitty, who has struggled with ill health. As they try to find work and security, Clara’s overprotective nature causes secrets and misunderstandings to arise between them.
The story has an engaging blend of elements – romance, danger, ambition and a murder – and the sisters’ adventures pull the reader in. Clara yearns to express herself creatively and hopes to apprentice in a millinery shop, while Kitty proves much more resilient and resourceful than her older sister gives her credit for being. The backdrop of the Civil War, and the division between northern and southern Americans, is effectively portrayed, as are the challenges faced by unmarried women. The sisters’ story will draw readers to root for them through the challenges they face, and a sequel featuring Kitty’s future adventures would be welcome.
Kate Braithwaite
MIDNIGHT ROOMS
Donyae Coles, Amistad, 2024, $28.00/ C$35.00/£20.00, hb, 336pp, 9780063228092
In England in 1840, newlyweds Orabella Mumthrope and Elias Blakersby arrive at Korringhill Manor. Black, orphaned, and exchanged by a disinterested uncle for gambling debts, she has married Elias within 24 hours in the enticing opening chapter but now looks upon his stately home, sprawling ominously before her, with trepidation. Its gloomy interior hints at a former magnificence long-lost to history. Miserly light diffuses into dark hallways through filthy ivy-clad windows, gloomy rooms house ancient dust-grimed furniture, rotting floorboards and mushrooms lie in dank corners, all spectacularly drawn to pull the reader into an alarming sense of unease. The new bride’s room shows some attention. A fairy-tale wall mural is a touch of bright fancy in this decrepit mausoleum, where a rigid housekeeper holds sway. Orabella is dutifully bathed, dressed, fed, never left alone, coddled like a favourite pet, and forbidden to wander or leave the house. Her obedience is rewarded by her preternaturally beautiful husband, who showers her with gifts and sweeps her into irresistible carnal pleasure during his seductive nightly visits, which confuse her all the more.
Characters and scenes are drawn with grotesque and foreboding strokes—the mute doll-like sister-in-law, the terrifying skeletal patriarch, and a ghastly wedding feast, which fills the air with shrieking laughter from the Blakersby family, all experienced through Orabella’s eyes. Confused by what she sees and hears, she tries to be an obedient wife, but as she sways between reality and macabre
dreams, and slowly learns to fight back against her horrifying circumstances, is there even one person she can trust? Expositional crumbs are scattered along the way, leaving the reader groping in the darkness for explanation, along with a courageous wife whose determination to defeat this ghastly nightmare is heroic and unusual. This is a relentlessly creepy, spinechilling debut well worthy of its title.
Fiona Alison
THE SILENCE FACTORY
Bridget Collins, The Borough Press, 2024, £18.99, hb, 384pp, 9780008424046 / William Morrow, 2024, $30.00/C$37.00, hb, 384pp, 9780063220010
Set in Victorian England and 1820s Greece, The Silence Factory is Bridget Collins’ third novel for adults. The story takes place in a recognisable place and time, but it is a historical setting overlaid with an eerie, gothic aura. Henry is an aspiring poet living with his father-in-law. He has trained with him as an aurist, selling ear trumpets, hearing aids, and helping the deaf to recover their hearing. Henry feels trapped and despondent since the death of his wife in childbirth, his father-inlaw treats him with contempt, and when he is given the chance to visit a potential customer and treat his deaf-mute daughter, Philomel, in Devon, he takes it. Henry is quickly seduced by Sir Edward and his lifestyle. The town revolves around Sir Edward’s factory making Telverton silk, a silk made from spiders’ webs that Sir Edward’s great uncle brought back from Greece.
However, Philomel’s governess Miss Fielding tries to warn Henry about the origins of the Telverton silk, giving him the diaries of Sir Edward’s great aunt Sophia. These diary entries from Sophia’s time in Greece are interspersed throughout the narrative, and they lead Henry to ask questions and wonder about the darkness at the heart of Sir Edward’s silencing silk and the threat it poses, when in the wrong hands. This is a brilliantly structured gothic tale of greed, grief, family, and friendship. Perfect for fans of Stacey Halls or Sean Lusk.
Lisa Redmond
TOWARD THE DAWN
Mary Connealy, Bethany House, 2024, $17.99, pb, 304pp, 9780764242663
The second volume of A Western Light finds Sebastian Jones going stir-crazy in a remote canyon in the winter of 1870 with a group of other refugees. Kat Wadsworth, escapee from an asylum who aided a wounded Seb on the trail west, also wants out. Seb suggests that they marry to make things easier. They attempt to settle in Wyoming, where Seb can pursue his ideas as an inventor. But bad guys chase them east to Seb’s hometown, where he intends to consult his lawyer. Then they discover that Kat’s rich uncle, who committed her for her inheritance, has learned of her escape and is also in pursuit.
Subplots involve the people back in the
canyon, some of whom escaped from the same asylum. I would have enjoyed the story more if I had read the first volume, Chasing the Horizon, or if the book had a list of characters and their relationships; I had trouble keeping them straight. Seb and Kat’s only conflict in their romance is his obsession with his inventions instead of putting time into their marriage, so the plot is more driven by the chases than by romantic push and pull. Read the first volume before this installment.
B. J. Sedlock
THE SMALL MUSEUM
Jody Cooksley, Allison & Busby, 2024, £16.99, hb, 320pp, 9780749031527
London in the latter part of the 19th century. Madeleine, a young woman from rural Cheshire, is newly married to Dr Lucius Everley and goes to live in his gloomy London townhouse. The rushed marriage, her husband’s distance, unwelcoming servants and all sorts of whispered secrets and unconventionalities in the house provide the ingredients for a traditional Gothic story. Madeleine’s own father was a medical doctor, and she has an interest in the subject and is a skilled draughtswoman. The extent of Dr Everley’s obsessive medical interests, supported by his possessed sister and the invidious position that Madeleine finds herself in the hostile household, becomes slowly clear to the reader, and a hideous secret is revealed at the conclusion of the story. From the beginning of the narrative, some chapters delineate the path of subsequent events – the proceedings against Madeleine Everley, who is on trial for her life for murder and seems to be the subject of some foul plot from her husband and sister-in-law.
The story, very capably narrated, is engaging and entertaining enough, but given the subject matter, it is highly melodramatic and lacks any real sense of credibility or indeed reality. The historical setting is not substantial, although there is a noteworthy emphasis on the vibrant scientific atmosphere surrounding the debate on evolution. Madeleine’s trial for murder continues for several days, which would have been exceedingly unlikely with the conventions of criminal proceedings in 19thcentury England. Nonetheless, an enjoyable novel.
Douglas Kemp
THE DEVIL TO PAY
Katie Daysh, Canelo, 2024, £18.99, hb, 324pp, 9781804365670
In the summer of 1802, shortly after the cessation of hostilities in the French Revolutionary wars, we find the main character, Lieutenant Arthur Courtney, on leave from the Royal Navy. Artie has endured many challenging conflicts in the preceding years, and whilst he is wary of people’s attitudes to him, he values two companions especially – his sister Jane and his close friend, Hiram Nightingale. The expectation of settling into his little cottage for the long summer days,
spending valued time with his confidant Hiram, is quickly rent apart by Courtney’s recall to the Navy for a secret mission aboard HMS Lysander, whose crew have been tasked with locating the missing frigate HMS Loyal. The latter had embarked on a journey to Malta, carrying British and French diplomats, namely Sir William Haywood and Hugo Baptiste, but the ship and all who sailed on her have gone missing in mysterious circumstances.
Supporting the British ship, the Lysander has a rendezvous with a French vessel, the Fantôme, north of Brittany as they set out to search the Mediterranean for news of the Loyal’s whereabouts. Lieutenant Courtney is unusual amongst the officers in the Navy at that time, having risen through the ranks from a common rating in his 15-plus years of service to the Crown. As a result of his humble origins, he has a rapport with other seamen that those from more privileged backgrounds don’t, while also harbouring various insecurities.
Initially, as a reader new to sailing terminology, it was a struggle to feel totally engaged with the story, but as the characters developed and were brought to life, this was inconsequential to the main aspects of the book. This is a hugely enjoyable and dramatic first adventure for what is set to become a popular series involving Courtney and Nightingale in future volumes.
Cathy Kemp
ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL
Michael Dunn, Historium Press, 2023, $14.99, pb, 393pp, 9781962465458
Death is a way of life in Pennsylvania coal towns. An explosion occurs. A burial ensues. Life goes on. But the guilt remains, as does the desire for change and revenge. Thirteen-yearold Mike Doyle is too young to follow through on these. Being the eldest now, he’s responsible for caring for his mother and siblings. Perhaps moving in with his relatives in a new town will provide the fresh start they need. It doesn’t.
Life in Shenandoah is much the same, with different ethnic factions vying for power while coal barons make certain their earnings far surpass their employees’ needs. Sure, Uncle Sean, a loyal company man, gets Mike a job caring for the colliery mules, and he does well, makes friends, and progresses to “better” paying, albeit riskier, jobs, but the family needs more money. L’il Bill becomes a breaker, even though cleaning coal isn’t a place for a lad who takes unnecessary risks. Burns cover Tara’s arms from the scalding wash where she labors. Trouble simmers within the household as much as it does without, while unions call strikes for fair wages. The camaraderie of the Ancient Order of Hibernians appeals to Mike, but participating in the Christian society may be as dangerous as mining and striking.
This coming-of-age story takes place between 1871 and 1875. Mike’s carnal thoughts, while normal for his age, are explicit, and some may feel they distract from more important aspects of the story. Dunn
excels in his vivid depiction of the perilous conditions, life-altering accidents, addiction, poverty, violence, greed, and desperateness of miners. Seen from the perspective of one who experiences it, much is beyond Mike’s control, yet he never relinquishes his dreams. A gritty portrait of life and death in the “not so gilded age.”
Cindy Vallar
THE PERSEPHONE CODE
Julia Golding, One More Chapter, 2024, £9.99, pb, 371pp, 9780008636876
England, 1812. Anthony Pennington, warden of the Hellfire Club, guardian of its secrets, is stabbed to death deep within the Buckinghamshire caves where privileged affiliates relish drunken debauchery. Among the late Anthony’s chattels is a letter to his halfsister Dora revealing the encoded location of the Club members’ private confessions, which they’re obliged to provide as ‘insurance’ against any future betrayal. The local reverend, aware of this letter, contacts his old friend Dr Jacob Sandys, ex-field doctor, now retired in the Lake District, urgently beseeching him to notify Anthony’s death to jobbing actress Dora, currently working in nearby Kendal. They meet and are soon attacked, begging the questions: who else knows, and how? The Illuminati are favourites because possessing the intimate indiscretions of society’s high and mighty could aid their dastardly aim of toppling the government. The pair journey south to investigate, encountering a succession of exciting scrapes, armed only with Jacob’s military experience and Dora’s all-woman capable sassiness to outwit their adversaries. As the trail unfolds, they become enamoured, adding another level to their tribulations. Told with zip and humour, this story kicks off at a gallop and the chase is on as, mostly one step ahead, our quick-witted duo hunt for the damning evidence. Regency details feature throughout, from coaching inns to carriage interiors, settings posh and poor, political trends, elegant clothing and everyday food, with horses galore. The letter’s decoding is cunningly managed, and lust evidently isn’t only for the Hellfire folks. Interesting, informative, most enjoyable.
Simon Rickman
WHEN THE GRASS IS RISING
Rose Gonsoulin, Reed & Wright, 2023, $16.99, pb, 184pp, 9781733035262
Rose Gonsoulin depicts the early life of the iconic Texan, Sam Houston, in 1805. Gonsoulin reveals the venturing soul in Sam “Kahunah” Houston, as he seeks to find himself within the trappings of a naturalist, politician, and soldier. Readers are introduced to 12-yearold Sam and his large family in Timbercreek, Virginia. Gonsoulin’s descriptions of the family interactions set the emotional, social, and political tone of the times. A classic middle child, Sam is the apple of his faithful mother’s
eye, later becoming a thorn in her side, and a 21-year-old infantry officer.
Sam is portrayed in his formative years as a dreamer, needing the attention of his absent father and the respect of his two oldest brothers. This hollowness causes him to dismiss authority and leave commitments, and eventually leads him to the Cherokee Indians. Sam serves as an interpreter between the Cherokee and the white man and through experiences “interprets” himself. A glossary of Cherokee terms, typical slang, and expressions aids readers. Through vivid adventures and character interactions, sensitive Sam Houston gains patience and endurance, and also learns to manage his intuitive actions. While his later accomplishments would rival those of George Washington, readers follow young Sam Houston toward his historic destiny and impact on Texas. His meeting General Andrew Jackson at the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend is a key event. A political timeline of Houston’s career is included as the general and future president becomes like a father to Sam and Texas.
The natural growth of people and seasons of life undergird this inspired story as readers venture forth like Sam Houston to understand the sentiment, “When the Grass is Rising.” Gonsoulin’s well-researched, detailed afterword, historical notes for each chapter, and bibliography add great enhancement for further reading. Engaging and informative.
Dorothy Schwab
OUR FAIR LILY
Rosie Goodwin, Zaffre, 2024, £14.99, hb, 464pp, 9781804183045
1875: Lily Moon is a miner’s daughter from Galley Common, near Nuneaton in the English Midlands. She works as a parlour maid for the wealthy Bellingham family, but she loves to sketch, and daydreams of an artistic career.
Arabella, the daughter of Lord and Lady Bellingham, is pregnant, and unmarried. Her grandmother embroils Lily in a plan to conceal the birth. However, nothing goes to plan. Arabella absconds, literally leaving Lily holding the baby, little Anastasia. The village (and Lily’s beau, Robbie) believe the baby to be Lily’s, and Arabella’s brother, Louis (the only other Bellingham who knows the truth) does not help matters by showing an interest in the child and trying to assist the Moon family. He and Lily are attracted to each other – but, as she says, she is ‘only a pit wench’ and he will be Lord of the Manor.
Lily’s story becomes entwined with Arabella’s, and the latter’s escapades lead to a chance encounter for Lily with a gallery owner, who shows an interest in her work. Will she be able to fulfil her artistic dreams?
This is a page-turning saga, full of twists and turns, with a compelling central character in Lily – strong-willed, good-hearted and forgiving. We root for her to overcome the obstacles thrown in her way, and to achieve her ambitions, both personal and professional.
However, I did have some caveats. The
narrative head-hops constantly between characters within scenes, which is not something I particularly like, and the phonetic rendering of the accents for the ‘workingclass’ characters could have been handled with a lighter touch. A couple of editorial errors jumped out: both the elderly Lady Bellingham, and her daughter-in-law, seem to be named Clarissa (p.5, and p.58), and on p.59, Louis thinks about ‘Anastasia’s baby’ rather than Arabella’s.
Mary Fisk
ESTELLA’S REVENGE
Barbara Havelocke, Hera Books, 2024, £18.99, hb, 378pp, 9781804367049
Writing a sequel or a novel with a character’s alternative perception presents challenges to the author, in that the reader needs to be at least familiar with the original work for it to make sense. There is the question of the degree to which the style and voice matches the initial book or presents a new departure. Barbara Havelocke revisits Great Expectations from the perspective of Estella, adopted daughter of the reclusive Miss Havisham, who narrates her story in the first person. Of course, Charles Dickens’ novel was not historical fiction, while this is. Estella is considered by literary critics to be one of Dickens’ most intriguing and effectively portrayed female characters. Raised by the jilted and psychotically embittered Miss Havisham to despise and to avenge herself upon the male gender, Estella’s character is warped and perverted, and the reader is shown another, firmly feminist, angle to her complicated life.
The need to keep to the overall parameters of the original book means that the focus on conventional historical fiction is occasionally disregarded, although the author admits that she has not kept slavishly to the plot and timelines of the original novel. There are some verbal anachronisms, and as the book progresses, the language seems to get more contemporary, suggesting the writer began to get a little cavalier as the narrative progresses towards the conclusion. There is a further sequel from the writer in the offing about the interesting and eventful life of Estella.
Douglas Kemp
THE SKELETON ARMY
Alis Hawkins, Canelo, 2024, £18.99, hb, 384pp, 9781804367148
The Salvation Army comes to Oxford in 1882 with the mission to outlaw alcohol. The workers at the many breweries in the town take to the streets in death’s head masks to defend their livelihood. There are fisticuffs, marching, music and a couple of murders to solve. Town and gown clash in historic settings as the university follows its traditional calendar of events.
The well-drawn plot fizzes with surprises. There are two narrators, a man and a woman. They write alternate chapters, a strategy that enables the author to explore
from both viewpoints the roles of men and women, love, sex, the law, and social justice. They write the structured prose of the 19thcentury novel, with much humour and no overlong descriptions. Non, from Wales, is both a student at Somerville, the women’s college, and a would-be reporter for the Oxford Mercury. As a woman she cannot sit the university exams or be awarded a degree. When not riding her tricycle down the High Street, she may be seen talking to Hara, her dead twin, who is deaf. In spite of being at Jesus College, Basil is not quite as Welsh as Non. He is conscious of his male privileges but pays a heavy price for them. The laws against homosexuality at that time were ferocious. A thoroughly absorbing and thought-provoking read.
Jane Stubbs
SAVED BY THE MATCHMAKER
Jody Hedlund, Bethany House, 2024, $17.99, pb, 352pp, 9780764241970
Part 2 of the Shanahan Match series. In 1849 St. Louis, a pregnant Enya Shanahan has run home from a failed marriage. To protect their business interests from scandal, her well-off family secures an annulment and employs Bellamy the matchmaker to find Enya a new husband. Sullivan O’Brien is from a steamboat-owning family, under pressure from his father to marry. Bellamy brings them together and, despite misgivings, Enya agrees to the match for the baby’s sake. Sullivan can hardly believe that such a beautiful woman would have him, because he has livid burns acquired in the Mexican War. And Enya is mentally scarred from her first marriage, “her shattered heart refused to believe any man could truly care without wanting something in return.”
The bulk of the novel concerns how they come to deal with their pasts so that they can attempt to make the marriage work. Both have hefty burdens of self-doubt and lack confidence. A subplot concerns Sullivan’s smuggling of escaped slaves from New Orleans on his steamboat to freedom in the north—can he trust Enya with the secret? Hedlund is good at creating sexual tension within the bounds of a “sweet” romance. Recommended.
B. J. Sedlock
THE CLOVERTON CHARADE
Sarah E. Ladd, Thomas Nelson, 2024, $17.99/ C$21.99, pb, 352pp, 9780785246862
Olivia Brannon and Lucas Avery are rival antiquity brokers, but when they meet at a house party, they find themselves strongly attracted to each other. The situation is further complicated by their discovery that some of the artifacts they are assessing are fake. Can they set aside their long-standing family feud and professional rivalry in order
to work together to discover how the originals were replaced?
The protagonists are a pair of likeable and sensible characters, and both the mystery and the enemies-to-lovers trope are satisfyingly handled. What distinguishes this romance from most, however, are the insights into the aristocracy in Regency England. Behind the mask of arrogance and carefree (desperate?) gaiety lurk many insecurities, most notably fear of losing their wealth. Lacking this, the tenuous hold on their overvalued status is fatally imperiled in a rigidly hierarchical social structure: heirs may be forced to sell impoverished estates, younger brothers’ allowances cut off, dowerless sisters and daughters unable to marry well. Then together they slip down into the scorned middle class, where they are forced to work for a living. And for which they are woefully ill-equipped. Recommended.
Ray Thompson
THE CARICATURIST
Norman Lock, Bellevue Literary Press, 2024, $17.99/£12.99, pb, 341pp, 9781954276277
Oliver Fischer is an art student and general ne’erdo-well in 1897 Philadelphia. On a lark (Oliver does almost everything on a lark), he and his friend Robert decide to recreate Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe as a living tableau, photograph it, and colorize it. The lark quickly turns into a misadventure. Over the next several weeks, Oliver finds himself expelled from art school, spending time in jail and in the poor house, and then arrested again at an anti-imperialist protest. He is apparently saved when his caricatures of poor house denizens lead to a job as a newspaper illustrator. But when the Spanish-American War breaks out, the newspaper sends Oliver and Robert to Cuba. As illustrators for Stephen Crane’s war stories, they will find more adventure than they dreamed of.
Oliver starts as a rather unappealing character, a spoiled rich boy with a banker daddy, playing the bohemian, rash and selfcentered. But he grows and matures as he dashes headlong through his misadventures. The voice in this novel is powerful. Oliver’s voice starts out full of drama, braggadocio, and wry wit. His hyperactivity and over-confidence echo the over-confidence of 1897 America, a swaggering nation of flimflam, skullduggery, and self-promotion. In the midst of his own breakneck adventures, Oliver encounters a
nation spoiling for a fight even before the Maine incident and the declaration of war.
As Oliver allows his experiences to change him, the voice in the novel also subtly changes, sounding more thoughtful and skeptical. This is a masterfully written book that brings light to America’s almost-forgotten first imperialist adventure.
Kathryn Bashaar
SKETCHES BY THE SERPENTINE
Rosanne E. Lortz, Madison Street, 2024, $12.99, pb, 235pp, 9781961708037
In the second of the Comfort Regency Quartet, Magnus Blackstone, the Earl of Anderly and heir to the Duke of Scarsdale, has withdrawn from society after a brief but disastrous marriage. His sole preoccupation is painting, but his attempt to sketch the Serpentine in Hyde Park is disrupted by an ill-behaved pug and an irrepressibly cheerful young lady. Despite his reluctance, he finds himself drawn to the aptly named Miss Felicity Comfort, and prospects for his recovery from guilt and depression look promising, despite the inevitable obstacles that lie in his way.
Kind-hearted Felicity is a likeable heroine with just the personality to rally the earl’s spirits. She is, however, too young and inexperienced to recognize danger signals, and her readiness to trust others leaves her vulnerable to misjudgments. While her abduction by the autocratic Duke of Bolton drifts towards melodrama, the warning against unwariness is valuable in a world where too many are ready to take ruthless advantage of the gullible and those over whom they wield power, as the predations of the duke and Magnus’s motherin-law demonstrate. Love triumphs, but it does require some initiative and hard lessons need to be learned. Insightful. Recommended.
Ray Thompson
A SHORE THING
Joanna Lowell, Berkley, 2024, $19.00/C$25.99, pb, 368pp, 9780593549728
1888. Muriel Pendrake is in St. Ives, Cornwall, studying seaweeds. Happily, the cyclist she collides with is the very artist she wants to illustrate her specimens for a career-making lecture in New York. Kit Griffith has been living as his true self in St. Ives, but he’s been artistically blocked ever since his best friend Lucy took his transition as a betrayal of their Sisterhood of female artists. To win Kit’s artistic support, Muriel takes a bet to pedal around Cornwall with a group of misogynist cyclists calling themselves the Mutton Wheelers, but as she fearlessly rises to the challenges of weather, landscape, and the wounds of their individual pasts, she worries that Kit doesn’t see the future she wants with him.
The book leans in on the jaunty, slapstick humor of its beginning, but smooths out into compelling emotional tension as the journey begins and Kit and Muriel spend real time together. Lowell, drawing on her lived
experience, tenderly and brilliantly captures the way Kit and Muriel navigate each other and the vocabulary and conventions of their world as a trans man and queer woman. There’s a riotously fun scene with a sapphist society and a takedown of toxic masculinity among debates of gender conventions and colonial appropriation, all of which are handled well.
The leads’ career ambitions fall away as the action turns to the exquisite pleasure they give one another, but after all, this is a romance, with a promising pairing between their respective male friends emerging as Muriel and Kit fall in love. Readers won’t need to be an enthusiast of cycling, Cornwall, or seaweed to be swept up in this passionate love story and Lowell’s wonderful prose. Recommended.
Misty Urban
THE BURIAL PLOT
Elizabeth Macneal, Picador, 2024, £18.99, hb, 326pp, 9781529090949
After stellar success with The Doll Factory and Circus of Wonders, Macneal continues with a novel set once again in the Victorian era but enters the realm of the gothic, with a cat-andmouse-thriller and themes of love, deceit and justice.
London’s cemeteries are overflowing, and much mischief is to be had by our protagonists Bonnie and her trickster lover, Crawford. But when an event forces Bonnie to turn her back on the old ways, Crawford secures for her a position as a lady’s maid at the country estate of Mr Moncrieff, who spends his time drawing up plans for an elaborate mausoleum for his recently departed wife. But how did Mrs Moncrieff die, and what secrets is the household holding onto?
As with her previous work, Macneal is a master of world-building, and her visceral prose regarding the underbelly of London and the curiously designed Endellion House ensures the reader walks directly amongst the characters. Macneal’s level of research is meticulous but never didactic. Crawford is a well-drawn character, and their relationship arc is skilfully woven. For the first third of the novel, the pages almost turn themselves. However, Bonnie has little agency. As The Burial Plot progresses, Bonnie’s transition between her many roles start to grate, for she slips between them with ease and with little to no introspection, preventing a full emotional connection with the reader.
For a gothic thriller, all the required tropes are present, and the book has dark moments. Yet the foreshadowing or guessing of the plot twists is too easy, which dilutes the tension and pace. This is a solid escapist novel, with flaws, and it is hoped Macneal returns to sparkling form with her next.
Katharine Riordan
FOLLOW THE STARS HOME
Diane C. McPhail, Kensington/John Scognamiglio, 2024, $27.00/C$37.00/£25.00, hb, 304pp, 9781496750884
The first steamboat to traverse the
Mississippi River in 1811 is the unique setting for this compelling novel of a momentous journey. It narrates the story of Lydia Roosevelt, an intelligent, brave, and determined young wife and mother who accompanies her husband Nicholas on this voyage, which begins when she is eight months pregnant. As the architectural designer of the living spaces on board, she wants to experience this adventure firsthand with her inventor husband who has worked tirelessly to build and promote the steamboat as a better means of transportation than horse and carriage.
The vivid depiction of what life was like on this first steamboat is told in the imagined voice of Lydia, who likens her own memories to the movement of water coursing in and around her other thoughts. She weaves episodes of fear and wonder from her childhood into her contemporary life on board as a way to make sense of what she is experiencing and how she might look back on it in the future. Day-to-day activities with her children, as well as singular and terrifying episodes, are all stitched into her thoughts about her husband, her own past, and their future. Far from a peaceful journey, dangers abound on this trip, and unimaginable near-catastrophes are ever present. Throughout, Lydia confronts, perseveres, and ultimately succeeds in her role as helpmate, astute crewmember, and intrepid adventurer. A worthwhile read!
Karen Bordonaro
MY LADY’S SECRETS
Katy Moran, Aria, 2024, £20.00, hb, 338pp, 9781803280233
This is a Regency novel in that it is set in 1812, during the Regency, and it is populated by the sort of people you might find in a Jane Austen novel. However, this is no gentle satire with an undercurrent of suppressed sexuality. This is an earthy, violent, red-blooded novel, and the blood often gets spilt. Moran’s Britain simmers with rebellion while fighting a brutal war in Spain.
We jump straight into the action, into a swirl of characters, including Lord Byron, all of whom have eventful back stories which are fed to us in frequent flashbacks. I never really understood what was happening, and nor did most of the characters in the book. There are several overlapping treasonous conspiracies, most of them set up by government agents provocateurs. The central character is Lady Cressida Nightingale, daughter of an Irish rebel peer and estranged wife of a senior army officer. Her secret is revealed in the final chapter, but it is unsurprising and explains little of what has gone before.
There are chases through the glens and lochs of northern Scotland, shootouts, murder, passionate sexual encounters, beautiful scenery and fine clothes. All very extravagant and gorgeous.
Edward James
THE THIRD WIFE OF FARADAY HOUSE
B. R. Myers, William Morrow, 2024, $18.99/ C$24.99/£10.99, pb, 352pp, 9780063209879
Edgar Award winning B. R. Myers returns to a supernatural gothic landscape for her new novel set in Nova Scotia in 1816. After the death of her parents, Emeline Fitzpatrick lives in Halifax with her guardians, Judge and Mrs Shackleton. She’s young, impressionable, naïve, impractical, and has no wifely skills besides her natural beauty. She does, however, have a strong independent streak and, against all sensible judgement, engages in a flirtation with a naval lieutenant, who promises he will whisk her off to Bermuda and make her his wife. To escape the furor that ensues, the Shackletons orchestrate a hasty marriage to Captain Graves, an older man whose two previous wives have died in childbed. Emeline is summarily shipped off to Faraday House, a drafty, neglected manor on a lonely island, cut off by the tides. Emeline is far from welcome and discovers, to her horror, that Captain Graves’ second wife, Georgina, lies at death’s door, attended by the enigmatic Reverend Pellerine. As her affection and fears for Georgina grow, Emeline vows to help her, but who can she trust?
Her future husband is haunted by the Faraday curse in which wives die young; the maid is haughty, rude and over-familiar; and the house and groundskeepers are one minute congenial, the next ill-mannered and unhelpful. Hostility oozes from them all, creating a confusing chain of events where it’s no easier for the reader to figure out who is trustworthy than Emeline. She encounters strange and frightening goings-on; is led through vivid dream sequences by ghostly apparitions; the piano plays itself; blood drips from the ceiling. Over the months, Emeline’s sheer stubbornness and refusal to be cowed become the making of this once naïve girl. The ending is a little too creative, but the writing style, settings and characters are expertly woven into a creepy, atmospheric, hard-toresist package.
Fiona Alison
DIAMONDS AND DOOM
John D. Nesbitt, Thorndike Large Print, 2023, $30.99, hb, 345pp, 9798885782173
In the 1890s, murder has come to a town in the West. Dunbar, who has taken a job at Hook Ranch, has stumbled into a new mystery, as told from the point of view of Edwin “Rye” Ryerson, who is a darling and tough old protagonist starring alongside beloved Dunbar. When two ranch hands who were interested in Rye’s niece turn up dead, it’s up to Rye and Dunbar to track down the killer. There are plenty of likely suspects, including that strange boss of Rye’s sweet eighteen-yearold niece, Vivian. Then Madeline, a street girl, is killed, and the murderer could be anyone. Rye and Dunbar set off on a chilly adventure to chase the killer and his accomplice across
a rugged, snowy landscape. It’s a good thing that Rye has been taking riding lessons. Including realistic depictions of the Old West, life on a ranch, and the camaraderie of cowboys, this mystery is easy to read and hard to put down. One can’t help but care about author John D. Nesbitt’s point-of-view character, Rye, and his friendly partner for this novel, Dunbar. A master of building suspense quietly, Nesbitt has crafted a mystery and Western for a wide audience with Diamonds and Doom
Ellaura Shoop
BUTCHER
Joyce Carol Oates, Knopf, 2024, $30.00/ C$39.00, hb, 352pp, 9780593537770 / Fourth Estate, 2024, £16.99, hb, 352pp, 9780008694876
One of America’s most prolific authors returns with a harrowing tale of a demented “doctor” who preys upon women neglected by the state in a mid19th century New Jersey asylum. Basing her work on authentic historical documents, Oates tells the story of Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, an ambitious yet deeply damaged man who, after botching a procedure, is shuttled off to head the medical department at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics. There, his psychotic loathing of the female body—and his lack of proper medical schooling—result in grotesque and horrific experiments upon wards of abandoned, helpless, and mentally ill patients. His decades’ long reign of terror earns him the name “Red-Handed Butcher” among the female patients, but to the world outside Weir garners national renown as the “Father of Gyno-Psychiatry.” If that term sounds terrifying, it is, and Oates does not skimp on the gag-inducing details.
The novel is a fascinating portal into 19thcentury medical notions of female diseases and various afflictions, which Oates researched thoroughly. She incorporates episodes from the lives of three historic medical practitioners of the era into her portrayal of Weir, who takes a shine to one patient—the “deaf/mute” Irish orphan, Brigit Kinealy—and makes her his “assistant” to his unending litany of diabolical experiments. Brigit is a courageous and resilient character who elevates the novel above a mere horror show, as she begins to question both Weir’s abilities and intent.
Butcher is one of Oates’s strongest titles of late, combining pitch-perfect historical details, dialogue, and an unusually happy ending (for Oates). This is superb literary and historical fiction that educates about
benighted and misogynistic understandings of the female anatomy in antebellum America. Highly recommended.
Peggy Kurkowski
THE STOLEN DAUGHTER
Florence Ọlájídé, Bookouture, 2024, $10.99/£8.99, pb, 312pp, 9781835252994
In 1848 in Yoruba Kingdom (presentday Nigeria), fourteen-yearold Ṣìkẹmi lives peacefully in a village, gathering wood and edibles and helping her loving parents. One night, their hamlet is raided by slave hunters. She is kidnapped by female warriors and taken to a seaport. While fortunate enough not to be shipped off to America, she is purchased by Madam Tinúbú, a former queen consort, and a wealthy slave trader. Ṣìkẹmi toils at Madam’s palace near Lagos, longing to see her family again and dreaming of her little brother’s laughter. She realizes that a way to endure her inhumane existence would be to serve her owner meticulously. Luckily, after some good deeds and discovering a plot against her mistress, Madam venerates her and offers her preferment. Ṣìkẹmi is in a quandary: whether to join a brutal slave trader and perhaps see her family again, or put her and her family’s life at a larger risk.
Florence Ọlájídé’s afterword mentions that in 2020, she discovered a progenitor who was a slave during the Yoruba Civil Wars (17891893). She also learned more about African slave traders, particularly two prominent women who were complicit in the transatlantic trade. Ọlájídé developed this fictional story based on the lives of those real people. It is a unique and informative novel that covers the appalling lives of Africans enslaved in their own country by their people. It’s interesting to learn that they were also employed in hunting and kidnapping other Africans for profitable sale to Europeans, and some of those slave hunters were African women. Ọlájídé has covered evocatively not only the flora and fauna and the lives of West Africans during that period but also the political turmoil and tribal warfare. The British efforts in abolishing slavery and colonizing that region are subtly woven into the plot. Highly recommended.
Waheed Rabbani
A GAMBLE AT SUNSET
Vanessa Riley, Zebra, 2024, $17.95/£16.99, pb, 336pp, 9781420154856
Georgie is the second daughter of a “Blackamoor” family, which has a debtridden coal business. Mark, shy third son of a
marquess and composer, is struggling to write a sonata that will prove his musical worth to the world. Enter a mysterious half-Russian, half-British duke with an African ancestor— and a past that’s entangled with Georgie’s older sister. When Georgie kisses Mark in the garden, just to spite her older sister, it sets in motion a roller coaster path for them all.
Set in London in 1816, this Regency romance has readers’ favorite elements—titled men, beautiful young women who are reluctant to marry, scandal, and a culminating ball with all the ton present. This story goes a step further by creating characters based on well-researched history involving British and Russian people of African and mixed ancestry. I especially liked that the author created characters who each have their own interests, such as the third daughter who dons men’s clothing to sneak into scientific lectures. A Gamble at Sunset is a fun read, not only for the romance but also for a better understanding of the era and how people of color have long been a part of all strata of British society.
Lisa Lowe Stauffer
THE DANCE OF DESIRE
Delphine Ross, Muse Publications, 2024, $16.99, pb, 308pp, 9798985351286
When Angela Bartham agrees to a marriage of convenience with her erstwhile best friend, the Earl of Sutherland, known as Sunny, her motive is to save her family from scandal. But in doing so, she puts herself in difficulty. Angela must spend months in seclusion with Sunny in his Parisian chateau, and her new husband is bristling with anger over the way she rejected his suit so forcefully only six months earlier. He’s become the Beast to her Beauty, and it will require many ups and downs – including a duel, a blackmail plot, a secret passage, and even a passel of kittens – before readers will discover whether Angela gets the fairytaleending she surely deserves.
Ross has a great gift with dialogue and the skill to show how words can wound. Sunny and Angela’s verbal sparring shows how easy it is to hurt those we love and hard it can be to understand one’s own feelings, far less share them. Both main characters grow throughout the story, and secondary characters – family, friends, and a dastardly journalist – throw enough curveballs in the path of true love to keep the pages quickly turning. An enjoyable second outing for the Muses of Scandal series.
Kate Braithwaite
VINCENT’S WOMEN
Donna Russo, Next Chapter, 2024, $20.49, pb, 418pp, 9784824185778
Vincent’s Women tells the dramatic and littleknown story behind the women in Vincent van Gogh’s life—the lovers, prostitutes, heartbreakers, caregivers and family members who influenced his decisions and his art at pivotal moments in his life. Born into a Dutch family in 1853, he drifted into art-dealing and ministry as a young man, but depended on continuous
financial and emotional support from his brother, Theo. After he met Paul Gauguin and other artists in the post-impressionist movement, he sought solitude in southern France. It was there that his sketches and dark renderings changed—to colorful, vibrant expressions of the natural world including The Red Vineyard and Vase with 15 Sunflowers. Never emotionally stable, he eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital at Saint-Remy in the care of Sister Epiphany, where he painted Irises and Starry Night. Flashes of stability led him to put himself under the care of Paul Gachet, a doctor of homeopathic medicine. Though his work was beginning to attract critical artistic attention, and his friendship with Gachet’s daughter, Marguerite, had become a source of calm, loving inspiration, in 1890 he died quite tragically under suspicious circumstances.
Russo guides the story through the narrative of Theo’s wife, Johanna, as she acquaints her son with the truth behind his Uncle Vincent’s stormy, passionate life, and, in the process, questions long-standing assumptions about how he lost his ear, his sexuality and whether he died by suicide or murder. Hundreds of eloquent and expressive letters were exchanged between Vincent and Theo that reveal the artist’s thoughts and theories. It is this extraordinary correspondence, with its intimacy and autobiographical sketches, that the author drew from to build layers of dimension and depth into her compelling portrait of a misunderstood genius in his time. This thought-provoking and beautifully constructed work is a must-read for everyone interested in art history and van Gogh
Deborah Cay Wilding=
THE ORDEAL OF MISS LUCY JONES
Liz Shakespeare, Letterbox Books, 2024, £10.99, pb, 336pp, 9780951687970
So this is a true story, verified by contemporary cuttings, which are reproduced from the local press and which, albeit difficult to decipher, comprehensively collaborate the facts.
Lucy Jones is a young girl in Victorian Devon who is falsely accused of improper conduct on the village common with a man, but not the man she loves, who she hopes will return from Australia. Ostracism and the burning of effigies ensue.
The plot, robust as it is, flounders under the weight of an effusive and frequently repetitive welter of description. Yes, the town is stonier, the hills steeper, the fields greener, the woods lovelier, darker and deeper than any you will find anywhere but the storyline, oh, the storyline – well. It doesn’t really get started until we are halfway through, but it is, basically, a good, strong, if fairly predictable yarn, worthy, almost, of Mr Hardy himself. But here any serious comparison ends.
Lucy Jones, herself unkindly and unjustly compromised, emerges (as we always knew she would) as virtually flawless, as she is finally rewarded for her inherent goodness. Her
minor shortcomings are accepted, and her relationship with her dog is noted as a positive points winner.
One of the charms of this novel – and there are those who will find many – is the writer’s use, in reported speech, of pronouns pronounced in the distinctive West country/ Devonian way. This accent has, sadly, over the past few decades, almost completely disappeared, overtaken, except rarely and by the elderly, by RP i.e., BBC “Received Pronunciation”. In this novel we have “You’m”, “Us’ll” “They’m” and “Yer ‘tis” etc., all accurately used, by Liz Shakespeare.
For that, and for her meticulous, if overused research, this writer should be commended and will be enjoyed.
Julia Stoneham
THE HONEY TREE
Jo Sparkes, Oscar Press, 2023, $14.99, pb, 294pp, 9781735563121
1850. Preacher is a runaway slave, determined to make it all the way to Canada. Following the stars, he makes his way north from the state of Mississippi, but in Missouri, his luck runs out, and he ends up on the Sweetgum plantation.
Maggie has been enslaved at Sweetgum all her life but nourishes the faint hope that someday, somehow, she and her children will find a way to escape. All that lies between them and potential freedom in Illinois is the vast, swirling Mississippi—but neither Maggie nor her children can swim.
Maggie asks Preacher for help. He initially says no, it will be enough of a challenge to run without hauling a woman and her children along. But one of those women is Honey, Maggie’s sixteen-year-old daughter for whom Preacher develops feelings. When a sadistic overseer brings things to a head, there is really no choice but to run.
Ms. Sparkes has written a novel with various voices, chief among them that of Maggie. Maggie—or Mammie—is a fantastic character, as is Preacher. The supporting cast and their various points of view add depth to the narrative, as do the recurring vivid descriptions of the setting, be it the endless cotton fields or the ancient dogwood overgrown with honeysuckle—the Honey Tree. There are some instances when this reader would have liked some more clarification— why was Hank punished as he was, for example—but this is more than compensated by the flowing prose and the building tension in the narrative. All in all, The Honey Tree is a captivating read, giving us a brief glimpse into one of the darker aspects of U.S. history.
Anna Belfrage
THE MAD BARON’S BRIDE
Misty Urban, Oliver Heber Books, 2024, $14.99, pb, 333pp, 9781648396489
The best way to describe Misty Urban’s work is atmospheric. Her sense of setting is impeccable. In The Mad Baron’s Bride, set in England in the year 1800, Mrs. Leda Wroth
is a companion to the Lady Plume. But Leda Wroth is not her legal name, and while she is a widow, the circumstances were far from respectable. Soon, Lady Plume’s nephew Jack arrives, needing a governess for his motherless child up in Norfolk.
The chatty, society-laden Upper Assembly Rooms in Bath are chock full of wealthy displays of finery and the mating habits of the ton. Leda Wroth helps young women interested in accepting proposals by secretly vetting their suitors to see if they will be kind and generous husbands. Often, they will not.
Jack is instantly attracted to Leda’s unusual status as what he terms an “unmatchmaker.” She is respected and intelligent, and he is interested in her as a governess surely, but more so as a wife—if she can manage the distant and cold Norfolk. At first Leda refuses, but when her past catches up with her, Leda agrees to leave Bath only long enough to find a suitable governess. As they travel, the reader moves from a bright and lively city to the remote and isolated rural manor house. Norfolk is delightfully cold and desolate, complete with the cavernous Holme Hall, a beautiful and unpredictable dead wife, a house full of ghosts, and secrets the servants and Jack’s daughter strain to keep.
With a dash of Romani, brick making, and unsteady lime quarries, The Mad Baron’s Bride combines the mannered dances of Jane Austen and the gothic atmosphere of Daphne du Maurier.
Katie Stine
THE MUMMY OF MAYFAIR
Jeri Westerson, Severn House, 2024, $29.99/£21.99, hb, 224pp, 9781448310760
In this expertly crafted and satisfying Sherlockian pastiche, former Baker Street Irregular Timothy Badger and his partner, Dr. Benjamin Watson, team up to solve the murder of an amateur Egyptologist. When Dr. Enoch Sawyer hires the team to provide security at a mummy-unwrapping party he is hosting, the pair are as shocked as the other guests when the doctor’s dead body is found in the sarcophagus instead. Once again, Badger and Watson find themselves following in the footsteps of their mentor, Sherlock Holmes, in order to investigate a murder.
While Holmes both advises the fledgling detectives and backs them financially, Badger and Watson solve the case using their own talents: Badger is intuitive, impulsive, and as his name suggests, dogged, while Watson is a measured man of science. Ably aided by the society lady-turned-journalist Ellsie Littleton, the detectives uncover a sordid underbelly of drug use, body snatching, and embezzlement among the rich and powerful.
Westerson neatly balances the guilty pleasures of Egyptomania and aristocratic dinner parties with the moral ambiguities involved in classism, racism, and colonialism. And Badger must face a deepening moral quandary when he confronts the involvement of another former Irregular, Wiggins. But just
as Holmes is never allowed to overwhelm the detection, Westerson never allows her cleareyed analysis of historical injustices to get in the way of a solidly enjoyable whodunnit.
Erica Obey
THE MESMERIST
Caroline Woods, Doubleday, 2024, $28.00/ C$37.99/£23.00, hb, 336pp, 9780385550161
In 1894 Minneapolis, Bethany House, a home for unwed mothers, unexpectedly receives a new “inmate.” Like most of the girls there, hers is a sad case but, beyond that, something about her just seems odd. She seems to be without coherent speech and is given the name “Faith” by the staff. Most of the girls also have pseudonyms for a variety of reasons. Faith has arrived at a particularly frightening time as the city is experiencing a number of murders under mysterious circumstances. Faith’s sometimes outlandish mannerisms, along with her pitiful few words in communicating, cause many of her housemates to become convinced she may be some type of sorceress.
Faith’s roommate, May, a bit more stable and mature than many of the others, begins an effort to determine further knowledge on Faith’s origins. This task is daunting as more murders continue, with some having possible ties to Bethany House. As May delves deeper into Faith’s case, she uncovers even darker and more threatening secrets.
This historical crime novel, based loosely on actual events, is intricate and intelligently written and proceeds through its pages with increasing suspense and tension. The general circumstances of that time and place are well described and show how many women found themselves at Bethany House. Fair warning – men do not come off well here. The best are portrayed as clueless and ignorant, while the worst are sociopathic monsters. In this cautionary tale and distant mirror of today’s burgeoning human trafficking crisis, one character, speaking about Minneapolis, states “Every day this city grows more and more wicked.” At book’s end, the reader may wonder who the real “mesmerist” was. Recommended.
Thomas J. Howley
20TH CENTURY JAC
Sam Adams, Y Lolfa, 2024, £9.99/$14.99/ C21.95, pb, 176pp, 9781800994423
Glamorgan, Wales, 1939: Jac is growing up in the mining village of Gilfach Goch, in a close-knit family and community. Sam Adams is also a poet, and it shows, particularly in the opening pages of this story, where he evokes vividly what was once quiet farmland, now transformed by coal: ‘the valley held a village in its cupped hand.’ This sense of human transience is echoed in Jac’s search for fossils amongst abandoned mine workings, an interest sparked by an encyclopedia he finds
in the library at the Workmen’s Hall. Jac’s sister explains to her little brother that the Romans came to Wales but did not conquer: the name Gilfach Goch means little red valley, for it is stained by their blood. All they have left behind is a broken-down wall.
The richness of description of the smallest physical details recalls the camera work of the films of Terence Davies. Adams sees quite literally from a child’s perspective: small Jac holds his grandmother’s hand as ‘she would pause to gossip with others, usually while he gazed at their shins and ankles.’ Later, Jac uses his father as a windbreak in a snowstorm. An omniscient narrator is firmly in charge, but it looks as though that narrator is really Adams sharing his own story. He was born at the same time as his protagonist; his father, like Jac’s, was an electrician down the pit. Arguably this is a disguised memoir, and the lack of chapter breaks reinforces this impression. Read this book for its portrait of a vanished way of life, of a community both perplexed and frightened by war, and especially for the passages where Jac and his friends explore disused mine workings, desolate and dangerous.
Katherine Mezzacappa
WHEN THE WORLD FELL SILENT
Donna Jones Alward, One More Chapter, 2024, $19.99/C$25.99/£9.99, pb, 374pp, 9780008647056
Two women, two shattered lives. In December 1917, with World War I still raging, a huge explosion emanating from a shipboard munitions’ ignition in the harbor ripped through Halifax, Nova Scotia. Its tremendous force sent shockwaves through the city, levelling buildings, raining fire and ash down, and killing hundreds of people. Against this harrowing background, this novel relates the story of Nora, a young nurse, and Charlotte, a young working-class mother, who both survived the initial blast of the explosion only to find their lives forever changed.
Heart-rending sorrow prevails as each learns of the fates of family members while still trying to navigate their own life pathways. For Nora, anguishing choices about family responsibilities, a new pregnancy, and taking care of boarders and neighbors in addition to her close relatives often prove overwhelming. The presence of a new doctor friend both helps and unsettles her adaption to the new realities she must face. For Charlotte, the prior loss of both her parents in a fire and the death of her husband in battle, combined with her
present unhappiness at life with her in-laws, are only ameliorated by the presence of her baby daughter, whose whereabouts after the explosion lead to many difficulties. Both women face seemingly insurmountable odds in making choices about their futures.
The setting and pace of this extremely compelling novel never let up as tragedies compound and viable solutions remain elusive. Hope never dies, however, and the very human side of tragedy includes both light and darkness. The characters, their reactions, their experiences, and their choices are realistic to the point that they feel like our own friends and neighbors. The reader is completely drawn into the story. Highly recommended.
Karen Bordonaro
THE WILD DATE PALM
Diane Armstrong, HQ Fiction AU, 2024, A$32.99, pb, 384pp, 9781867245162 / HQ Fiction, $7.99, ebook, 384pp, B0CKCMB8F8
It’s a rare experience when you encounter an historical novel that not only sweeps you away with a magnificent, stirring tale full of engaging characters but also enlightens you about historical events that form the background to current strife in our modern world. Primarily set in Palestine, it covers the period 1910 to 1917. Shoshana, Leah and Nathan are siblings in a pioneering Jewish family in the town of Zichron Ya’akov, founded by Baron de Rothschild. Nathan is a botanist with an international reputation. The sisters are expected to follow the usual pattern for women and make good marriages, but world affairs and the fates will set them on divergent paths. Both sisters are in love with the exuberant Eli but it is Shoshana who will become his soulmate and share a remarkable destiny with him.
As World War I reaches towards the Middle East, Shoshana, Nathan, Eli and a cabal of other young Jews see an opportunity to involve Britain in ultimately defeating the oppressive rule of the Ottoman Turks. They embark on dangerous spying activities but are constantly frustrated by difficulties in being taken seriously by the British authorities, even with the help of T.E. Lawrence [of Arabia]. They must overcome innumerable wartime blocks in logistics, transport and communication, and when at last action is imminent, the Turkish net closes in with inevitable tragic consequences. This superb and elegant novel grapples with profound human emotions and amazing courage in the face of impossible odds and seemingly irreconcilable conflicts. Inspired by a true story, the settings are rich, the research
is impeccable, and it is highly recommended reading for anyone who is unsure of the blighted history of Israel and Palestine but would like to discover more in an accessible way through fiction.
Marina Maxwell
THE VOLCANO DAUGHTERS
Gina María Balibrera, Pantheon, 2024, $28.00/ C$37.99, hb, 368pp, 9780593317235
In 1914 El Salvador, Graciela is born into a coffee plantation community. It’s a hardscrabble but cozy childhood surrounded by her four friends and all their mothers. Missing is Graciela’s older sister Consuelo, who was taken to live with their father in the capital some years ago. When he dies, Graciela’s mother is tricked into bringing her to the capital, to replace her late father as oracle to the ruling general.
Graciela and Consuelo follow different paths in this story that weaves a tapestry of lush images, historical details, authentic settings, and magical realism. From Central America to Hollywood, San Francisco, and France, it’s never an easy journey. With resilience, stubbornness, and a large sprinkle of Spanish slang, they persevere. Graciela and Consuelo, as well the chorus of ghosts who accompany them, are vivid on the page.
This book is layered, rich, and wellresearched. However, I wish the author had included a note clarifying which aspects were based on real historical events and people, since Central American history isn’t widely known among English-speaking readers.
Despite the lack of a research note, I heartily recommend this book. With lyrical language, this story lulls the reader deeper and deeper into the space between dreaming and waking. In addition, it’s rare that El Salvador is the setting for a story, rare to have a story centered on the hardships and strengths of women without any romantic subplot, and rare to use magical realism in a way that encompasses the theme of women supporting each other.
Lisa Lowe Stauffer
THE ROSE ARBOR
Rhys Bowen, Lake Union, 2024, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 379pp, 9781662504228
In September 1943, families in Tydeham Grange, Dorset, are told by army soldiers they have two weeks to gather their belongings and move away because the village has been requisitioned for invasion drills. More than 20 years later, a little girl goes missing in London. The incident recalls the unsolved cases of three
little girls who had gone missing back in the 1940s, and evidence leads back to Dorset.
Bowen is the bestselling author of the Molly Murphy historical mysteries as well as other books. She’s skilled, therefore, in revealing bits of evidence and unraveling plot lines that are not as they first appear. In The Rose Arbor, she sheds light on the effects of wartime on the home front. In addition to recounting the actual story of the evacuation of Tydeham Grange, Bowen captures the frantic actions of parents who must move their children to safety in the country and away from the Blitz, and the anxieties of children who are forced to travel on their own and rely on caregiving strangers.
While the threads of the story do pull together, there are many side stories that distract along the way: the hippie lifestyle of the 1960s, an emerging love story, unsettling flashback recollections, numerous incidental characters, and vignettes told from the perspective of “The Little Girl.” An entertaining, if slightly bumpy, read.
K. M. Sandrick
THE TRIAL OF MRS. RHINELANDER
Denny S. Bryce, Kensington, 2024, $17.95/ C$24.95/£16.99, pb, 336pp, 9781496737878
Denny Bryce tackles racism, classism, and passing in her new novel, drawing inspiration from the sensational early 20th-century Rhinelander trial. Alice Beatrice Jones and her sisters, Gracie and Emily, have been raised white, although their father has some watereddown West Indian blood.
Emily marries a Black man and opts for ‘Negro’ on her marriage certificate. Alice’s love affair with, and secret marriage to, Lenny ‘Kip’ Rhinelander releases devastating retaliatory spite from blue-blood millionaire patriarch, Philip Rhinelander, not least because Alice has proclaimed herself white. In 1940, a feisty young assistant at the NY Amsterdam News, Roberta Brooks, is chasing her big break. It comes when the editor discovers she is Alice’s niece when her aunt won’t talk to the newspaper. Roberta’s family are estranged from Alice, blaming her for all the misery she caused, most prominently her firm denial of any Black heritage and the media circus that denial unleashed in the ´20s. As it happens, Alice won’t talk to Roberta either, but with Philip Rhinelander’s death, her allowance is abruptly severed by Lenny’s sister, Adelaide. The more Alice seethes at Adelaide’s vindictive treatment, the
more she lets go of the heartbreaking story she has previously refused to tell.
Bryce’s artistic flair in intertwining historical stories with fiction is on show here. No wonder this story grabbed headlines! What begins as a fairytale romance quickly becomes sordid manipulation, humiliation, shame, and inevitably, the ‘one drop’ law (although events could be seen as Alice playing the race card in reverse). One drop of Black ancestry, and you were labelled ‘Negro’ the moment you stepped off the boat. This novel based upon Rhinelander v. Rhinelander is a gripping read, as any sensational story of private celebrity lives always has been. Another gem about race, discrimination, and entitled arrogance from Bryce’s expert hand.
Fiona Alison
THE BOY WITH THE STAR TATTOO
Talia Carner, William Morrow, 2024, $19.99/ C$24.99/£10.99, pb, 432pp, 9780063325777
1968: Sharon Bloomenthal’s life is one of grieving, from her parents’ early death to her fiancé’s recent disappearance at sea. When the Israeli navy recruits Sharon for a secret project in Cherbourg, France, she’s grateful for work to distract her from her grief. She welcomes the unexpected opportunity to travel out of Tel Aviv and to get to know Daniel Yarden, the enigmatic officer in charge of the project. Like her parents, Daniel was a Jewish orphan brought from postwar France to Israeli kibbutzim by Youth Aliyah, an immigration organization that worked to rescue Jewish children from homes, orphanages, refugee camps, and hiding places across war-torn Europe. Daniel’s story sheds light on Sharon’s own past, on the work of Youth Aliyah, and on the bravery of those who hid Jewish children within their homes and families during the occupation of France. Told through three narrators in different timelines—Claudette, a disabled French seamstress in occupied France; Uzi, a determined Youth Aliyah agent in 1946; and Sharon in the 1960s—The Boy with the Star Tattoo is a moving and mesmerizing novel.
The history in this story—the efforts to absorb Jewish children into families in occupied Europe and the work of Youth Aliyah to locate and rescue those children after the war—was new to this reader and made for a truly engaging read. The characters loved, worried, questioned, hoped, and dug deep to find courage they didn’t know they had. Through the alternating narration, the reader
also tries to put together the story of Sharon and Daniel’s pasts. The history of the Israeli military’s secret Cherbourg Project was also gripping and made a great backdrop to the unfolding of the wartime story. An excellent and engrossing novel.
Jessica Brockmole
THE WINGED TIARA
J’nell Ciesielski, Thomas Nelson, 2024, $17.99, pb, 368pp, 9780840721204
Europe, immediately after the First World War, is a rich hunting ground for talented jewel thief, Esme Fox. Also, it turns out, for Jasper Truitt, an equally talented jewel thief whom Esme married during the wonderful chaos of Armistice Day in Paris. She regrets the marriage and leaves him before he can awaken the following morning. He spends the next four years searching Europe for her.
Unexpectedly he finds her on the French Riviera, at one of Madame Rothschild’s parties for the rich and famous. Each is there, separately, to steal the enormously valuable Valkyrie tiara – two glittering wings set with over 2000 diamonds. Esme has been offered a large sum to obtain it for Countess Accardi; failure means death in the hands of a brutal bodyguard. Jasper, illegitimate son of an illegitimate son, needs the tiara to prove his worth to his aristocratic grandfather. Together Esme and Jasper romp through the parties and entertainments of the fabulously wealthy in the fashionable spots of Europe, each needing to outwit the other by stealing the Valkyrie tiara.
This is a fast, fun read as sparks fly between Esme and Jasper and they find themselves in one impossible situation after another. Settings vary from King Ludwig’s castle in Bavaria to champagne grottos in France to gondolas in Venice. Rich and eccentric characters range from opera divas to princes to a French comte with his most recent wife.
The author accurately conveys the spirit of post-WWI Europe for the conspicuously rich, where excess appears to cover the pain of shattered countries and broken lives. She has drawn from this a fast-moving tale full of dramatic twists and brilliantly rich settings. The escalating emotional tension between the two main characters is a bonus as they represent the hope of the future.
Valerie Adolph
THE QUEEN OF STEEPLECHASE PARK
David Ciminello, Forest Avenue Press, 2024, $20.00, pb, 470pp, 9781942436614 1930s Coney Island. Young Italian American Belladonna “Bella” Marie Donato has been a firecracker since her earliest years, in which she was tasked with caring for her younger siblings and washing her father’s grungy feet. She’s a rambunctious girl who talks back to nuns and calls on her Cooking Spirit to help her save the day with delicious meatballs. She’s considered the ugly
daughter, but becomes beautiful with the help of a gay boy named Terelli who really knows his cosmetics. As she grows older she discovers the joys of not only glorious Italian cooking, but also sex with local adonis Francis Anthony Mozzarelli.
Alas, at 15 she gets pregnant with his child and leaves her father’s house, going to live with the parish priests, for whom she cooks her scrumptious Italian dishes. After she gives birth, her father has her sterilized. The baby is taken away by nuns. Still recovering from the surgery, she runs away to Coney Island, where she lives with a loving chosen family of circus performers and works as a dancer, on account of her zaftig figure. Meanwhile, she searches for her lost love, Francis. Various hijinks ensue as Bella and Francis are torn apart again, then reunited, repeatedly.
Overall, this is a magnificently charming book with a unique main character who manages to push through tragedy without allowing her spirit to break. There’s also a fair amount of LGBTQ representation, including –most memorably – gay mob bosses in drag. I also enjoyed the smatterings of Italian, which really bring the characters and their culture to life. The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a joyful, vivacious, oft-crude tall tale with undeniable wit.
Lee Lanzillotta
BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN
Sara Goodman Confino, Lake Union, 2024, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 349pp, 9781662517723
Beverly Diamond is the perfect mid-century wife to her husband, Larry, the campaign manager for Maryland senator Sam Gibson, who’s seeking reelection. Every day she wakes before him to doll herself up and have breakfast on the table for him and their two young children before he leaves for work. Once he leaves, she scurries to finish the household chores so Larry never knows how much exhausting work happens behind the scenes of their picturesque life. So, when she catches him fooling around with his secretary one afternoon, she isn’t just hurt—she’s livid. She throws him out, but he claims he can’t afford to keep her in the house if he has to pay for his own place as well, and then laughs in her face when she says she’ll get a job.
Angrier than ever, Beverly does get a job— as the campaign manager for Sam Gibson’s underdog opponent, Michael Landau. With her well-intentioned but often overbearing mother watching the kids and some excellent advice from her father—a former minority
leader in the U.S. House of Representatives— Beverly throws herself into Michael’s campaign to prove to both Larry and herself that she isn’t lost without a husband.
Confino has managed the rare trick of dishing up a social commentary that’s both illuminating and sharply funny. As Beverly navigates womanhood in 1962—complete with plenty of references to Jackie Kennedy— she proves the power of women’s voices, even at a time when they were thought to be unimportant. Buoyed by a delightful cast of well-rounded secondary characters and sprinkled with a dash of romance, the novel shows the power of blazing one’s own trail, even against frightening odds. Readers who love strong female leads won’t want to miss this one. Highly recommended.
Sarah Hendess
HALL OF MIRRORS
John Copenhaver, Pegasus Crime, 2024, $27.95/ C$36.95/£20.00, hb, 336pp, 9781639366507
On the first of May, 1954, Lionel Kane watches helplessly as firefighters hurry past him to extinguish flames bursting from the doors and windows of the apartment he shares with his lover, Roger Raymond. Next to him in the street are two friends, Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, who now worry they all may be endangered by their efforts to resolve the years-long mystery surrounding a series of murders of young girls in the DC area and bring to justice the man they suspect of killing them—Adrian Bogdan, a man with powerful connections in government.
Hall of Mirrors is the second in Copenhaver’s Nightingale trilogy. The first of the series, The Savage Kind, gained high praise for its focus on an often-underrepresented class of characters—teenage girls and their sexual awakening. The book won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery.
In Hall of Mirrors, Copenhaver further develops the characters of the young women and their complex and deepening connections, introduces and explores the complicated mixed-race relationship between the two gay men, and adds layers of historical context— the time of the Lavender Scare, when anticommunists in the U.S. Senate and the FBI labeled homosexuals as dangerous risks to national security.
Written as first-person entries, the narrative illuminates as it delves into the thoughts and feelings of the characters. The plot is difficult to follow, however, as the timeline jumps back and forth from May 1954 to various times in 1949, 1952, and 1953, and the story is told from different characters’ perspectives. This reader, at least, got lost in a hall of mirrors.
K. M. Sandrick
Teddy is the story of Theodora Huntley Carlyle, a sometimes feckless, often terrified young woman from a Texas family of privilege and political ambition. First married in her early 30s to David, a basic, albeit often mysterious American on diplomatic assignment in Rome, Teddy struggles to fit into a life for which her finishing-school, private-college upbringing should have made her well suited. The glamour of consular social circles in Rome, populated by notable glitterati from cinema, art and politics, leaves her fundamentally lonely, and in fear of a youthful past of which she has been programmed to feel deeply shameful.
This debut novel is nothing short of stunning. The style is varied in pace, yet every paragraph leaves the reader hungry for the next; descriptions are economical yet vividly compelling. Symbolism is occasionally telegraphed, yet this just adds to Teddy as a character study—a young woman painfully aware of her own metaphor, isolated by a deeply personal aesthetic empathy, and on a lifelong journey from self-consciousness to selfawareness.
The narrative resounds with historical authenticity, drawing on accurate cultural touches as well as often disturbing aspects of the lives of American power families. It also holds a mirror to current events—still unresolved issues such as reproductive rights, sexual power imbalance, and the corruption of privilege, demonstrating the often-startling contrasts, and even more startling similarities, between the basic dangers of living female in American society in both eras. Not to be missed.
Jackie Drohan
BORN OF GILDED MOUNTAINS
Amanda Dykes, Bethany House, 2024, $18.99, pb, 384pp, 9780764239519
Mountain lore, a mystery, and mending of hearts are like the veins of gold in Colorado’s San Juan Mountain Range in Amanda Dykes’ dual-timeline novel. A blood moon pact between four ten-year-olds, heartfelt girlish letters between pen-pals Rusty Bright and Marybeth Spatts in 1928, and the 1948 arrival of a fallen movie star in Mercy Peak, Colorado, all set the narrative in motion.
TEDDY
Emily Dunlay, Harper, 2024, $30.00, hb, 320pp, 9780063354890 / Fourth Estate, 2024, £16.99, hb, 320pp, 9780008669713
Set in 1969 Rome with earlier flashbacks,
Like the “Galloping Geese,” hybrid train/ automobiles used to climb the mountains, the pace of the novel transports readers slowly and deliberately to reach the peaks, then builds speed toward the station with a satisfying, uplifting arrival. Dykes’ narrative, somewhat epistolary through the pen-pal letters, is
also layered with newspaper articles, movie scripts, and interviews which reveal personal emotions and feelings, lending a realistic, captivating element. A riveting treasure hunt with ingenious clues and patterns, along with the search for the Galloping Goose #8, leads readers to a fascinating discovery. The train’s mysterious disappearance and its missing mailbag add suspense and personal connections to Mercy Peak’s citizens, some waiting years for life-altering news. Throughout the narrative, Dykes connects Mercy Peak’s present-day residents to the past through the possibilities of the mailbag’s contents. The author is known for her love of symbolism, and the mountains are cast as a character, representing life and the treasure they hold.
Themes of friendship, finding purpose, and hope are painted onto the novel’s canvas. The landscape, with glorious descriptions of mountain peaks and verdant valleys, is enhanced by the lure of the poignant tales and visions of those residing in the charming village of Mercy Peak. A soul-stirring, rewarding journey filled with forgiveness, grace, courage and adventure.
Dorothy Schwab
MURDER AT AN ENGLISH SÉANCE
Jessica Ellicott, Kensington, 2024, $27.00/ C$37.00/£23.00, hb, 288pp, 9781496740168
“Private enquiry” agents Edwina Davenport and her American friend, Beryl Helliwell, return in this historical mystery set in the quaint English village of Warmsley Parva. Soon after World War I ends, séances are in vogue as distraught families hope to contact loved ones who perished in the war. A psychic medium and her brother have set up shop in the quiet town, and the minister’s wife—upset that the medium has hired away the church’s talented organist—engages Edwina and Beryl to uncover whether the newcomers are con artists or the real deal.
Edwina and Beryl launch their enquiry by attending a séance. Although new to the town, the psychic already knows a lot about everyone, including Edwina’s love interest, Charles. Edwina and Beryl are suspicious but unable to uncover any outright fraud. But when the body of one of the villagers shows up in the sarcophagus the psychic uses as a prop, the mystery turns deadly. Edwina and Beryl aren’t convinced that the town’s female constable has arrested the right suspect, and the two set out to solve the crime themselves. Along the way, there are fun subplots, including a spiffy biplane gifted to Beryl and a charming toddler who inches his way into Edwina’s heart.
This is the eighth in Edwina and Beryl’s series of mysteries, and the author capably overviews the workings of the village and the women’s friendship for new readers. One quibble is that too many names of female villagers begin with “M,” which may make
it a challenge for some to keep track of the characters. Other than that, this atmospheric historical cozy doesn’t disappoint.
Paula Martinac
THE SISTER KNOT
Ann S. Epstein, Vine Leaves Press, 2024, $17.99, pb, 338pp, 9783988320575
New York City, 1946. German Holocaust orphans Liane and Frima are rescued by a Jewish refugee agency and relocated to New York City after five vagabond years in warravaged Berlin. The traumatized young girls, having survived the dangers and hardships of street life through cunning, thievery, and prostitution, find adjusting to foster care rules difficult. To overcome the loss of family, friends, and their homeland, Liane and Frima vow to be “blood sisters,” no matter what the future holds.
To escape despair, Liane, who dreams of being an artist, often forages through city debris to find metal, wood, and stone scraps that she uses to create miniature sculptures. When most are destroyed, Frima saves one unique statue, the Sister Knot, symbolizing their enduring friendship. Their paths diverge when Frima is adopted by a well-to-do Jewish family, offering her many opportunities to succeed, while Liane remains in group homes, struggling to make ends meet.
Over the span of sixty years, as Frima marries, has children, and teaches, and Liane takes on odd jobs to pursue her art career, their relationship transitions in surprising, sometimes contentious, and heartbreaking ways. But their indestructible bond holds fast, forged by their shared experiences and strengthened by the tough love, understanding, and support the two women build as they reconcile their turbulent past and internal demons.
Epstein’s poignant, haunting tale of survival, resilience, and friendship deftly employs dual narration, providing powerful, in-depth, and intriguing portrayals of Liane, rebellious and independent, counterbalanced by Frima, conservative and introverted, as they journey through the trials and triumphs of overcoming their past. A memorable, evocative novel that explores the Jewish faith and religious intolerance, the Holocaust horrors and its impact on future generations, and the fragile yet unbreakable oath of sisterhood.
Marcy McNally
SMALL BOMB AT DIMPERLEY
Lissa Evans, Doubleday, 2024, £18.99, hb, 318pp, 9780857528292
England 1945, and Dimperley Manor in Buckinghamshire is recovering from the predations of war, having been used as a home for pregnant women whose husbands were deployed to the armed forces. The VereThissett family, who have been fortunate enough to occupy the substantial pile for many centuries, are also struggling to adapt
to the new reality of a postwar Labour Party government. Following the death of Felix, the first son and heir, in combat in Singapore, and the mental incapacity of the next son, Cedric, a burden falls to Valentine, just de-mobbed from his spell in the forces. Valentine is a thoroughly decent sort of chap, but not the type of man to tackle the challenges facing his financially ruined family estate. Solutions have to be found, and the dynamic and assertive role of a former prenatal occupant of the property and now secretary, Zena Baxter, proves to be essential to the valetudinarian family.
Lissa Evans captures perfectly the austere realties of postwar Britain – one where such families and their houses come under unprecedented financial strain. Servants can’t be found, and their centuries-old way of life seems to be on the point of ending ignominiously. She has a similar arch observation as Kate Atkinson, allied to the wit of P. G. Wodehouse, which makes for a compelling and thoroughly entertaining read. The characters are portrayed with forensic skill as well as a wonderful acute humour –Valentine’s stiff and formal mother Lady VereThissett as well as his dilettante uncle Alaric are observed with a piercing and convincing wit. Very much recommended.
Douglas Kemp
DAUGHTERS OF RIGA
Marian Exall, The Wild Rose Press, 2024, $18.99, pb, 338pp, 9781509253876
Daughters of Riga explores the lesser known drama of World War II in the Baltic country of Latvia, whose Jewish and non-Jewish people suffered massacres and deportations by both Soviet and Nazi forces. Exall gives us two young girls, Berta and Danielle, pushed together as playmates in the Dutch consulate as war closes in on them. Danielle’s widowed mother, Nellie, expertly assists Berta’s father, Richard, the Dutch consul, while giving Berta the affection her own bitter, self-obsessed mother cannot. It is the novel’s central irony that while Richard heroically risks his life and career to help displaced Jewish people he doesn’t know, he cannot muster the grit to save Nellie, his secret love.
Surviving the war, the girls are separated, Danielle bearing the knowledge of her mother’s almost certain murder and Berta unable to reach a father devastated by guilt. We watch both grow and grow old as the novel moves smoothly through time and Nellie’s and Berta’s stories as both build their lives, one cushioned by family and the other
professionally successful but increasingly solitary, both eventually finding peace.
Despite some forced plot points, Exall expertly paints the horrific choices of those caught in war, the bewildered child’s perspective, how ordinary people can be both heroic and complicit in a vast catastrophe, and how long and deep a shadow war casts on its child victims.
Pamela Schoenewaldt
COLEMAN HILL
Kim Coleman Foote, Zando, 2023, $28.00, hb, 320pp, 9781638931140
A fictionalized family saga, or in the author’s preferred term, a biomythography, Coleman Hill travels through several generations of the Coleman family, beginning in the American Deep South of the 1910s and ending in 1989 New Jersey, with a short junket to Brooklyn. It is a new history of ordinary Black Americans, one with the power that only fine fiction can wield, about Black sharecroppers who moved to the Northern suburbs alongside the Great Migration moving north to the great cities. People who left lynchings and total segregation behind to find their Northern lives a dead-end, the women working as domestics, the men as low-paid factory workers, the children’s aspirations less fulfilled than their Southern cousins’. Generational trauma and pain are palpable in the abuse and violence some of the elders show one another and their children, but so is the intergenerational love and resilience, as this Coleman family member, the author, records their humanity.
Kim Coleman Foote writes so bravely and naturally about the lives of people who happen to be her ancestors and relatives, the reader never questions the truth of this fiction, as this historical novel draws the reader in on the first page and does not let go. Coleman Hill teaches as much as it touches the heart, and after reading it once, the desire to reread this amazing work follows.
Constance Emmett
POLITE CALAMITIES
Jennifer Gold, Lake Union, 2024, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 411pp, 9781662521089
Colourful and blunt, Winnifred Hurst is not a typical Rhode Island society wife in 1965. The wealthy housewives of Wave Watch refuse to accept her no matter how desperately she tries to fit in, and her husband’s unexpected death early in the novel isolates her even more.
Eventually, Winnifred finds a creative solution to her loneliness with the help of new friends. It is refreshing to read a novel that foregrounds the importance of women’s friendships. Neither careers nor romantic love are the focus, and Winnifred’s longing for a close friend is poignantly depicted. However, the novel gets off to a rocky start. Winnifred’s awkwardness around her husband’s wealthy colleagues and their wives is understandable, but she and the other wives say exactly what they think, more like mean schoolgirls on a playground than sophisticated adult women. It’s also difficult to understand why Winnifred tries so hard to fit in, exhausting herself cleaning and baking for a ladies’ meeting at her house that nobody bothers to attend. One would expect a dramatic reaction to this snub, especially in her fragile state as a new widow, but she merely eats a slice of quiche and quietly misses her husband.
The novel improves as it progresses, with Winnifred moving into new and believable stages of grief. Her growing friendship with artist and secondary protagonist Marie is fascinating, but the point of view of haughty housewife June, whose storyline is more conventional, isn’t necessary.
Vivid descriptions and lyrical passages abound: the reader can smell the salt of the beach and the alcohol-soaked parties Winnifred throws. Readers who seek stories about deep friendships between women and who are patient enough to ride out the clunky bits will find much to enjoy.
Clarissa Harwood
THE SECRET KEEPER
Genevieve Graham, Simon & Schuster, 2024, $17.99/C$24.99, pb, 448pp, 9781982196981
Spanning 1928 to 1982, this intense historical centers on Canadian non-identical twin sisters Dot and Dash Wilson. Dot, a shy thinker, has an almost photographic memory for whatever she sees and hears. Dash, constantly moving, loves to climb trees, dance, and fix anything from car motors to airplane engines. She dreams of flying her own aircraft.
World War Two gives the twins the platform to use their talents after they both join the Royal Canadian Naval Service. Dot quickly develops into an expert at listening for and then breaking German Morse codes. Dash helps build Hurricane fighter planes and works her way up to becoming a solo pilot for Air Transport Auxiliary’s flights in Europe. Their assignments become more dangerous with not only their own lives at stake but the lives of countless others.
Strong family ties run side by side with the twins’ professional successes. They are devoted to their parents, uncles, aunts, each other, and Gus—a boy taken in by the family when the girls were young. As both twins advance to ever more important positions, the secrets they must keep about what they really do and where they really are, greatly strain and confuse those once close personal relationships.
Graham takes readers into the fascinating
training of Canadian spies and aviators, including the combat skills and equipment they must learn to use. An end note explains that the locations and methods for training, various WWII missions, and secondary characters are based in fact. Graham also deftly balances character depth and personal relationships against the chaos and brutality of WWII. Fascinating twins Dot and Dash set this story above most other fictional WWII hero journeys. Recommended.
G.J. Berger
THE LOST BOY OF SANTA CHIONIA
Juliet Grames, Knopf, 2024, $29.00/C$39.00, hb, 394pp, 9780593536179
In 1960, educated and idealistic 27-year-old Francesca Loftfield, an Italian-American, flees her marriage to an Italian man she loves. She goes to a primitive and brutal mountain town in Southern Calabria on an altruistic mission.
Francesca is the first-person narrator of this novel, and she recounts her experiences from the perspective of a successful woman 60 years after her adventure. But the detailed narration of her time in Santa Chionia loses nothing in its immediacy. Francesca must find enough children in the town to open a school, which will, theoretically at least, offer opportunities for the students to become educated further and so break the cycle of poverty and ignorance the town has suffered through for many generations. In the process of trying to identify suitable students from the local families, she also becomes embroiled in the secrets surrounding the lost boy of Santa Chionia, whose identity is a many-layered, dangerous mystery. Her attempts to solve this mystery add a layer of suspense to the novel.
The plot is rich in both geographical detail and vibrant personalities. It includes two floods that further isolate the townspeople, threatened transfer of the villagers to a new location, and treacherous mountains; add no phone and poor postal service to the sense of isolation. Grames’s colorful characters, most of whom try to frustrate her heroine’s idealistic zeal, range from downtrodden wives, wily politicians, abusive husbands, and garrulous widows, to a duplicitous priest and a politically complacent doctor.
At heart, this novel is a feminine epic about an intelligent, altruistic woman who is searching for her personal identity and her purpose in society. It is well worth reading.
Joanne Vickers
THE WALLED GARDEN
Sarah Hardy, Manilla Press, 2024, £9.99, pb, 400pp, 9781838779290
During WW1, writers including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen drew renewed public attention to the psychological damage caused by warfare. In The Walled Garden, Sarah Hardy explores the situation when, after WW2 ended, members of a small East Anglian community return home and attempt to
resume life as they once knew it. Much of the novel is dominated by the story of Alice, lady of the manor and wife of Sir Stephen Rayne, a man so damaged by one particular wartime experience that, when the hostilities are over, he rejects his wife’s affectionate welcome and isolates himself from the life he is offered.
It transpires that most of the local community has been, in one way or another, damaged by the war or its effect on their circumstances; hence, the first half of this novel is a rather too downbeat account of things, while poor Alice finds herself coping with not one but two disastrous men, one physically and the other mentally damaged. Alice’s role in the proceedings becomes slightly (and rather unfortunately) diminished. We eventually get told what becomes of her but, by then, how much do we care?
The writer effectively makes her various points by introducing into the narrative useful characters and events, applying them to the structure of the novel almost like pawns in a game of chess. This technique diminishes the impact of storylines which would otherwise carry more emotional weight than they do. The event, details of which we eventually learn, and which so traumatised Sir Stephen, seems no worse than many equally tragic wartime horrors and fails, for this reader, to properly justify his response to it.
Nevertheless, The Walled Garden delivers some nicely observed details of a wellloved location and with a time and a place painstakingly and sympathetically evoked.
Julia Stoneham
REDFALCON
Robert J. Harris, Polygon, 2024, £9.99, pb, 320pp, 9781846974854
Redfalcon is the second of Robert J. Harris’ books based on the adventures of John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay. The action has moved to the Second World War, and Hannay – now considerably older and contemplating his retirement – is called upon to unearth a secret buried with the ancient Knights Hospitallers. He is assisted by the Gorbals Die-Hards (Buchan’s Glasgow street urchins now grown to manhood) and Dr Karissa Adriatis, an attractive but formidable Greek archaeologist.
Their quest will take them to Gibraltar and Morocco, and at stake is the future of the island of Malta and, potentially, the outcome of the war. For Hannay the tension is heightened by the fact that his own son is serving in Malta, and the story becomes a desperate race against time.
This is a yarn in the manner of The Da Vinci Code, and a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required: it is hard to imagine the hard-pressed War Office of 1942 committing valuable resources to what is essentially an archaeological expedition. I have to admit that I found the style slightly stilted and the characters two-dimensional. On the other hand, I enjoyed the descriptions of wartime Morocco, as the story moved from the chaos
and confusion of Casablanca (with an implied homage to the film of the same name) to the remote Atlas Mountains. This is a novel for anyone who wants an undemanding, pageturning read.
Karen Warren
THE GATHERING STORM
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Sphere, 2024, £21.99/$28.99/C$36.99, hb, 624pp, 9781408729502
Harrod-Eagles signs off on her Morland Dynasty in this highly anticipated 36th book. Not having read any of the previous books, it took a few chapters for me to become familiar with the wide-spread family, even with the family tree provided —the Morland Place occupants in Yorkshire, and the London and American branches. It’s 1936. Wallis Simpson, Edward VIII and the abdication have less than flattering roles. Hollywood epics, the rise of television, the Spanish Civil War, and the hallmark moments leading up to WWII, feature with research that Harrod-Eagles utilises with easy authority. It required no effort to be drawn into those dark times, when the threat of another war was topped only by a general belief that there wouldn’t be one. How the characters cope with the ominous signs is a strong element of the novel.
Interwoven stories centre mainly on widowed Polly Alexander-Morland, now in charge of Morland Place; Lennox Manning in America, babysitting his cousin, Rose, a flighty Hollywood actress who, after a marital breakdown, is busy throwing her life to the wolves; Polly’s brother James, working in Paris but returning home after finding himself unlucky in love; and Basil Morland, attempting to live the life of the idle rich, while convincing his family he’s looking for work. However, finding such work matures him in a way he doesn’t expect, his character arc being the most rewarding for me. Romantic episodes are scattered throughout, but the novel isn’t overwhelmed by them, which is one of the many aspects I liked.
A review of Harrod-Eagles’ 100th novel should perhaps include a quotation appropriate to the times: “Every new generation thinks they’re the first people to tread the earth. I’d make studying history compulsory for politicians. At least five years of it.” With the exception of a few small mentions, the novel can stand alone.
Fiona Alison
THE GIRL WITH A SECRET
Kate Hewitt, Bookouture, 2024, $10.99/£8.99, pb, 308pp, 9781837902934
This is Book Two of The Emerald Sisters series. In 1939, with World War II looming, young German Rosa Herzelfeld boards the ship St. Louis with her parents and hundreds of other emigrating Jews. They are being sent to Havana, Cuba, one of the few places that should accept them; disastrously, they are turned away. Finally winding up as penniless refugees in London, England, the Herzelfelds
try to build new lives. Rosa adapts better than her parents, but as the Nazi threat increases, all three are interned on the Isle of Man. From there, Rosa is recruited to assist in top secret British war efforts. She finds new love in England, but secrets she carries about her family’s behavior in Hitler’s Germany may derail her romance.
I couldn’t put this book down. The tension never stops as multi-layered, very human actors make difficult, pragmatic decisions and react in different ways to hardships and uncertainties. We know how the war eventually played out, but Rosa and the large cast of characters have no idea. They all—especially the Jews, of course—are facing a chilling, black force of evil with no safe ending in sight. Their fight for freedom is both frightening and inspiring. Highly recommended.
Elizabeth Knowles
ALVESDON
James Holland, Bantam Press, 2024, £20.00, hb, 448pp, 9781787636705
August 1939, and once more Britain is on the brink of a terrible global conflict. The Castells are a long-established landed farming family in rural Wiltshire. In a timespan of just over a year, Holland covers the family’s immersion in the war, both as combatants and local rural farmers and workers.
A good proportion of the novel is devoted to those days of August when the country was sliding into conflict, and the dismay and trepidation that this caused in the breast of the Castells and their circle of neighbours and employees. Although the subject of the approach of the Second World War in England is one that has been covered comprehensively in fiction, this specific emphasis on the impact upon a secluded rural community is well portrayed and engaging. All the uncertainty, regret and fear amongst the landowners, farmers and the rural population is described with feeling and authenticity.
The writing is fluid, and the narrative progresses capably and effectively. As one would expect from a professional historian, the factual context is excellent, but the reader does not feel that they are receiving a history lesson or lecture for most of the time. The large cast of family characters introduced in the opening chapters of the book took quite a while to get familiar with, and although there is a dramatis personae at the beginning of the novel, reading it via a digital copy makes it quite difficult to refer to the list and establish just who is who and what their respective familial relations are. The story ends rather abruptly in October 1940, and it would seem that a sequel to the affairs of the Castell family is very much in order.
Douglas Kemp
A PAIR OF WINGS
Carole Hopson, Henry Holt, 2024, $29.99/ C$39.99/£25.99, hb, 432pp, 9781250347213
Bessie Coleman, who became a Black aviatrix in the early 1920s, is the heroine of
this epic novel. Born in 1892 (and passing as four years younger), in 1915 she joined the Great Migration of southern Blacks to Northern cities, ending up in Chicago. Bessie’s dreams are unlike any other woman’s making a new life there. Since learning about the Wright brothers as a child, she was determined to fly airplanes. She saves money to fulfill her dream but has no idea how to go about it. Black people couldn’t train as pilots in the U.S., let alone females. This novel follows Bessie to an aeronautic school in France, where there is no color bar, but a woman still must work extra hard to prove herself. In 1921, Bessie earns the first French civilian air license issued to an American of any gender or ethnicity. She experiences firsthand the aftermath of WWI in France and, later, in Amsterdam and Germany. In between, Bessie returns to the States despite the segregation she must contend with: she wants to inspire dreams of flying in her people and offer pilot training. Supporters and friends help her along the way, but her obstacles are huge and potentially tragic.
Carole Hopson, a Black pilot for United Airlines, enriches the book with her vivid writing and knowledge of airplanes and the history of flight. She includes photos of Bessie’s French Pilote-Aviateur license and her Parisdesigned flight gear. A Pair of Wings provides a fascinating angle on the history of the early 20th century. It is so rich and nuanced, both in the historical background and in Bessie’s remarkable character, relationships, and challenges, that it deserves to be a bestseller. Highly recommended.
Jinny Webber
THE FORBIDDEN DAUGHTER
Zipora Klein Jakob, HQ, 2024, £9.99, pb, 273pp, 9780008665067
1943, Kovno Ghetto, Lithuania. Women are forbidden to give birth—punishable by death. Those unfortunate enough to conceive receive abortions. In this place of terror, Dr Jonah Friedman and his wife, Tzila, discover she is pregnant. So begins a novel inspired by family history, based on painstakingly researched facts. In the space where the facts are unfathomable—people’s emotions and motivations—the novelist steps in.
Jonah and Tzila achieve the impossible: they hide the pregnancy and birth, then smuggle the baby out of the ghetto, into the care of a friendly farmer. The book follows the survival of that child, as, under the shadow of the Holocaust, she lives multiple lives, multiple
identities. The favoured name is Elida, Hebrew for ‘non-birth’.
It would be a spoiler to reveal the many twists and turns, but, as is well known, truth is stranger than fiction. Survival is not easy –especially when a child realises that adults are talking secrets about her. Secrets that they stubbornly refuse to reveal, no matter how much they are challenged. As Elida matures, she understands that she is buffeted by politics beyond her control. The book is written in plain language, the events so powerful that they need no talking up.
There are lessons to be learned from this book, lessons of injustice, an innocent child condemned simply for her parentage. Lessons applicable not only to Jewish people, but to the many tribes, ethnicities and religions that continue to fight each other in the world today. When can the world learn to let go of hatred? But there are other lessons too. Of courage, of endurance, and of the indomitable human urge to survive.
Helen Johnson
SECRETS OF ROSE BRIAR HALL
Kelsey James, Kensington/John Scognamiglio, 2024, $17.95/C$24.95/£16.99, pb, 304pp, 9781496742933
Secrets of Rose Briar Hall opens with Millie, a new wife living in an elegant but isolated mansion, intent on marital happiness. It’s 1908, and Millie has organized a glamorous party to demonstrate husband Charles’s wealth and business credentials, but things go quickly awry. Millie wakes up to find the party is over, and she can’t remember what happened. Charles won’t tell her the details, but it’s clear something devastating has occurred. What was it, and why is Charles being so controlling?
The story is a page-turner that highlights the lack of control available to women, married or not, at the beginning of the 20th century. As Millie struggles to remember what happened at the party, she comes to doubt her husband’s motives and loyalty, but her father, although affectionate, has fixed views on the sanctity of marriage and her need to make things work. Friends prove unreliable, and Millie’s servants don’t seem to have her best interests at heart – in fact, they’re positively threatening. This is a tale where the stakes keep rising and the tension doesn’t flag. Menacing doctors, dangerous dogs, and dark secrets abound with only handsome journalist, David, offering Millie the possibility of a different life. A wellexecuted gothic story with crisp descriptions and appealing characters.
Kate Braithwaite
THE COLONEL AND THE EUNUCH
Mai Jia, trans. Dylan Levi King, Apollo, 2024, £20.00, hb, 400pp, 9781804540244
Mai Jia is China’s best-selling author, whose books have sold over 10 million copies. So what
is it that the Chinese read, and how do they view their history?
The Colonel and the Eunuch defies all our rules of story structure. The central character is known variously as the Colonel and the Eunuch. Indeed, few characters are known by their actual names but by their nicknames or family relationship. Unlike the biofics we are familiar with, the book is not written from the point of view of the central character but narrated in Parts 1 and 2 by a teenage boy living in the same rural village in south China in the 1960s. ‘The Colonel’ is reputed to have been a senior officer in both the Nationalist and Communist armies in China’s various wars and an eminent surgeon. He generates a swirl of gossip and myth which fascinates the narrator as he tries to piece together a coherent story. And why is he called The Eunuch?
The Red Guards arrive spreading the Cultural Revolution, the Colonel is disgraced, flees, is betrayed by the narrator’s grandfather and taken away to be re-educated.
Part 3 takes up the story after an interlude of 21 years, when the narrator returns from Europe where he was trafficked to escape his family’s shame. This is a more straightforward, less oblique narrative carrying the life histories of both the Colonel and the narrator up to 2014. As the narrator reflects, ‘life is never simply a tragedy or a farce or a romance – it has all of these, one after the other.’ This is very true of the book, which veers sharply between heart-warming and desolating. A beautiful book written by a Chinese author for Chinese readers, giving outsiders a unique insight into China’s fast-changing culture.
Edward James
THE CRY OF CICADAS
J. Sydney Jones, Independently published, 2024, $12.95, pb, 329pp, 9798989658213
October, 1941. After new friend Tadeo Suzuki is found dead at the foot of a cliff, his clothes doused in alcohol and a flashlight nearby, former New York City police detective Max Byrns begins to investigate on his own. Sure that Tadeo was not what local officials claim— an alcoholic who lost his footing or committed suicide, or a spy who stumbled while signaling offshore Japanese operatives—Max, his wife Elizabeth, and their son Philip, on leave from the US military, investigate individuals with motives: those anxious to acquire Tadeo’s property before he and his family are taken to internment camps, Japanese haters, and men and women who could be actual spies for the enemy.
As the author of the historical crime series The Viennese Mysteries as well as other mysteries, Jones is expert in the elements of a good police procedural—interspersing likely suspects with the seemingly uninvolved as well as downright threatening characters, twisting and turning plot lines, and keeping readers on their toes. (The identity of the perpetrator was clear as miso to this reader, that is, until…) Jones smoothly weaves in historical context: the fears and distrust of ordinary citizens
toward Japanese Americans and the effect of the 1942 Presidential Executive Order that labeled the West Coast as a war zone, excluded Japanese Americans, and eventually removed them from their homes and businesses to guarded encampments. Jones also fleshes out a complex lead character who seemingly will be the subject of future novels in Max Byrns, a man who is gradually overcoming the sequelae of the traumatic shooting of a young man in New York and his own serious chest wound. A character this reader would welcome meeting again.
K. M. Sandrick
THE LION WOMEN OF TEHRAN
Marjan Kamali, Gallery, 2024, $28.99/C$38.99, hb, 327pp, 9781668036587 / Simon & Schuster UK, 2024, £9.99, pb, 336pp, 9781398534759
From the moment Elaheh Soltani and Homa Roozbeh meet on the first day of school in 1950, they are inseparable. Together they explore Tehran’s markets, play hopscotch in its alleyways, learn cooking in the Roozbehs’ cozy kitchen, and dream about growing into the kind of women who can make Iran a better place. Although envious of Homa’s tight-knit family, her ambition, her authenticity, and her confidence in changing the world, Ellie finds strength in Homa’s friendship. But as political tensions in Iran rise, their paths begin to diverge. While Ellie plans for love and marriage, Homa throws herself into activism until a devastating event tears apart the once-inseparable friends. Years later, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, Ellie and Homa reconnect from across the world, revealing long-held secrets, remorse, and acts of bravery.
The Lion Women of Tehran is a touching coming-of-age novel about friendship, courage, and the lengths to which we go to preserve both. Through lyrical, illuminating writing, Marjan Kamali brings to life the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds of Tehran. She writes about the changes in Iran’s political and cultural landscape, but she writes about them very effectively from the perspective of two quite different women. Through Ellie and Homa, the reader viscerally feels how those changes silenced women’s voices, stifled their freedoms, and limited their options. Kamali threads the idea of lionesses (shir zan in Persian) throughout the book—strong and fierce Iranian women who leap unafraid into the future. Despite the turmoil and uncertainty of Iran in those decades, two hopeful girls
indeed grow into shir zan and their journey makes this an exceptional book.
Jessica Brockmole
SHANGHAI
Joseph Kanon, Scribner, 2024, $28.99/C$38.99, hb, 304pp, 9781668006429
In 1939, young, half-Jewish Daniel Lohr boards a Lloyds liner sailing for Shanghai. Following Kristallnacht, he flees Berlin to the only safe port that does not require an entry visa. He is escaping the clutches of the Gestapo, who had killed his father and captured his resistance movement collaborators. Daniel’s uncle, Nathan, had moved earlier to Shanghai, where he operates nightclubs and casinos. He generously pays for Daniel’s first-class passage but with an ulterior motive. On board the ship, Daniel finds love with a young German lady, Leah, traveling with her mother, who, like the other refugees, had all their possessions and passports confiscated by the Germans. Also on board is the stern Colonel Yamada of the Japanese military police, who is also interested in Leah. Daniel works for Nathan in Shanghai’s volatile political atmosphere, which is in danger of Japanese occupation. He is again involved in violent activities and must determine ways to survive and assist his loved ones.
This novel is another exciting historical thriller by award-winning Joseph Kanon. The novel’s setting in Shanghai at the cusp of the Japanese occupation is unique, as prior novels have featured more about the Japanese capture of Nanking. Also, pre-WWII Shanghai had harbored thousands of Jews as it didn’t require entry visas, and Kanon effectively weaves this into the story. With all its gang violence, crime, and vice, Shanghai’s nightlife is prominently featured. Deals are made, broken, and settled with ferocity. Although fortunate to have escaped the Nazis, the stateless and poor refugees are engulfed in both politics and immorality. They must determine their limits of tolerance. Kanon uses evocative images to describe the characters’ plight, such as they had to “leave their best dishes behind.” Readers will recognize the similarities between the premise of Shanghai and the movie Casablanca and anxiously hope for a film version. Highly recommended.
Waheed Rabbani
THE CAMERAMAN
Matthew Kneale, Atlantic, 2024, £9.99, pb, 274pp, 9781838959012
It is 1934, and Julius is newly discharged from a mental hospital in Wales. He is joining his family on a motoring trip across Europe for his sister’s wedding in Rome. Julius’ recent incarceration in a remote hospital is crucial to the plot. He is truly an innocent abroad. He has never heard of Hitler, doesn’t know what a Nazi is and the last he had heard of Oswald Mosley, now leader of the British fascists, was that he was a Labour MP. He must learn about Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy from scratch, Lest this seems too serious, I should hasten to add that this is essentially a comic novel.
Julius’ family are caricatures of British tourists: naïve, clumsy and extremely accident prone. They have all become ardent Fascists, except for one who is a Communist. Most of them are madder than Julius.
Julius is by profession a film cameraman, and on this journey he is the detached observer recording the growing insanity of a deranged continent. The narrative is mostly in dialogue, mainly internal dialogue within Julius’ head. Very amusing with an interesting twist. Edward James
THE QUEEN’S FAITHFUL COMPANION
Eliza Knight, William Morrow, 2024, $18.99/ C$23.99/£10.99, pb, 368pp, 9780063281011
Taking place in the early-mid 20th century, this heartwarming book is perfect for dog lovers and anyone who has known the friendship of a canine. After her uncle abdicates and her father steps up to run the country, Elizabeth takes on a title she never expected to wear in childhood: heir to the throne of Britain. The future queen is happy to share life and burdens with her trusted dog, Susan the corgi. Susan is with her through her adventures of young love with royal pen-pal Philip, service in WWII, the birth of her first child, and of course her friendship with the equally loyal Hanna.
Hanna’s family has always served the crown. Quiet, shy, and awkward around crowds, Hanna bonds with the young princess over their mutual love and respect of dogs. The servant provides a listening ear anytime Elizabeth needs to unburden herself.
Through thick and thin the three remain great friends. A queen could not find better companions. With Susan’s affection and canine wisdom, the girls’ lives are enriched and the two made closer as Susan provides her own perspective on the trials, burdens, and joys of life at the palace during this tumultuous and stressful time. Though, be warned, Susan is so likable one just might feel the urge to adopt a corgi after reading this adorable portrayal of man’s best friend.
Ellaura Shoop
BEYOND SUMMERLAND
Jenny Lecoat, Polygon, 2024, £9.99, pb, 264pp, 9781846976537 / Graydon House, 2024, $18.99, pb, 304pp, 9781525831546
The liberation of the Channel Islands in 1945 ought to bring joy and relief to the inhabitants of Jersey. But to Jean Parris, awaiting news of her beloved father, who was deported by the Nazis for possession of a forbidden radio, it is a time of uncertainty and suspicion. Her Uncle Eddie returns from England, looking for reparation for his pillaged home and determined to unmask the informer who betrayed his brother. Suspicion falls on unconventional teacher Hazel Le Tourneur, who is struggling to take care of her invalid father. But as Jean digs deeper, she uncovers secrets about her family she never suspected, while Hazel finds that proving her innocence is all but impossible once the rumours about her
gather momentum. Indeed, there’s only one person who could help – if she were willing to do it…
This is a powerful tale of suspicion, betrayal and unlikely friendship, set against the background of a little-known aspect of the aftermath of WWII. Virtually every character in the book is hiding at least one secret –including Jean herself – and Lecoat builds up a palpable sense of menace as Hazel becomes enmeshed by unsubstantiated rumours, with obvious parallels with the modern world and so-called ‘cancel culture’.
Jean matures believably from frightened teenager to fully-fledged, if damaged adult, for whom the slightly older but impulsive Hazel is a suitable foil. Their actions, both admirable and reprehensible, are always plausible given their contrasting characters and their personal circumstances.
There are some lyrical passages, evoking the beauty of Jersey, but otherwise the writing is rather intense with little light relief. Given that this is a short novel, this is not a major problem. Highly recommended.
Jasmina Svenne
ACROSS SEWARD PARK
Gail Lehrman, Penny Tunes Publishing, 2023, $18.95, pb, 290pp, 9798218210878
In 1912 New York, young Irving Friedman endures an oppressive household run by an abusive father.
But nobody has it harder than Arthur, Irv’s older brother, who is beaten every time he has a seizure he cannot control. When Arthur is sent away, Irving’s sister Miriam takes matters into her own hands. Due to her strength, Irving begins a path that is safe from abuse but still tough—the garment workers’ strikes, the intricacies of union organizing, and ultimately the struggles of a businessman. But young Irv really only has one goal at heart, something he is desperate to achieve.
This is a realistic and gripping saga that follows a Jewish family in New York from 1912 through 1965. The points of view vary between Irving, his sister Miriam, and Miriam’s daughter Michelle. The characters are richly developed. Miriam’s hard heart is easily explained by the things she has endured, and Irving’s devotion to his brother is the core reason for all of his choices. Michelle is the epitome of someone who makes decisions without having the full story. The descriptions evoke the harsh sights and smells of that time. Near the beginning of the book, I felt as if I had stepped into 1917 Manhattan in the middle of a workers’ strike.
The squalid life in New York tenements and the experiences of starting a new business at that time are so truthfully told. The appalling treatment of the mentally ill or those with certain medical conditions in the early 20th century is shown through the struggles of one character.
The novel is a story of a family, but also a history of the United States and the world over the lifetime of one man. Heartbreaking, true to the period, and gritty; I was mesmerized throughout. Highly recommended.
Bonnie DeMoss
A JEWEL IN THE CROWN
David Lewis, Kensington/John Scognamiglio, 2024, $27.00/C$37.00/£25.00, hb, 304pp, 9781496749093
In 1940, Britain is alert for invasion. To safeguard the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Winston Churchill comes up with an audacious plan involving an unlikely pair of operatives—Caitrin Colline, a Welsh coalminer’s daughter and an outspoken antiroyalist, and Hector Neville-Percy, a taciturn aristocrat from the north of England. Posing as a honeymooning couple and using the protection of Hector’s title, the pair must escort the Crown Jewels—hidden in a horse trailer—to a waiting boat in Scotland. That is not their only mission, however. As they travel between estates and converse with their hosts, they must ferret out Nazi sympathizers from within the British aristocracy. Despite their differences, Caitrin and Hector are the country’s only hope and, as they travel further into danger, each other’s only hope.
David Lewis has written a well-paced thriller with lively banter and engaging characters. Caitrin and Hector play well off each other as a mismatched espionage duo, both with different strengths and weaknesses, both needing to learn to trust. The cigar-smoking, siren-suited Winston Churchill is sprinkled liberally throughout the pages, watching over the residents of London as carefully as Caitrin and Hector watch over the Jewels and is a delightful addition to the cast of characters. A Jewel in the Crown is the first in a new series, and I look forward to seeing the fierce Caitrin in her next adventure.
Jessica Brockmole
THE LAST HOPE
Susan Elia MacNeal, Bantam, 2024, $29.00/ C$39.00, hb, 294pp, 9780593156988
The Last Hope comes as a bittersweet title for fans of Susan Elia MacNeal’s popular Maggie Hope series, which stars a brilliant, beautiful, redheaded, Anglo-Irish-American agent during World War II. The year is 1944. Maggie’s final assignment is to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist suspected of producing a fission bomb for the Nazis in time to win the war. This dangerous job takes her from her London home base and longtime true love, John Sterling, first to Portugal and then
to Spain—both technically neutral but ruled by authoritarian dictators and infested with intrigue.
Besides the potential fission bomb, another plot is also afoot to negotiate a separate peace between Germany and the Allies. To quash both threats is a nearly impossible assignment.
But, disguised as Paige Kelly (her longestablished undercover identity), Maggie boldly plunges into this very risky milieu and navigates a sequence of terrifying adventures full of deathly twists and surprises, which require her to employ both her advanced knowledge of math and physics and her raw courage, as well as a fashionable wardrobe.
Throughout the Hope series, MacNeal makes interesting use of actual historical figures such as Winston Churchill and Coco Chanel, both featured in this novel as well as Maggie’s long-term handler, Kim Philby ... a name to set off alarm bells in the mind of any reader who knows the history of the Cold War.
It’s a bit of a surprise that the Hope series ends before the war does, but MacNeal does tidy up her plot lines and hint at some happy endings after peace breaks out. As always, her writing is accomplished, research impeccable, and characters well-drawn, particularly the many-faced Coco Chanel.
Susan Lowell
SALT OF THE EARTH
J. J. Marsh, Prewett Bielman Ltd, 2023, $12.99, pb, 302pp, 9783906256245
Switzerland, 1916. Seraphine spends her days taking care of her two half-brothers, who were born with a condition called cretinism, known today as congenital hypothyroidism. Their father is a hard man who wishes both boys were dead, and says so. Seraphine has never known her own father, who was not married to her mother. She dreams of a different life, where she can study, work, and make a difference, but it seems so out of reach. She also is developing a goiter on her throat, like so many of her fellow townspeople, and tries very hard to hide it. Then Bastian Favre comes to town. He is an assistant to Dr. Eggenberger, who is working on a cure for cretinism and goiters. Can it be as simple as salt?
This compelling novel explores the history of iodized salt and the pursuit of a cure for hypothyroidism in Switzerland by adding iodine to the diet. The author portrays the skepticism and superstitions of the people affected so well. Seraphine’s mother is used to express the doubt and fear, and to show the extreme effects of a lack of iodine on mothers and their babies. The refusal of some of the townspeople to accept such a simple cure is indicative of the time. The slow-burn romance is captivating, as Bastian’s instant attraction to Seraphine meets many challenges along the way. There is epistolary work in the form of letters and news articles. The news articles are an excellent way of following the story of how Switzerland’s Goiter Commission made the decision to recommend iodized salt to
the people in 1922. Fans of romance and medical history will enjoy this book. Highly recommended.
Bonnie DeMoss
IN THE SHADOW OF THE GREENBRIER
Emily Matchar, Putnam, 2024, $18.00/£16.99, pb, 400pp, 9780593713969
In her first novel, journalist Emily Matchar gives us no fewer than four timelines, each focusing on a member of the Zelner family: Sol, who leaves Lithuania in 1909 to avoid the fate of Jews drafted into the czarist army and finally settles in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he opens a general store; his discontented Polish daughter-in-law, Sylvia, who in 1942 is furious to learn that the federal government is billeting captive Axis diplomats at the posh Greenbrier Resort; Sylvia’s daughter Doree, whose teenage life in 1958 is upended when her brilliant but socially inept younger brother begins obsessing about a construction project at the resort; and Doree’s son Jordan, a rookie reporter at the Washington Post who in 1992 determines to follow up an anonymous lead involving the Greenbrier.
Matchar assigned herself a formidable task, and she handles it beautifully. Her main characters, as well as the large supporting cast, are drawn well; even the least sympathetic protagonist, Sylvia, has her redeeming qualities. The mysteries about the resort and about their own family that confront Doree and Jordan keep the reader in suspense, and the actual historical events involving the Greenbrier that form the backdrop of the novel mesh smoothly with the stories of the fictional Zelner family. Equally important, In the Shadow of the Greenbrier raises questions— about assimilation, family ties, and Jewishness in America, among others—that will keep this book in a reader’s mind long after the last page is finished. I recommend it highly.
Susan Higginbotham
MURDER AT VINLAND
Alyssa Maxwell, Kensington, 2024, $27.00/ C$37.00/£23.00, hb, 304pp, 9781496736215
In August 1901, the conspicuously wealthy families of New York are gathered in Newport, Rhode Island to spend the summer in their expansive vacation homes. In Vinland, the Viking-themed home of Florence Vanderbilt Twombly, a fundraiser for the local Audubon society is attended by the wife of Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. The following morning one of the guests is found to have
been poisoned. Reporter and sleuth Emma Cross Andrews, also a guest at the luncheon, suspects poison in a box of petit fours supposedly sent by Mrs. Roosevelt.
Quickly ruling the Vice President’s wife out, Emma works with police detectives to discover the identity of the poisoner. However, more poisoned desserts are sent to socially prominent women who had attended the luncheon, and tension increases even as the dangerous toxin used is identified. Emma herself appears to be a victim of the poisoner.
This, the latest novel in Maxwell’s Gilded Newport Mysteries series, continues her literary tradition of meticulously researched insight into the places, people, and social values of the Gilded Age. The extravagant mansions, lavish entertainments, and sumptuous lifestyle are revealed in detail on every page. This richly documented setting creates a stage for the portrayal of intrigue that stimulates the imagination. Each carefully crafted scene adds to the tension and drama that is sustained throughout the novel. Emma makes an attractive protagonist with some of the wealth, but also with a wellcrafted viewpoint about the opulence around her and about her affluent peers.
Great reading for anyone who is fascinated by this vivid and grandiose age.
Valerie Adolph
THE WITCHING HOUR
Catriona McPherson, Hodder & Stoughton, 2024, £21.99, hb, 320pp, 9781399720397
The Golden Age of British detective fiction lives on in an eternal 1930s. This is the 16th in Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series which has now reached May 1939. Dandy, an upper-class Englishwoman married into the Scottish aristocracy, runs the Gilver and Osbourne detective agency with her business partner, Alec.
Golden Age authors never tried to be authentic, and The Witching Hour is an unlikely tale set in a Scottish village which unites in an attempt to bamboozle the two sleuths, in order to shield the killer. The victim is the husband of one of Dandy’s closest friends who proves to have a part of his life which Dandy never suspected.
McPherson faithfully recreates the mythical upper-class 1930s world of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers transposed into a Scottish setting, and in so doing gives us a delightful and ingenious puzzle to unravel.
Edward James
CABARET MACABRE
Tom Mead, Mysterious Press, 2024, $26.95/ C$35.95, hb, 272pp, 9781613165300 / Aries, 2024, £20.00, hb, 320pp, 9781837932573
1938: The wife of eminent judge Sir Giles Drury contacts Joseph Spector, retired conjuror and amateur sleuth; someone is threatening her husband. She suspects Victor Silvius, currently incarcerated in a hospital for the insane. Silvius had attacked Sir Giles with
a knife after his beloved fiancée died at Drury’s home ten years earlier, her death attributed to suicide by strychnine. Meanwhile Caroline Silvius, Victor’s sister, contacts Inspector Flint, certain that her brother’s life is in danger at the asylum.
After foiling a botched attempt on the judge’s life in London, Spector arrives at Marchbanks, Drury’s country home, and the entire family—the judge, his wife, two legitimate sons, one illegitimate son, and a stepson—descend to celebrate the holidays. Murder quickly follows when Drury’s bastard son is discovered in a small boat in the midst of a frozen pond, a large kitchen knife protruding from his torso. There are no footprints, no cracks in the ice. Absolutely nothing indicates how the body and boat were transported to the middle of the lake. Another mysterious death follows rapidly, a classic murder in a locked room.
Cabaret Macabre, Tom Mead’s third novel featuring Joseph Spector, is a devilishly intriguing read and a pleasing homage to Golden Age mysteries. No one and nothing are quite what they first seem, as Spector and Flint pursue their investigations at Marchbanks. Mead skillfully captures the era and the tone of the late 1930s, while the murderer proves a cunning adversary for Spector’s keen observations and Flint’s investigations. All the clues are given, but I challenge the reader to solve the puzzle. I certainly did not. My appetite is whetted for more of Spector’s cases after this very enjoyable book. Recommended.
Susan McDuffie
THE TWISTED ROAD
A. B. Michaels, Red Trumpet Press, 2024, $16.99, pb, 464pp, 9781733786348
Barrister Jonathan Perris has left England to establish a law firm in San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1907 earthquake and fire. Mingling with the moguls of the city, Perris takes on high-profile legal cases. As the novel opens, the city is on edge due to a streetcar strike and the accompanying violence. An angry guard for the streetcar company allegedly shoots a striker. When the guard is found guilty of murder, an influential businessman asks Perris to take on the appeal. Perris delegates the case to his young associate, Cordelia Hammersmith. In the meantime, Perris himself is arrested for t e gruesome murder of his wealthy girlfriend, Magdalena. He learns she has more than one identity and has been associating with a group of agitators. These two murders, along with others, keep Perris and his associates busy investigating multiple leads and clues.
Michaels has created five distinct and appealing employees in the law firm— courageous and determined Perris, his petite and hardworking associate Cordelia, his clever associate Oliver, creative investigator Dove, and formidable office manager Althea. Readers are likely to admire their comradery and banter. The complex plot races from one
lead and suspect to another, sometimes too quickly, and the motivations for the murders are not always convincing. Nonetheless, Perris and his crew are engaging characters and this first book in the Barrister Perris Mystery series bodes well for those to follow. Michaels has solved some of the mysteries in the novel and wisely left others hanging for subsequent books.
Marlie Wasserman
WE WERE THE BULLFIGHTERS
Marianne K. Miller, Dundurn, 2024, $19.99/ C$26.99, pb, 336pp, 9781459753600
In her leanly written debut, Miller dramatizes the pivotal months Ernest Hemingway spent in Canada as a reporter for the Toronto Star, imagining how he develops an affinity and quiet admiration for an infamous bank robber, Norman “Red” Ryan, who’s on the lam after a daring prison break from the Kingston Pen.
In 1923, Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, relocate from Paris to Toronto to await the birth of their first child, a move that encompasses multiple regrets on his part. Feeling trapped into impending fatherhood and in a career with a controlling boss who doesn’t allow him a byline, he gets frustratingly bogged down with routine assignments and nonstop travel when he’d much rather be investigating Red’s more exciting trail and developing his own fiction-writing craft. For his part, Red, reveling in his liberty, makes his way from the piney woods near Toronto to various points across the northern United States, holding up banks and accumulating enough wealth to fund an increasingly lavish lifestyle. The leader of his band of outlaws, Red aims to keep their goal focused while his most loyal sidekick, Arthur “Sully” Sullivan, gets distracted by pretty ladies.
Miller’s writing effectively combines the flawed heroes and unsentimental settings of hard-boiled crime fiction with an economical style that creates bold, memorable images of both men and their parallel journeys. Hemingway follows Red’s exploits from afar, researching the background to his case with a librarian’s invaluable help while growing confident in his pursuit of creative freedom whenever his path and Red’s unexpectedly cross. With slangy dialogue and vivid scenes of the raucous 1920s that pop from the page, We Were the Bullfighters makes for a stirring portrait of a young man’s incessant hunger to fulfill his artistic vision.
Sarah Johnson
UNTIL OUR TIME COMES
Nicole M. Miller, Revell, 2024, $18.99, pb, 384pp, 9780800744700
In autumn 1939, the Germans invade Poland. American horsewoman Adia Kensington feels responsible for the safety of the 250 Arabian horses at the Janów Podlaski stables: a national treasure in Poland. As she
starts evacuating the horses, she is assisted by the English spy Bret Conway, despite her antagonism towards him.
They embark on a dangerous trek with all the horses but encounter obstacles that force them to return to Janów, with some horses lost in the fighting and confusion. The stables and the remaining horses, including the two most precious stud horses, are taken over by the oncoming Germans. Fortunately, the officer in charge values these Arabian horses as much as Adia and Bret do, and food is made available for them. Meanwhile Adia and Bret separately help resistance forces.
This novel interweaves the romance between Adia and Bret with WWII history. While it is, in a way, just another in the ‘Americans and British saved Europe in WWII’ genre, it is lifted by the author’s intense knowledge of, and love of, horses. Another plus is the beautifully concealed twist at the end. Horse lovers will enjoy this novel and root for the safety and security of the two stud horses, not to mention the little pickpocket Ewan.
Valerie Adolph
THE STRANGE CASE OF THE PHARAOH’S HEART
Timothy Miller, Seventh Street, 2024, $18.95, pb, 288pp, 9781645060819
Timothy Miller is a marvelous writer. This is his third and possibly best Sherlock Holmes mystery. The plot is engrossing, but for me the main attraction is the voice he creates with Watson and this time with another character, a medium named Estelle Roberts. The story follows Watson and Holmes as they head to Egypt accompanied by Mrs. Roberts to solve the “curse” of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Holmes, by now (like his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) has become a believer in Spiritualism. He often defers to Mrs. Roberts, while Watson constantly attempts to ferret out her “tricks” in order to expose her as a fraud.
Since we’re privy to the perspective of Mrs. Roberts, it’s no spoiler to say she has an authentic gift and plays an important role in uncovering the truth. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the murders following the disappearance of treasure from King Tut’s tomb result from supernatural causes. That’s up to Watson and Holmes to figure out as they investigate the mysterious death of one of the first men to enter the tomb. His daughter, Lady Evelyn, wants to quash or confirm the rumors of a curse, once and for all.
The story reveals the arrogance of the British as they plunder Egyptian antiquities. Along the way, we bump into T. E. Lawrence, Howard Carter, and other notable real-life figures. Estelle Roberts, in fact, is based on a real medium. In addition to a thorough grounding in the era, Miller’s use of language, occasionally bordering on the poetic, makes this a book to savor and broadens its appeal beyond the purview of Sherlock Holmes fans, to include anyone who appreciates brilliant writing and descriptions such as this: “The
mornings seemed to unfurl and grow taut with the swiftness of sails while the night was one long, vast purple twilight.”
Trish MacEnulty
BLACKSHIRT CONSPIRACY
Jason Monaghan, Level Best, 2023, $16.95, pb, 371pp, 9781685125073
In October 1936, Hugh Clifton, leader of the Confidential Investigation Section of Department Z, known as Z3, has an inside view of Sir Oswald Mosley’s organized band of fascist Blackshirts. An operative within the inner workings of the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists for more than a year, Clifton is acting as a private investigator, weaving together pieces of information about three intrigues—the possibility of a traitor within the Blackshirt organization, the murder of a farmer who’s been sending suspicious reports about the yet-to-be-crowned King Edward VIII to the Blackshirts’ newspaper, and the woman who may bring down the British monarchy: Wallis Simpson. And his investigations bump him up against not only Blackshirt higher-ups, but also their opponents—Communists and the 35 Group of Christians against Fascism.
Blackshirt Conspiracy is the second in Monaghan’s Agents of Room Z series of alternative fiction. The book delves into a fascinating period of British history, when, as the author writes, the poor, downtrodden, and badly housed were marching with groups they believed would address their grievances, the heir to the British throne was considered to be a threat because he was “too malleable, selfish, and pro-Nazi,” and the tithe wars pitted tenant farmers against the Catholic Church. But as alternative fiction, it does not follow the actual path of history, taking readers down unexplored roads.
The storyline is effectively scheming. With suspicions everywhere, who can be trusted? Who stands for what? And the plot twists neatly in the end. But the massive cast of characters and, as Clifton himself notes, “plots within plots within plots” make for a disjointed read. At times, one wonders who’s on first and whether they’re zigging or zagging.
K. M. Sandrick
MARIA
Michelle Moran, Dell, 2024, $18.99/ C$25.99/£15.99, pb, 320pp, 9780593499481
It’s the 1950s, and your life’s about to be made into a musical by the Tony Awardwinning team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It will turn out to be one of the most successful musicals of all time, be adapted to film, and become beloved worldwide… but it’s actually a lie. Your husband is portrayed as controlling and humorless, your children’s names and genders have been changed or simply omitted, and the person responsible for your family’s professional success is absent. Even your daring escape “over the mountains” is geographically impossible. But you’ve sold the story rights away, so what can you do? Well, a letter to Mr.
Hammerstein, himself, is one place to start!
The narration alternates between Maria’s life and that of Hammerstein’s fictional secretary, Fran (plus a third surprising and rewarding point of view).
Fearing bad press if Maria’s objections are made public, Fran is sent to listen to Maria’s concerns. She quickly empathizes with the matriarch while searching for her own purpose. Moran elegantly balances the women’s times and places. Fran’s story isn’t as developed as Maria’s, but it works for this book.
Maria dives into the complex reality of the von Trapp family and serves to illuminate the realities of truth versus perception. The real-life Maria lived in a time when the world had overwritten her story. In truth, marred by abuse and loss, her life was a far cry from the woman Julie Andrews portrayed. The difficult moments aren’t glossed over in this heartfelt and honest depiction. Maria’s world was messy, but through it all, readers will see a life defined by her love of family and of music. Maria fits comfortably within Moran’s exquisite catalog in which the realities of women’s nuanced roles in history, women who made difficult choices in difficult times, are illustriously personified under the author’s deft pen.
J. Lynn Else
THE WINTER PALACE
Paul Morgan, Penguin Random House Australia, 2024, A$34.99, pb, 336pp, 9781761049095
This Winter Palace is not the famous residence of Russian Tsars, but rather a family mansion near Poznan, Poland, the home of Anton and Elisabeth Lewicki-Radziwill, a young couple married for just three years when war breaks out in 1939.
Reluctant to leave Elisabeth, Anton must join the Polish army while she plans to stay with an aunt in Warsaw. In the ensuing years Anton takes on new identities and endures the horrors of a Siberian labour camp, a prolonged march across Soviet Central Asia, and internecine conflict in the Middle East. Elisabeth is tormented by shame after her forced subservience to the Nazis. She must also disguise her past as she becomes involved with the partisans. Irrevocably changed by their experiences, only the love that binds Elisabeth and Anton and their mutual dream of a return to their peaceful Winter Palace keeps them going.
The novel reveals many lesser-known aspects of World War II including the story of the Polish Anders’ Army and the Jewish revolt
against the British Mandate in Palestine. Many of the secondary characters are brutal. Even some of the good ones are self-serving or have unpleasant flaws. The poignant, bittersweet conclusion is an honest reflection of what really happened to so many in the War’s aftermath.
Elisabeth muses on love: ‘Yet despite its ceaseless trafficking, the word does not diminish in meaning or in worth. Like an ancient coin passed for centuries from hand to hand, use only makes it shine the brighter and grow in worth, that untarnishable word which is love.’
This masterful novel doesn’t shirk in its authentic depiction of history and the depths to which humanity can sink as hope and love struggle to survive. Recommended, but with a caution if you are at all uncomfortable with graphic realities.
Marina Maxwell
BEWARE THE TALL GRASS
Ellen Birkett Morris, Columbus State Univ. Press, 2024, $22.95, pb, 244pp, 9798988732105
This compelling dual-timeline debut novel is told from the point of view of artist-mother, Eve Sloan, and young farm boy-soldier, Thomas Boone: separated in time by fifty years. How are they connected? We soon discover with skillfully placed clues. Eve’s threeyear-old son, Charlie, is haunted by the past life trauma of a Vietnam vet, Thomas. Charlie loves horses, hides from danger in tall grass, fears explosions and napalm. Thomas grew up an only child in Montana. While riding his horse Beau in tall grass, a rattlesnake attacks, leaving the horse with a broken leg. Thomas must summon the courage to shoot his companion. “Beware the tall grass, nothing goods ever happens there.” Later this scene is paralleled in combat when his comrade, paralyzed and dying in pain, looks for mercy. Both incidents cause untold guilt and grief.
The novel explores the inexplicable connection of our souls across time and space. Eve survived a dysfunctional family and self-absorbed mother; she strives to be the perfect mother. She obsesses over her son’s war play and night terrors, almost destroying her marriage. The novel was inspired by a National Public Radio story on children with past life memories. The dramatic potential captivated the author. By nature, beginning as a poet and short story writer, Morris’ language is fluid and precise. Each section echoes the one before, creating a thematic connection. Tension builds as the marriage deteriorates and the child’s actions escalate as he undergoes past life regression therapy. At times this can be a dark read. Battle scenes are graphic and horrific. Does reincarnation exist? Can this child be helped? Will there be a positive outcome?
Gail M. Murray
COME TO THE WINDOW
Howard Norman, W. W. Norton, 2024, $27.99/ C$36.99, hb, 208pp, 9781324076339
April 1918, Elizabeth Frame murders her new husband, Everett Dewis, hours after the wedding. Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, is a small fishing community by the Bay of Fundy, where journalist Tobias Havenshaw has been dispatched to report on the hearing.
Elizabeth is tall and “slim as a Christmas candle.” Wearing her wedding dress to her hearing, her “speech can seem like a pastiche of antiquities” as the judge halts the hearing to search for a dictionary. She describes the evening when, following their marital activities, she looks out on Parrsboro Harbor at a whale washed up on the beach and says, “come to the window.”. He wants to wait until morning, so she shoots him. Then Elizabeth drops a bombshell on the stunned court –weeks before marrying Everett, she married Oscar Asch in Halifax and now carries his child. Oh, and he gave her the wedding dress she wears. The hearing is interrupted by an explosion as the whale is dispatched with explosives. This hearing, very entertaining but resolving nothing, has been suspended when Elizabeth and the stenographer, Peter Lear, go on the lam.
While we check in periodically on Elizabeth and Peter, it is primarily Tobias’s story that threads throughout the novel with the final year of WWI and the raging Spanish flu as a backdrop. His wife, Amelia, arrives home from France, where she has been in working as a surgeon at the front; she continues working as a doctor in Halifax doing restorative surgeries on soldiers and battling the flu epidemic. Amelia and their marriage are very modern –too much for the time. But their relationship is so loving and delightful, and their banter has an exuberant energy. We meet many quirky characters whose uniqueness brings amusement to a story rich in language and description. A delightful, heartwarming novel.
Janice Ottersberg
WAR BONDS
Pamela Norsworthy, Black Rose Writing, 2024, $18.95, pb, 313pp, 9781685133719
World War II novels are often grim and disturbing affairs, focusing on the horrific cruelties of that particular war. Norsworthy takes a different approach in War Bonds, which revolves around the emotional bonds that people create, break, and re-create in times of duress. Not that the novel ignores the horrors of that era (especially the brutal conditions in a POW camp) but it’s not necessarily the focus in the way that the human relationships are.
Beryl Clarke, a London nurse, relinquishes her son, Colin, to Ivy Hughes and her son in Elsworth so that he can be safe from the frequent bombings of the city. Both Ivy and Beryl are war widows with husbands in battle overseas. Beryl’s husband, Gordon, has been captured and is in a POW camp. Ivy’s husband, Will, is missing in action. The town of Elsworth provides a sanctuary for Colin,
a bright, curious boy, and his new-found “brother” Hugo. The boys befriend a rugged all-American pilot, who becomes a regular at the house when the Yanks join the war. Meanwhile, in Europe, Beryl’s husband has been sucked into the web of a Nazi officer’s wife, who saves him from death and then tries to use him for her own ends, while Will, who has been separated from his unit in France, finds ways to help the Resistance.
The story incorporates a subtle JudeoChristian message, and the two families are a testament to the resilience of familial bonds even in the worst of times. Readers looking for an engrossing, often poignant story to touch their hearts will find it here. Well-written and rigorously researched, War Bonds is a stirring novel and a welcome addition to the World War II genre.
Trish MacEnulty
MINA’S MATCHBOX
Yoko Ogawa, trans. Stephen B. Snyder, Pantheon, 2024, $28.00, hb, 273pp, 9780593316085 / Harvill Secker, 2024, £18.99, hb, 288pp, 9781787302761
This is a delicate domestic novel. The protagonist and first-person narrator is twelveyear-old Tomoko, who spends a year with her aunt’s family in a coastal Japanese city in 1972. In addition to her aunt, the family includes her uncle, her uncle’s German mother, her two cousins, two family servants, and a pygmy hippopotamus who provides transportation for one cousin’s trip to school. The home the family lives in is elegant with spacious grounds, which once included a zoo.
Tomoko recounts her stories about all of these family members thirty years after they occurred, but her memories are vibrant and absorbing. As she interacts with them in various circumstances, the plot slowly reveals all of these characters in exquisite detail. The truth behind the charming and successful uncle slowly unfolds. Grandmother Rosa’s youth in Germany is much more complicated than she has revealed in the past to her family. Tomoko is a careful and intelligent reporter; she watches and listens; she does not judge.
Tomoko is especially close to her slightly younger cousin Mina, a severely asthmatic girl who collects colorful matchboxes and invents elaborate stories about the illustrations on them. She describes Mina as a girl “whose body was too weak to travel but whose soul never stopped voyaging to the ends of the earth.” The two cousins share various adventures, some involving library books and interesting male figures such as Mr. Turtleneck and the “Young Man from Wednesday,” which are recounted with fresh candor and winsome humor.
Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award, and her work has been widely published in the United States. Mina’s Matchbox proves to be a quiet novel to savor!
Joanne
Vickers
KATHARINE’S REMARKABLE ROAD TRIP
Gail Ward Olmsted, Black Rose Writing, 2024, $16.95, pb, 229pp, 9781685134327
In the fall of 1907, 77-year-old Katharine heads out in her new car, traveling from Newport, Rhode Island, to Jackson, New Hampshire. She tells her sister that the 270mile drive is a routine visit to her second home and a chance to catch up with some old friends, but deep down, Katharine knows this may be her final journey.
Rather than dwell on her mortality, she maintains her lifelong strategy of meeting things head-on and views the trip as an adventure, one of many in her eventful life. During her seven-day excursion, she plans for several stops to reconnect with friends and tie up some loose ends but finds herself in a series of unexpected situations and detours. She meets a cast of colorful characters, offering them sage advice and even saving a couple of lives.
Basing her novel on Katharine Prescott Wormeley’s unconventional life, Gail Ward Olmsted has a wealth of material to draw upon. Katharine inherited money from her parents and could have lived a life of leisure, but instead became a volunteer nurse in the Civil War, a hospital administrator, a successful translator of French literature, and a philanthropist. Putting the character on a fictional road trip provides the perfect device to explore her extraordinary experiences as she tells bits of her story to those she meets along the way and reminisces with friends.
Katharine is a little prim and proper but is also warm and charming, and the reader quickly gets swept up in her tales. This book is an inspiring story of a life well lived, which might motivate the reader to take a road trip of their own.
Janice Derr
SCANDALOUS WOMEN
Gill Paul, William Morrow, 2024, $18.99, pb, 384pp, 9780063245150 / Avon, 2024, £9.99, pb, 384pp, 9780008532161
Scandalous Women by Gill Paul follows two Jackies—Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann, two New York Times bestselling romance authors who turned the 1960s literary world upside down with their steamy novels featuring sexually liberated heroines. Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls, was based in New York City, while Collins writes her The World is Full of Married Men from London. Both women struggle to succeed in a world eager to criticize career driven, independent women.
A third point-of-view focuses on fictional Nancy, a young career woman working for Jacqueline Susann’s agent. With hopes of becoming a book editor, Nancy, newly graduated from college and completely innocent in the ways of the big city, is mentored by world-wise Jacqueline. In many ways, Nancy’s story is the most compelling of the three; while both Collins and Susann face and survive many adverse events, there is a lack
of tension in their plotlines. In many ways, the novel is essentially a domestic drama and possesses a slower pace.
Jackie Collins would have a decadeslong career, going on to write multiple bestselling novels including her best-known work, Hollywood Wives (1983). Jacqueline Susann’s career was cut short by her death from lung cancer in 1974; she published four books during her life. However, additional works were published following her death.
Scandalous Women provides fascinating insight into the literary world of the 1960s, which, like society in general, is undergoing significant upheaval. The novel will appeal to readers who love biographical fiction and stories set in the recent past.
Caroline D. Wilson
UNDER THE EYE
Marilyn Pemberton, Williams & Whiting, 2024, £9.99, pb, 278pp, 9781915887603
Britain granted independence to Egypt in 1922, but many stayed on in an advisory capacity. Gangs such as Cairo’s right-wing Blue Shirts, and the Eye of Horus, were active in their determination to rid their country of the British.
The novel takes place over a few months in 1936. Beattie, in her early twenties, is the spoilt daughter of the British adviser to the Egyptian Minister of the Interior. In love with Marcus, an archaeologist she has known since childhood, she spends much of her time in the Museum of Antiquities, writing labels for him, updating the catalogue, or doing any other job he gives her.
In London, Effie is a bright, feisty, ten-yearold foster child with a love of ancient Egypt and a talent for drawing. Because of her black hair and swarthy colouring, other children tease her about her unknown parentage. Effie is convinced her mother was an Egyptian princess.
Chapters are short, narrated alternately by Beattie and Effie in the first person, past tense, so that the story reads as a summary, a stream of consciousness. Effie’s arrival at the museum in a packing case, with which Beattie is expecting to help Marcus, sets in motion shocking events, revelations, and festering hatred. The dénouement can never be in doubt, although the final surprise for Effie – an endearing character – is particularly touching. The book is dedicated to the memory of the author’s mother, born in Al Qahirah (Cairo) in 1917.
Janet Hancock
BLOOD RED MORNING
Mark Pryor, Minotaur, 2024, $29.00/ C$39.00/£24.99, hb, 304pp, 9781250330604
On New Year’s Eve morning in 1940, a Frenchman is shot dead right outside police inspector Henri Lefort’s apartment building. Lefort heard and saw nothing and is assigned the case. He soon learns the dead man collaborated with Germans. To curry favor, earn money, or get decent food, many
Parisians write secret letters to the Nazis about real or invented offenses by unfavored neighbors, even family members. The dead man, a former banker, had been hired by Germans to pursue such a letter or letters— right to Lefort’s building. A tenant there seems to be under Nazi investigation and might be the banker’s killer. The violations could range from prostitution to food smuggling to printing anti-German news leaflets. Other tenants might have turned in the offenders.
Lefort struggles to find food and keep his sanity while pursuing unsolved real crimes with Nazis watching his every step. On this new case, high-up Nazis suspect Lefort himself might be helping petty law-breakers, or that he shot the snitch. He is clever, experienced, and confident, at times too confident, especially when explaining himself to Nazis while trying to shield his neighbors and friends from torture and death.
Pryor tells the story through Lefort’s first-person view, pulling readers into the detective’s every move. He struggles with what to do about a “righteous” killing or local Frenchmen spying on other Frenchmen and collaborating with Germans. Pryor’s descriptions of Nazi operators and methods are at times so realistic it chills the soul. Lefort and others are powerless to stop them. At best, they pretend to mind their own business while protecting their countrymen. Recommended for anyone interested in a well-done gritty murder mystery under the smothering blanket of Nazi-occupied Paris.
G. J. Berger
THE BRIAR CLUB
Kate Quinn, William Morrow, 2024, $28.99/ C$35.99, hb, 432pp, 9780063244740 / HarperCollins UK, 2024, £18.99, hb, 432pp, 9780008643546
It’s Thanksgiving 1954, Washington DC, and a boarding house for working women, Briarwood House, is the scene of a murder. There’s a corpse upstairs, detectives have arrived, and the residents mill around in the kitchen while the landlady has hysterics. So begins The Briar Club, a story of female friendship – and murder – told from multiple points of view, including, unusually, the house itself. When Grace March arrives at Briarwood in June 1950, it is a depressing place. Pete Nilsson, the landlady’s teenage son, dreams of a life like that of his hero, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, but in reality, he’s at his tetchy mother’s beck and call. He is the first of Briarwood’s inhabitants to be drawn to Grace who, while remaining
something of an enigma, manages to bring out the best in her fellow boarders, instituting attic room dinners and offering help where needed. The different boarders – lonely mother Fliss, hard-working Nora, baseballplaying Beatrice, and aging artist Reka – take turns to confront a range of challenges and hardships faced by women in 1950s America, as the story builds up to the reveal of who has been murdered, why, and by whom.
A clever structure and great characterization make this a real page-turner. Quinn addresses serious issues: McCarthyism, domestic abuse, organized crime, immigration, espionage, and racism, all while effortlessly charming the reader with beguiling characters trying to overcome the challenges life throws at them. When Grace’s secrets are finally revealed in a dramatic conclusion, the inhabitants of Briarwood must ask themselves how strong the bonds they have formed at Briarwood really are. As entertaining as it is illuminating, The Briar Club does not disappoint.
Kate
Braithwaite
THE FERTILE EARTH
Ruthvika Rao, Oneworld, 2024, £16.99, hb, 384pp, 9780861549092 / Flatiron, 2024, $29.99/C$39.99, hb, 384pp, 9781250899903
This is a gorgeous story of star-crossed lovers across the class divide in volatile 1960s India. In Irumi, ten members of the wealthy Deshmukh family are executed, their heads put on spikes in a paddy field. Then we go back in time. Four Telegu children—Vijaya and Sree from the Deshmukh family; Krishna and Ranga, sons of a family servant—dare an expedition into the forest to hunt down a man-eating tiger, an experience which has disastrous consequences for each of them.
The disaster has real intensity of emotion yet is still from a child’s simple point of view. The ramifications of the event reverberate differently for each of the four, making for intricacies of character. Powerful emotions are portrayed extremely well. The way a smell can fill a person with rage, as it evokes memories of an experience. It’s difficult to convey political arguments in fiction without it sounding like authorial intrusion. Rao does this by having Krishna a semi-reluctant attendee to meetings led by his nationalist friend Gagan. Years later, when violent uprisings and the Naxalite movement threaten their village, Vijaya and Krishna are drawn back to each other. The setting is gorgeous, with culturally appropriate metaphors: ‘green tops of palm trees rustling and swaying like so many paintbrushes against [the] hot blue sky’. There are some fantastic examples of understated showing. Vijaya counts the few instances of her name in the letter from her overly critical, unloving mother. Relationships are nuanced, multi-layered, sometimes too subtle. I had to read a few passages twice. In the shocking climax, the children’s subjective experience is revisited through Sree’s childlike point of view in an absolutely brilliant way. A
glossary would have helped with the Hindi and Telegu vocabulary.
Susie Helme
THE MURDERER INSIDE THE MIRROR
Sarah Rayne, Severn House, 2024, $29.99/£21.99, hb, 288pp, 9781448310951
This is the second Theatre of Thieves novel from mystery writer, Sarah Rayne, featuring the eccentric Fitzglen family and their rival thespians, the Gilfillans. Those who know the Fitzglens well know that their more lucrative sideline, aside from staging plays, is theft – of the Robin Hood variety, whereby they relieve those who can afford it, of part of their wealth. It’s 1908, and sadly, a message has arrived that Great Uncle Montague (the family’s master forger) has died unexpectedly. Now it’s up to young Jack to find the infamous iron box Montague was rumoured to have hidden. Jack also needs Montague’s notes on his plan to rob the wealthy Girdlestone family of an original Gainsborough, if he is to pull off the heist himself. The box turns out to hold a manuscript entitled “The Murderer Inside the Mirror,” which seems to have been penned by the deceased Irish playwright, Phelan Rafferty, and has ominous and shadowy overtones within its first pages. This makes Jack think some darkness may be best left undisturbed. While sidelining on the Gainsborough heist, Jack spies a painting of Catherine O’Raifeartaigh hung in a dark corner. Why has her history been concealed by the Raffertys?
This entry, like the previous book, Chalice of Darkness, unrolls multiple stories in multiple timeframes. Rayne’s mystery novels are intriguing, but readers have to pay close attention to connect all the pieces of the puzzle. As one character tells Jack, “you need to hear the story… in full—or you won’t understand.” Rayne blends fiction with history—in this case Henry VIII’s rebellious nemesis, Thomas Fitzgerald, 10th Earl of Kildare—and her stories prompt many questions along a circuitous route. A few scenes stretch credulity a little, and one can’t help thinking there’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek going on, but overall, a clever story-within-a-story of rebellion, betrayal and revenge.
Fiona Alison
THE LAST WHALER
Cynthia Reeves, Regal House, 2024, $20.95/ C$27.95, pb, 334pp, 9781646035083
The Last Whaler transports the reader into the life of a whale hunter and his wife stranded during the dark season in the Svalbard archipelago surrounded by the Norwegian and Barents Seas. Far from the political upheavals in Europe during 193738, Tor Handeland and his wife, Astrid, are forced to seek refuge in a whaling station with no functioning communication with the outside world. The story is told through two voices, husband and wife. They delve into the
problems at Svalbard, including isolation, lack of food, the dangers of hungry animals, and the bitter cold. Yet the horrific loss of their fouryear-old son in a drowning accident causes untold turmoil in their marriage.
The descriptions of the land above Norway are exquisite. Astrid writes of the magnificent landscapes in her letter to her deceased son: “…there is life here. Birds by the hundreds gather on cliffs…bright yellow Arctic poppies wave their tiny flowers from delicate stalks… the water too quivers with life. Schools of herring and cods skim the surface. The sea whirls and bubbles, as if breathing…”
Tor writes about the challenges of his livelihood, and the importance of a good Beluga harvest to meet his family needs. He argues that animals exist exclusively for “our needs; only humans have souls.” Reeves has created an imaginative, thoughtful, and gripping story. For the most part, it moves at a good pace with tension and suspense.
Frances E. Stephenson
SOME MURDERS IN BERLIN
Karen Robards, MIRA, 2024, $28.99, hb, 448pp, 9780778305514
Eight women slaughtered. Not a headline the Nazis want broadcast to the citizens of Berlin in 1943. Nothing can affect morale at home or the front. Therefore, Dr. Murder must be consulted, regardless of what the lead investigator thinks. Elin Lund detests the moniker she has earned through her forensic psychiatric work. No matter how much she wants to stay in Denmark to protect her halfJewish daughter from the evil that threatens Copenhagen, Elin feels compelled to help two colleagues who work for the Resistance and are being hunted by the Nazis. They accompany her to Berlin to aid the investigation and to hide in plain sight. If they are discovered, all three will die.
Despite the skepticism of Kriminalinspektor Kurt Schneider, Elin scours the crime scenes for clues, which are easily lost in the rubble from nightly bombings. But the connection between the women remains elusive. One piece of evidence suggests the culprit has ties to the SS. This knowledge endangers both Elin and Kurt for different reasons, both associated with their pasts. Trust becomes an issue because they are enemies who must work together.
Robards has crafted a complex mystery, set in a well-known historical period. The usual subjects are covered in atypical ways that make the story fresh and compelling. Tension, conflict, psychology, and atmosphere combine to clearly demonstrate how the past affects the present and influences who characters are. Danger may lurk in the shadows of Some Murders in Berlin, but the threats and peril are palpable enough to make readers constantly look over their shoulders.
Cindy Vallar
YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY
Cat Sebastian, Avon, 2024, $18.99/C$23.99, pb, 400pp, 9780063272804
New York, 1960. When magazine writer Mark Bailey is assigned to write a column on baseball star Eddie O’Leary, he decides to humanize the golden boy who resisted being traded to the brand-new Robins. Eddie’s batting slump becomes an obstacle that Mark, Eddie’s fans, and Eddie’s team all tackle together, and their shared goal bonds them. Mark, prickly by nature but also emerging from the paralysis of grief, resists being pulled in by Eddie’s open-hearted, sunny charm, but Eddie’s hard to say no to. Still, in a world where being out would ruin Eddie’s career and risk both their lives, can they find a safe place to be together?
Sebastian is the acknowledged queen of queer romance, and this one hits it out of the park for tenderness and slow burn as Mark and Eddie circle one another, cautiously testing the waters and honestly, warmly taking care of one another. They find unexpected allies in George, an aging sportswriter, and Tony Ardolino, a manager trying to get sober, who provide comic relief and deepen the emotional tension. With well-crafted scenes, endearing characters, and just enough baseball talk to sound authentic, this is truly a rewarding read. Recommended.
Misty Urban
ELAINE
Will Self, Grove Press, 2024, $27.00, hb, 304pp, 9780802163530
From the first paragraph onward, close readers know they are in the mind of a master writer, in the intellectual housing of a modernist-styled novelist who might be channeling James Joyce. Will Self (shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; and shortlisted for the Booker Prize) has based his latest novel, Elaine, on the intimate diaries of his own mother. Here is a visceral, immediate immersion into the interior life portrayed without the standard on-thepage dialogue or traditional plotting. Elaine is a would-be writer, a woman who expresses her own torment and fantasies while diarizing. At the opening Elaine stands outside her house and wonders, “is this… it?” and the reader recognizes a deeply frustrated and unhappy woman: a 1950s Jewish suburban housewife in Ithaca, New York, married to a mediocre but striving academic. In angst-
saturated prose she lusts after her husband’s colleagues without remorse and suffers terrible migraines and other physical pain. Lines and phrases from her diaries of over forty years are interspersed, set in italics, as though confessional, revealing the deeply personal feelings of a woman incapable of accepting her roles as a wife and a mother of, in this case, the author himself, lending the new-coined term “auto-oedipal fiction.”
Auto-fiction (in this case, semi-auto-fiction) seems very much in vogue lately, but here with a twist: the sources in the author’s own mother’s hand give glimpses of her young son, Billy. Even memories of sessions with her psychiatrist Dr. Freud[!]enberg are fraught with disdain. Only the ironing of her husband’s shirts brings her a sense of competence, which she calls irony. This is not a novel for the faint-hearted, but a deep dive into a psychological case history.
Christina Nellas Acosta
LAST HOUSE
Jessica Shattuck, William Morrow, 2024, $28.00/C$35.00, hb, 336pp, 9780062979896
After fighting in the Pacific, Nick Taylor feels grateful for his post-war prosperity, a fragile blessing. He believes in the promise of Americanled progress, but following a secret trip to Iran in 1953, he is smart enough to question whether an Americanled coup in Iran will bring such progress. Nick, now a lawyer for American Oil, can influence the restoration of the proAmerican shah and turn those pipelines back towards the West. If he wants to, that is. If he succumbs to the charms of his Yale classmate turned probable CIA handler, Carter Weston.
Meanwhile, back home Nick’s wife Bet is struggling with her two young children and her thwarted dreams of an intellectual life. She met Nick when she was a secret codebreaker for the government—a job so secret she has never told him everything. But now the only secret is how much she hates being asked to edit The Modern Mapleton Household for the local Junior League. The effort of shaping quirky recipes from her neighbors into something readable feels like an imprimatur of domesticity she isn’t ready to accept.
This sweeping novel follows Nick, Bet, and their daughter Katherine as the 20th century becomes the American century then sours on the haunted prosperity that engendered such wealth. After all, as Nick and Bet’s son Harry says, all the planes and cars running on oil are really fueled by the ghosts of dead creatures from millennia past. As these touching characters grapple with their personal and
collective responsibilities, Shattuck’s beautiful writing stitches meaning into their lives, wondering about the sacrifices of civilization, the privilege of retreating from it all, and the never-ending cycle of death and rebirth that human societies create. This novel is a masterpiece, crafted of small lives that together form the entire world.
Carrie Callaghan
THE MASK OF MERRYVALE MANOR
Pete Sherlock, Fairlight Books, 2024, £9.99, pb, 320pp, 9781914148484
Dorset, 1964: On her wedding day to a considerably older man, Natasha escapes the marquee at Merryvale Manor with her cousin Ben, to the area of the estate she and her twin, as children, had named Arcady.
Ben, a Cambridge undergraduate who is in thrall to Natasha, upbraids her for marrying the wrong man. But Arcady is no longer Arcadian: the lake is scummy and murky, and Ben makes a macabre discovery: a woman’s shoe containing the skeletal remains of a foot. Ben was brought up by Natasha’s wealthy parents – Rupert Drummond is the local Tory MP – after his mother killed herself when he was fourteen. As the police investigation proceeds, Ben is reminded with increasing force of what he owes to the family who have raised him. He nevertheless reveals, though not by entirely orthodox means, what he knows about the identity of the dead woman.
As a result, this privileged family disintegrates, a process hastened by the arrest and trial of one of their members. I read this book in one sitting; it’s an immersive psychological thriller, but much more than that. The deployment of Sixties language and mores gets across the right sense of time and place. The characterisation is superb, especially of Ben’s aunt and uncle: she brittle yet unyielding, he disappointed in his political ambitions. Needless to say their marriage is not quite what it appears.
Add to that a creepy, unwashed vicar who is not above a bit of blackmail, a taciturn gardener-cum-chauffeur who knows much more than he is saying, and the mask of the title (an ooser, a horned, devilish face used in 19th century “Skimmington rides”), together with superb plotting, and the result is a compelling page-turner with a truly startling climax.
Katherine Mezzacappa
STUMBLING STONES
Bonnie Suchman, Black Rose Writing, 2024, $17.95, pb, 294pp, 9781685134105 Germany, 1920. With the support of her wealthy Jewish parents, young Alice Heppenheimer attends the Nuremberg Arts and Crafts School to pursue a career in fashion design. At a family dinner, she meets Ludwig Alder, an ardent pro-Jewish political activist, and within two years, they marry. Passionate and ambitious, Alice hones her
wardrobe skills by working for other garment manufacturers, then opens her own clothing factory. Despite the increasing animosity and religious intolerance for those of Jewish faith and the limitations imposed by a genderbiased society, she succeeds. Alice moves to Frankfurt when her marriage falters, hoping to build and expand her business. As Hitler and his Nazi party gain momentum, she and her family, along with thousands of other Jews, are gradually stripped of their rights and privileges and subjected to cruel restrictions and punishments.
After divorcing Ludwig, Alice marries Alfred Falkenstein, the ex-husband of her estranged friend, Erna. For years, as the Nazis continue their relentless persecution, attempting to destroy every facet of Jewish life, Alice and Alfred live on a dangerous precipice, facing life-threatening circumstances and an overwhelming, uncertain future.
Based on a true-life story discovered while researching her family heritage, Suchman’s powerful novel is a gripping portrayal of Alice Heppenheimer’s life as a Jewish woman in Germany during Hitler’s reign of terror. As the horrific events unfold, heart-breaking scenes of the sinister impact on family, friends, and the Jewish community are skillfully revealed through poignant dialogue and welldeveloped characters. Alice’s indomitable spirit and resilience are vividly depicted as she bravely confronts prejudice, injustice, and inhumane conditions during a brutal and unforgiving time in history. An inspiring, haunting story of love, courage, and the will to survive.
Marcy McNally
AGONY HILL
Sarah Stewart Taylor, Minotaur, 2024, $28.00/C$37.00, hb, 320pp, 9781250826626
In 1965, the small town of Bethany, Vermont, is struggling towards modernization; the new interstate is gouging swathes through pristine farmland, and farmers are barely compensated for their loss. Crack investigator Franklin Warren, happy to leave his dark memories in Boston, has made the move at the behest of Tommy Johnson of Vermont’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He is barely unpacked when called to the site of a barn fire, where a farmer’s body has been discovered in an annexed room, the door locked from the inside. Likely to be ruled a suicide, things do not add up for Warren or the sharp-witted Trooper ‘Pinky’ Goodrich, who Warren immediately commandeers as his deputy. Why sleep in the barn, why bolt the door, what started the fire?
I read this in one sitting, becoming quickly immersed in the strongly character-driven story and Taylor’s nuanced handling of the events, not felt so much in the crime itself as in the larger picture—the locals and what they are withholding. Small sideline events grow into more pertinent issues in Taylor’s deft hands, eliciting the townsfolks’ protectiveness towards each other, including the taciturn
pregnant widow and her four unusual sons. Atmosphere runs high with an underlying feeling that we are only privy to part of the story, which adds to the overall need-toknow for the other part. Behind-the-scenes events are as important as those which are obvious, and untoward things happen which are not necessarily part of the mystery, keeping the twists and turns lively. Haunted by personal tragedy, Warren’s forgiving nature is touchingly revealed through his all-toohuman reaction to certain scenes. I was not particularly surprised by the culprit, but it did not matter, because this is about ordinary people finding their way through life’s drama. It is the first in a planned series, which was my hope as I finished the novel.
Fiona Alison
D IS FOR DEATH
Harriet F. Townson, Hodder & Stoughton, 2024, £22.00, hb, 304pp, 9781399731478
London, 1935. Fleeing an unwelcome arranged marriage, Dora Wildwood takes the milk train to London, where she narrowly escapes abduction by taking refuge in the London Library. Here she is horrified to discover that some miscreant is mutilating books by hollowing them out, leaving just the spine and covers on the shelf. When she then stumbles on the body of the director, she feels compelled to offer her assistance to an unimpressed Detective Inspector Fox who, against his will, finds himself co-operating with her.
Harriet Townson takes Dora on a whistlestop tour of 1930s London, directing a whirling cast ranging from lady authors to the ‘nippies’ at a Lyons Corner Café to the Bright Young Things at the Café de Paris, but never losing sight of her purpose. In the grand tradition of the Golden Age of detective fiction, she plays fair with the reader who, at the denouement, can look back and piece together the subtle clues.
Dora is an engaging heroine who quickly makes friends. She is ruled more by instinct than by reason, but her instinct rarely lets her down. As she unravels the library mysteries, she learns more about herself and her own history. Some personal questions are left open, but the reader is encouraged by a taster of the next book in a promising new series that will appeal to all lovers of Golden Age mysteries.
Catherine Kullmann
JACKIE
Dawn Tripp, Random House, 2024, $30.00/ C$39.99/£25.00, hb, 496 pp, 9780812997217
This powerful literary exploration of the life and loves of Jackie Kennedy Onassis starts her story with the event we all know about – the assassination of JFK. The reader is immediately and intimately brought into the trauma from Jackie’s point of view – in a fragmented stream of consciousness that reflects the horror of the moment but also hints of difficulties within the couple’s marriage. From there, Tripp steps back in time to spring 1951 and the beginning of
that most famous relationship, as experienced by Jackie and very occasionally, by Jack Kennedy, adding another layer of interest and complexity to the novel. From the ´50s, Tripp follows Jackie right through to the ´90s when illness strikes. As someone who knew little about Jackie Kennedy beyond the headlines of her marriages and JFK’s assassination, this was a fascinating read. Often biographical historical novels feature an historical afterword at the end of the book, but not this one. Given the subject at hand, Jackie wisely opens with a lengthy author’s note where Dawn Tripp outlines her research process and her ambitions for the book. She reveals her passionate attention to detail and argues that a fictional portrayal of this famous woman can offer something that nonfiction works about Jackie cannot. ‘Fiction,’ she writes, ‘when it hews to the historical record, can access a different level of truth, an experiential truth that allows us to enter the emotional heart of a story.’ In Jackie, she ‘wanted to explore the space between what took place and what she might have felt’. For me, she has achieved that and more. Jackie is a portrait of a person, but also of a time and a country. I couldn’t put it down.
Kate Braithwaite
NO COUNTRY FOR LOVE
Yaroslav Trofimov, Abacus, 2024, £20.00, hb, 369pp, 9780349145310
When idealistic teenager Debora Rosenbaum moves to Kharkiv in 1930, she believes everything she has been told about building a brave new world in Soviet Ukraine. She finds work at a tractor factory, before going on to study literature in Kyiv, and falls in love with dashing trainee pilot Samuel. But her ideals are rapidly eroded by the realities of life under Stalin’s increasingly repressive rule, where neighbour denounces neighbour, a single careless word can lead to arrest, and famine stalks the fertile plains of Ukraine. And when war with Germany breaks out, even being a non-practising Jew becomes highly dangerous.
This is the epic story of one woman’s fight for survival and the compromises and machinations she is forced to resort to, to protect her more Orthodox Jewish mother and her children. Parallels with current events in Ukraine and Russia are startling, particularly the way Stalin and Putin both manipulate what news reaches their citizens and silence opposition through their reign of terror.
Debora matures plausibly from young idealist to hardened pragmatist, and secondary characters are similarly well developed. Even
the NKVD officer Maslov, who becomes key to Debora’s survival, is shown as having human characteristics when not at work, instead of being just a one-dimensional villain.
Ukrainian-born Wall Street Journal journalist Trofimov has apparently based his debut novel on the remarkable story of his grandmother’s survival through the 1930-50s. It would have been interesting if there had been a historical note to explain how much of the dramatic denouement of the novel is actually based on fact, but otherwise this is a fascinating book, evoking historical events in a digestible form that ought to convince even sceptics why it is important for the West to go on supporting Ukraine’s fight to retain its freedom. Highly recommended.
Jasmina Svenne
DARKNESS CALLS THE TIGER
Janyre Tromp, Kregel, 2024, $16.99, pb, 368pp, 9780825448508
Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989 by its military government) was scorched by the Japanese Imperial Army’s lightning conquest of southeast Asia in 1942, and bore the brunt of the gradual retreat of the Japanese in the face of the Allied recovery. With its rich ethnic diversity, the theatre saw remarkable successes in stitching together effective guerilla units. Historians Christopher Alan Bayly and Timothy Norman Harper wrote about these units in their work Forgotten Armies (2005).
This novel is set in the context of one such army, the Kachin Rangers, the creation of which Catholic and Baptist missionaries facilitated by helping hill people before the war and hence being able to recruit them for Allies. Though it is positioned as a Christian novel, I thought it addresses universal questions. How does one forgive when one can’t forget? How does one find one’s home? How do we know when we have done all we can?
Apart from shining light on a lesser-known aspect of World War II, this work stands out for its characters and situations. A tigerslaying little girl, who reads ancient Greek poems, Shakespeare, and Augustine with as much ease as she scampers through the jungle, grows into both a vulnerable woman and a feared slayer. A young missionary who is fond of her grows into a toughened soldier on a mission; he wants to rescue her from a dangerous situation, without revealing this to his officer.
The story describes some brutal events, including rape, with sensitivity. Military thriller fans may find the action sequences weak. From a historical point of view, greater acknowledgment of the British Indian Army’s effort may have been appropriate. Overall, though, this is a valuable addition to the historical and Christian fiction genres.
A. K. Kulshreshth
MURDER AT THE PARIS FASHION HOUSE
Nancy Warren, Storm, 2024, $9.99/ C$14.99/£8.99, pb, 298pp, 9781805081111
Nancy Warren’s latest entry begins a new series, set in Paris in 1925. Abigail Dixon wants a career and a byline, and arrives at the Paris office of her Chicago newspaper, gung-ho to write about the French Union for Women’s Suffrage. Her editor, Walter Strutt, puts her straight about that. As a woman she must write about clothes, hair and tea parties, and she’s bustled off to Maison de Joubert, where couturier Paul Joubert has agreed to show her his new fall collection. But in the showroom, she’s horrified to see the last person on earth she expected – her young stepmother, Lillian Dixon, who destroyed her parents’ marriage. Abby makes a quick exit, feigning interest in the intricate details of design and dressmaking, from sketchbook to soirée. Unfortunately, during part of her tour she discovers Lillian’s body in a dressing room, and immediately becomes the number one suspect for murderby-dressmaking shears.
I have to say I loved this novel, not only for the couture aspects, which are worth a stopover just to learn tidbits about the fashion industry, but also the manner in which the author uses women being put in their place to turn the story on its head. Abby’s tenacity in trying to clear her name and her fear for her future feel totally credible, and her digging takes her all the way back to WWI. The story includes a delightful friendship between the dowdily dressed Abby and her chic modern flatmate, Vivian, who, unlike Abby, is happy to ensnare the right rich man. Abby’s plans to exonerate herself draws in interesting side characters, including her spiritist aunt, and, as Abby turns the label of suspect into something else entirely, she basks in being the star of the show. The killer eluded me until the end of this delightful read, which I hope will lead to more of Abby’s murderous adventures.
Fiona Alison
SHELTERWOOD
Lisa Wingate, Ballantine, 2024, $30.00/ C$39.99, hb, 368pp, 9780593726501
This richly imagined dual-timeline tale introduces eleven-year-old Olive Peele and her adopted Choctaw sister, Nessa Rusk. In Oklahoma in 1909, they escape the abusive household where Olive’s brutal stepfather, Tesco, has already used and discarded Nessa’s older sister. When Olive catches Tesco eyeing sixyear-old Nessa one night, she takes the little girl and flees. Their extraordinary journey
explores the resilience and inventiveness of children faced with extreme danger.
Hungry and bedraggled, they make their way to the town of Talihina with a small gaggle of orphans and into Oklahoma’s Winding Stair Mountains. In 1990, Valerie Boren-Odell relocates there with her sevenyear-old son, Charlie, to become a ranger and law enforcement officer for the National Park. Valerie’s encounter with Sydney, a cheeky, garrulous youngster dumped into foster care when her grandmother takes ill, is eye-opening, and her instincts, during a routine check of an abandoned car, tell her that Sydney’s missing brother, a suspicious rockslide, and a bloated body caught in a flood path are all connected. But how?
Shelterwood swept me into a time and place I knew nothing about, when the Five Tribes were systematically robbed of oil- and timber-rich land as the government facilitated a corrupt legal system which allowed ruthless grafters to purchase guardianships of Tribal children. Part mystery, part thriller, and based upon meticulous research, it explores the human struggle and search for justice in an unforgiving world. The vulnerability and abuse of children is a difficult subject, but the novel allows us to focus on the wider, untamed wilderness, spotlighting our need to maintain our connection to the natural world. Valerie and Charlie’s grounded mother-son connection is juxtaposed against Olive and Nessa’s harrowing journey, where they face impossible odds in returning to Olive’s original mountain home. Wingate crafts a tender story of family trust and responsibility, connecting two timelines into a memorable and fulfilling ending.
Fiona Alison
THE COMFORT OF GHOSTS
Jacqueline Winspear, Soho, 2024, $29.95/ C$39.95, hb, 360pp, 9781641296069 / Allison & Busby, 2024, £22.00, hb, 384pp, 9780749031077
This novel is the eighteenth in the longrunning Maisie Dobbs series, and Jacqueline Winspear tells the reader in an introductory letter that it will be the last. Winspear brings all of the interesting characters from the series to a satisfying conclusion with several hints of happy events to come for the engaging heroine, her family, and friends. The author incorporates appropriate vignettes of the important people (or ghosts) who have shaped Maisie’s life, including her husband James Compton and mentor Maurice Blanche, who still provide her with comfort. (Was there ever another man as wise as Maurice?) Winspear also updates the lives of other key figures like Lady Rowan, her father, Frankie, Billy Beale and family, Priscilla, and Maisie’s new American husband, Mark Scott. This personal strand of the saga is carefully developed with surprising and mysterious twists complicated by a theme of personal trust.
But this is also a novel that clearly illuminates the real difficulties England
faced in the aftermath of World War II; as Priscilla’s husband Douglas says: “Britain is like a battlefield.” Winspear does not flinch from describing the challenges of continuing rationing shortages, bombed-out buildings that leave people homeless, and orphaned children who played a significant role in civil defense during the war. Readers will be sad to say good-bye to Maisie, but they will not be disappointed by her last adventure.
Joanne Vickers
KATHARINE, THE WRIGHT SISTER
Tracey Enerson Wood, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024, $27.99, hb, 448pp, 9781728257877
This is the lightly fictionalized story of Katharine Wright, the younger sister of aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville. Early in life, the three made a pact not to marry, but to support each other in the invention of the world’s first airplane. Katharine kept house for her brothers while also managing to achieve a college education and a teaching career. She was a committed suffragist, helping Ohio women win the right to vote. She was an invaluable help to Wilbur and Orville in Europe, where they were at first far more famous than in the United States. Katharine’s social skills and knowledge of foreign languages made her a popular figure overseas, especially in France. The brothers were shy and were most comfortable in their workshops or trying out their inventions. Katharine found her own personal happiness in later life, but it caused an irreconcilable family rift. She died relatively young, and only recently has the extent of her help to her brothers been recognized.
The story was difficult to follow due to the rapidly rotating first-person viewpoints of Katharine, Wilbur, and Orville. I found “the boys” far more interesting than Katharine, whose role, however worthy, was supportive and secondary. As accomplished as she was, the story of man’s first powered, controlled aircraft flight belongs to her brothers, not to her. Katharine was an admirable woman, and her story was entertaining enough, but I would have better enjoyed this gripping history of flight in non-fiction, with an index and plenty of photographs.
Elizabeth Knowles
NO PERFECT MOTHERS
Karen Spears Zacharias, Mercer Univ. Press, 2024, $25.00, hb, 232pp, 9780881469196
Carrie Buck has not lived an easy life. Taken from her mother at a young age, she grows up amid neglect and abuse at the hands of foster parents, J. T. and Alice Dobbs. They label quiet Carrie as “stupid” and tell her from a young age that she’ll end up like her no-good mother. When Carrie is seventeen, she is assaulted by the Dobbses’ nephew. Fearful of the truth getting out and tarnishing their family’s reputation, they blame Carrie for the assault and resulting pregnancy. The Dobbses have her declared morally and mentally deficient by
a judge and committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Once at the colony, Carrie becomes the center of a court case, as those in charge argue for the right to sterilize her and prevent another generation of “deficients.”
No Perfect Mothers tells the story behind the notorious Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case (1927), which codified forced sterilization in the United States and gave legal validity to the eugenics movement. Zacharias does a nice job of revealing the real, human story behind the law. The difficulty with writing a novel centering on a real person and real historical events is that you are bound to the historical story, for better or for worse. Carrie Buck’s life was one of unyielding hardship, exploitation, and disappointment. As interesting as the history is, her story does not make for a satisfying character arc, and I found myself wishing for a different trajectory for her. The history of the eugenics movement and the consequences of the Buck v. Bell case are important and rich topics for historical fiction, but unfortunately not every historical figure makes for a compelling protagonist.
Jessica Brockmole
MULTI-PERIOD
A PLACE TO HIDE
Ronald H. Balson, St. Martin’s, 2024, $29.00/ C$39.00, hb, 304pp, 9781250282484
In the lead-up to World War II, the Nazi machine with its relentless intimidation and brutality seemed unstoppable. How could ordinary people with no access to military power find the means to stand up to it? And yet, repeatedly we come across stories of citizens who defied the Nazis and made a difference. Such was the story in the Netherlands, where ordinary Dutch people saved tens of thousands of Jewish children from death by secreting them away to families who adopted them and hid their Jewish identity.
In this fictionalized story of true events, reporter Karyn Sachnoff was one of the children separated from her family and adopted in the Netherlands during the war. She remembers a sister whom she desperately wants to find. Enter Burt Franklin in 2002, whose cousin, Teddy Hartigan, worked in the State Department in the Netherlands before the war. Burt arranges a meeting between Karyn and Teddy, now 94 years old. Teddy offers to help Karyn in her quest if she will write his memoirs for him. Told in dialogue, Teddy’s story of finding love with a young Jewish woman and her family is harrowing. Rather than leave the country when the other Americans flee, he stays to help save Jews. But as the occupation tightens its grip on the country, he and his family face increasing danger.
The book is packed with information about the plight of Jews in the Netherlands before and during the war, as well as myriad details and statistics about Hitler’s march to power. Though at times the research overwhelms
the story, readers will find this a compelling perspective on the bravery and perseverance of good people during horrific times.
Trish MacEnulty
THE GODDESS OF WARSAW
Lisa Barr, Harper, 2024, $30.00/C$37.00, hb, 368pp, 9780063382619
In 2005, Lena Browning is a Hollywood legend. Approached to tell her story for a biopic, she decides to let the truth of her life come out, starting with the revelation that Browning is not her real name: it’s the name of the gun she used to kill the Nazi who murdered her father. That’s because Lena was once Bina, Bina Blonski, a Polish Jew, in love with her husband’s brother, and more than ready to kill Nazis as part of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
While the bulk of the novel’s drama and action takes place in the war years, Bina’s story doesn’t end there. We follow her journey from Europe to Hollywood and learn how her scars, and her skills as an assassin don’t just disappear at the end of the war. There are Nazis in America, and Bina, even as she takes Hollywood by storm, is still on a mission, even perhaps into the 21st century.
For me this was a stellar read: a compulsive page turner with complex characters and diverse historical settings, all crisply rendered. Actual historical events are portrayed with sensitivity, notably the mass suicide of ninetythree Jewish girls and young women to escape forced prostitution and rape by Nazi forces. Lena/Bina is a wonderful character, full of dry wit, passion, anger and resolve. If you loved Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, then don’t miss this one. Highly recommended.
Kate Braithwaite
THEIR DIVINE FIRES
Wendy Chen, Algonquin, 2024, $28.00/ C$36.00/£22.00, hb, 288pp, 9781643755151
Yunhong grows up poor but happy in the Chinese countryside in the early years of the 20th century. An unexpected encounter with a local landowner’s son leads to love and promises for the future, a future that is interrupted by a violent peasant uprising on the day after Yunhong’s wedding. The trauma from that brutal day reverberate through the generations as her daughter Yuexin, twin granddaughters Yonghong and Hongxing, and great-granddaughter Emily all grapple with familial relationships, lost love, and
finding their own identities within an everchanging China.
This is a tightly-knit story of women—as mothers and daughters, as wives and lovers, and as the keepers of lore and mythology in an increasingly modernizing China. Through four generations of women, we see China’s history, from the Chinese Republic to the People’s Republic of China, from the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War and Japanese occupation to the changes brought about by the Cultural Revolution, from modern China to the politics of present-day America. Each woman narrates a childhood where the family’s tragic history impacts the adult she becomes. My one complaint is that I wish I could have spent longer with each narrator, but this is a credit to the author for rendering such engaging protagonists. A heartfelt family saga.
Jessica Brockmole
THE GLASSMAKER
Tracy Chevalier, Viking, 2024, $32.00/C$42.00, hb, 416pp, 9780525558279 / The Borough Press, 2024, £20.00, hb, 400pp, 9780008153861
Out of the Renaissance and the islands of Murano have come the world’s premier glass artisans, with Venice as the leading trade center. Each Murano family has their own secret recipes and techniques that are fiercely guarded and strictly confined to the island. Nine-year-old Orsola is the daughter of the Rosso glassmaking family. She is fascinated with the fire, sand, ash, and skill that combine to make the beautiful works of color and beauty. But the workshops and furnaces are strictly men’s domain. Orsola has the rare opportunity to learn the art of making glass beads. The glass is heated and shaped by a lamp and bellows, not the fierce fire of the furnace. This lampwork is disregarded by men and the beads as trivial “mouse shit.” But this women’s work is what puts food on the Rosso table as the production of significant glasswork falters and wanes.
Chevalier plays with the passage of time across centuries as she tells the story of the Rosso family and Murano glass. Beginning in 1486, during the height of glassmaking, Venice is the world’s hub for exporting Murano’s glass. As the narrative skips to 1574, 1631, 1755, 1797, 1915, 2019, and 2024, we learn how world events and the expansion of glassmaking to other countries impacted the industry, Murano, and Venice. We see the ins and outs, ups and downs of glassmaking –especially beadmaking. It is Orsola, her family,
and “those who matter” to her who, across 450 years, only age 60 years. We follow the Rossos through births, deaths, famine, wars, plagues, and economic changes. This is a clever and unique way to immerse the reader in the lives of a family while seeing the trajectory of glassmaking across centuries. Not only does Chevalier give us noteworthy characters and an immersive plot, she manipulates time expertly and believably: a remarkable read.
Janice Ottersberg
DESIDERIUM
Julie Furxhi, Independently published, 2024, $16.00/C$21.99, pb, 274pp, 9798988592419
Albania, bordered by the Adriatic and Ionian Seas to the west, Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, North Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south, is perhaps the European country of which we know the least. Not only was it hard to reach, but for most of the latter half of the 20th century it was a hardline totalitarian state with strict travel and visa restrictions.
All the more welcome is Julie Furxhi’s debut novel, which casts light on the country’s recent turbulent history as experienced by three young women: Mira, who joined the resistance against the Ottoman Empire in 1911; Val, who fought with the Partizans against the German occupiers in 1943/44; and Dita, an assistant curator of the Cave Artifacts Team in a Tirana museum in 2000, who treasures decoding the past’s mysteries.
Although heavily inspired by real people, the women in particular, all the characters are fictional. Mira and Val tell their own stories while Dita’s is a third-person narrative that in the end unites all three. Each story unfolds bit by bit, and this back and forth is at first confusing, but each woman has a unique voice. Furxhi is adept at conveying the customs and traditions of the different time periods through her language and phrasing so that Mira’s circumscribed life, ruled as it is by the Kanun, a compilation of customary laws within the tribes of Albania, is almost archaic compared with Dita’s post-communist, modern world. What all three women have in common is a fierce desire for freedom and a deep love of their native land, for which they willingly suffer sorrow and loss. However, this hardship is lightened by hope and golden moments of happiness. A valuable insight into a fascinating country. Strongly recommended. Catherine Kullmann
IN SILENCE CRIES THE HEART
Catherine Hughes, Austin Macauley, 2023, £11.99, pb, 290pp, 9781649797360
This is a dual-timeline novel that tells a passionate love story. In 17th-century Scotland, a cattle thief does not normally get the chance to fall in love with the daughter of the laird, but that is what happens between Mary McElroy and Donal Donn. Their instant passion is undeniable after a chance meeting in the forest. Their desire to be together conflicts with the plans of Mary’s father to strengthen his position by placing her in a political marriage. The most likely candidate is a hateful man who will do anything to destroy Donal and take Mary for himself. In 2018, Caitlyn is on a trip to Scotland when she comes across a love story from the past in an unusual way.
I adored the story of Mary and Donal. The writing is so powerful and poetic, and the dialect of the time fits the story perfectly. The verses that Donal pens for Mary while they are apart are beautiful. This love story grabbed me and kept me mesmerized until the end. Mary’s situation demonstrates the lack of choices for women at that time. I feel that the dual timeline, however, is not needed. The whole 2018 storyline is unnecessary and not fully developed, and Caitlyn’s character is not fleshed out. The story of Mary and Donal stands on its own, and the attempt to switch between the two timelines is jarring. It appears Caitlyn’s function was to bring a bit of magical realism to the story, but that could have been done without her. Nevertheless, I still highly recommend this captivating love story.
Bonnie DeMoss
THE CURSE OF THE FLORES WOMEN
Angélica Lopes, trans. Zoë Perry, Amazon Crossing, 2024, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 238pp, 9781662516139
What we love about historical fiction emerges in the opening pages of this novel: an intriguing location, unfamiliar circumstances, and vivid characters.
Translated from the Portuguese, it focuses on lace makers in 1918-19 in a rural Brazilian village. They live in a house with a pretty garden, so they’re referred to as the Flores women and eventually take the name officially. Besides their flower garden and the lace-making that gives them an independent income, they’re notorious for a curse handed down from their great grandmother, Das Dores, by a gypsy
whose man she married – all will be unlucky in love for seven generations. One way or another this proves true.
The Flores lace circle includes Inês, the daughter telling the story, and her blind younger sister, Cândida. Besides their mother and devout maiden aunt, the unrelated Victorina and Eugênie complete the circle. Inês’ friendship with her fellow teenager Eugênie intensifies the drama after Eugênie’s arranged marriage. In 2010, seven generations after Das Dores, Alice, an 18-year-old rebellious spirit, is given her ancestors’ heirloom lace veil and becomes involved in its story. Alice, who fights oppression herself, is fascinated by how her predecessors rebelled almost a century earlier, when women asserted their rights covertly, if at all.
Angélica Lopes’ dialogue and writing style keep our attention, and the book is full of charming details. For instance, Cândida “sees” through the birds that fly freely through their little house. Suspense is built around how the powers of church and patriarchy impact the women’s lives, sometimes to tragic effect. Making lace is a communal effort that takes on metaphorical significance here. Published by Amazon Publishing’s imprint for international novels and labeled as book club fiction, this highly recommended novel would prompt lively discussion.
Jinny Webber
THIRSTY GHOSTS
Emer Martin, Lilliput Press, 2024 (c2023), $24.99/£16.00, pb, 352pp, 9781843518631
Like ploughshares into swords, Emer Martin’s novel transforms storytelling and bearing witness into powerful weapons against cruelty and oblivion.
A sequel to Martin’s Cruelty Men, Thirsty Ghosts assembles a magnificent cast of characters from Irish history that recount their sufferings in memorable, highly individual voices. Ireland itself, in the person of the hag, gets to have her say. The numerous colourful strands of the narrative—alternating between violent assaults by the British in the past and the post-EEC Republic—come together in a richly patterned canvas that lays out before the reader a beautiful, albeit painful, portrait of the country. It adds to the profundity of the novel that the speakers are marginalized personalities, extending from murdered villagers of previous centuries to servants illused by the rich, and from the girls exploited in the Magdalene Laundries to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. But modern Ireland, too, enslaves. Parents sacrifice the welfare of their children to their political convictions. A former convent inmate, victimized by criminals, turns into an addict.
As the passages set during the remoter periods of history bring to light the string of atrocities committed by the British on Irish soil, they serve as the backdrop for the contemporary story that recounts the interconnected fates of two dynasties, the Dublin-based O Connails and the rural Lyons. What makes Thirsty Ghosts particularly special
is that in contrast to many other Irish novels, the Troubles are not only depicted from the Catholic perspective, but from the viewpoint of Jewish family members, whose outlook tends to be objective and cosmopolitan. In the end, though, they, too, fall victim to the vicious cycle of crime and retribution that continues to plague Ireland. Might the only hope lie with the young who are able to escape what for too long has been deemed the destiny of the Irish?
Elisabeth Lenckos
THIS STRANGE EVENTFUL HISTORY
Claire Messud, W.W. Norton, 2024, $29.99/ C$39.99, hb, 448pp, 9780393635041 / Fleet, 2024, £20.00, hb, 448pp, 9780349127057
This Strange Eventful History, inspired by the author’s grandfather’s memoir, is organized into seven decades, 1940–2010. The first half avoids showing the Cassar family together, partly due to their displacement by WWII, later by French Algeria’s war for independence. These pieds-noirs survive the war but are later snubbed as ‘Other’ in France. Thereafter the family members live separately and peripatetically across continents, creating the theme of the storyline: migration.
French Algerian Gaston and Lucienne Cassar are a devoted Catholic couple who prove the exemplar of love itself, which their son and daughter, François and Denise, can never fully understand or attain. Their lives are followed through isolated passages of youth (1950s–60s), middle age, failing health, and final years. While Denise remains the sad spinster reliant on her parents, François marries the Canadian Barbara, a marriage continually fraught with disappointment. But in their daughter, Chloe (a stand-in for the author herself), the story transforms through a first-person narrator voice and into a memoir of Messud’s father.
The fullness, ranging lengths, and stream of sentences suggest at times Virginia Woolf. While the novel’s throughline is chronological, it is also disjunct. From the first pages set in Salonica, consequences of war drive the original love story, similar in concept (three generations of family influenced by WWII) to Penelope Lively’s novel Consequences. But Messud’s approach to causality is much more diffused and her range of topics is wide: power of faith in religion, love, and family; familial and personal discontent; French colonialism; an ever-changing political world. A family secret is revealed in the epilogue, and prior to that, the last few chapters lay out the illnesses and dying of the two patriarchs, father and son, in loving if grueling detail.
Christina Nellas Acosta
THE SEVENTH VEIL OF SALOME
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Arcadia, 2024, £20.00, hb, 310pp, 9781529431018 / Del Rey, 2024, $28.99, hb, 336pp, 9780593600269
1950s Hollywood. Pacific Pictures requires
a special new talent to star as Salome on the silver screen, a sultry looker to dance that dance.
In Mexico, young Vera Larios gets a lucky break, gets invited to LA for the audition, gets the part. On set, most folks are sceptical, rude or downright racist, but Vera, quelling internal doubts, toughs it out; unbeknownst to her, two-bit aspiring starlet Nancy seethes with a scheming jealousy, loose woman becoming revengeful loose cannon. Meanwhile (albeit two millennia earlier) the real Salome, mired in bloodline politics, anticipates her own show-stopping performance. As the two stories progress, the girls’ families, passions and goals display sundry similarities. Recognising their true desires, they make their choices, their lives merging across time to culminate in, yes, that dance. Persistent suspense builds as they pursue their aims.
Both depictions of Salome’s life – that of the generally-agreed biblical tale and Hollywood’s attempts to bring it to the screen – are cleverly presented as named chapters, each one a storyline character, who take turns advancing the narrative, some written in the first person as if we’re observing an interview. Interwoven are Salome’s chapters that develop her 1stcentury timeline. Beautifully imagined realistic settings and speech in both eras are wholly redolent of their respective times, Salome with her opulence and intrigues, Hollywood with its decadence and danger. Los Angeles meets The Levant – it’s like watching two movies simultaneously. Truly remarkable, grippingly told, thoroughly recommended.
Simon Rickman
FORGOTTEN ON SUNDAY
Valérie Perrin, trans. Hildegarde Serle, Europa, 2024, $28.00, hb, 304pp, 9798889660187 France, 1919-2013. Twenty-one-year-old Justine works at The Hydrangeas, where she is a nursing assistant. Her favorite patient is Hélène, who is almost 100 years old. Hélène has led a fascinating life, and Justine records it for the elderly woman’s family. Hélène’s journey begins when she meets Lucien; together, they share a love that cannot be destroyed by war, separation, or time. When Lucien is arrested for harboring a Jew in occupied France and reportedly dies in a concentration camp, Hélène begins a years’ long search while serving village customers in the café she and Lucien own, refusing to give up hope she will see him again, her sole companion the stray dog abandoned by a German soldier. Meanwhile, Justine, orphaned as a child and raised by her grandparents, confronts the secrets of her past while investigating
the mysterious circumstances surrounding the car accident that killed her father and his twin brother and their wives. Also, someone is calling the families of The Hydrangea’s residents—relatives who never come to visit on Sunday—lying to them by telling them their loved one has died and they need to come to the home to take care of business. This, to force them into coming to visit. All of which has nothing to do with Justine herself.
Justine and Hélène’s threads are kept separate, with little interaction or emotional connection between the two women. Multiple viewpoints from other characters lead to a further feeling of disconnection. Throughout, Justine remains apart from the overall narrative and even from the man who adores her—an upstanding fellow she calls What’s-his-name. One wonders why he sticks by her, much as how I wondered why so many readers have embraced this book. This is Perrin’s first novel, published in France in 2015 and only now translated into English.
Alana White
BY ANY OTHER NAME
Jodi Picoult, Ballantine, 2024, $30.00, hb, 544pp, 9780593497210 / Random House Canada, 2024, C$40.00, hb, 544pp, 9781039002623 / Michael Joseph, 2024, £22.00, hb, 400pp, 9780241676042
Picoult’s novel is a dual-time interplay between Elizabethan poet, Emilia Bassano, and Melina Green, an aspiring contemporary playwright struggling in an artistic field dominated by men. Melina’s play about Emilia, entitled “By Any Other Name,” spotlights the necessity for Emilia to write anonymously, echoing Melina’s own experience. Unbeknownst to Melina, her roommate, a fellow playwright, submits the play to a fringe festival under a male alias. This ironically proves Melina’s point, as the play is showered with accolades because its subject is the cancellation of female agency as supposedly written, in soul-searing prose, by a man.
The story utilises dozens of literary references, mostly from works attributed to Shakespeare, whose authorship of the detailrich 37-play compilation we so esteem is a topic that scholars have argued about for centuries. But dwelling on what Shakespeare may not have done is not the objective. Instead, through meticulous and convincing research, Picoult’s narrative documents Emilia’s education, intellect, and life experience, making her the probable author of at least some of the works. The quotes from comedies, tragedies, and sonnets, the witty quips in Melina’s play, Ophelia’s herbal concoctions, and the use of particular names and places in specific plays are but a few intriguing links.
This is an excellent addition to Picoult’s thought-provoking novels of human struggle and conflict, but as beautifully crafted and compelling as the novel is, the last quarter feels drawn out. The contemporary story drifts towards sentimentality after some romantic fallout, and despite the obvious thematic
importance, Melina’s contemporary troubles pale in comparison to the monumental hardships of Emilia’s life, muting the overall effect. There are, however, many things to love here, especially for those who have a fondness for the classics and who will revel, as I did, in the long, leisurely sections about Emilia’s eventful life, giving a hitherto unknown writer the recognition she so justly deserves.
Fiona Alison
THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY
Elif Shafak, Knopf, 2024, $30.00, hb, 464pp, 9780593801710 / Knopf Canada, 2024, C$36.00, hb, 464pp, 9781039055865 / Viking, 2024, £18.99, hb, 496pp, 9780241435014
This is the story of a drop of water. Short? No.
Ranging widely through space and time— like water—British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak begins her new book with a Mesopotamian tyrant, moves to a Victorian archaeologist, and expands from there to include two contemporary characters, a Middle Eastern child and a floundering young British woman.
Two rivers run through it: the Tigris and the Thames. The main characters are Arthur, an intellectual born in the London slums; Narin, a non-Muslim Yazidi; and Zaleekhah, a water scientist of Middle Eastern heritage. As in a Victorian novel, various vivid secondary characters orbit around Arthur, Narin, and Zaleekhah, all three of whom that same water droplet touches in different ways.
A rich variety of other symbols link them, too: the ancient city of Nineveh, located in current Iraq; the epic of Gilgamesh; a rare lapis lazuli tablet; the fantastic Assyrian man//bull/eagle figures called lamassus, the cuneiform symbol for water; and Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of writing... and of grain. Glorious but tragic, the Middle East also links them. The cradle of civilization is, and often has been, the scene of terrible conflict and brutality, which affects all three main characters, as does the dark side of water—pollution, floods, drought, thirst.
“The story of humanity cannot be written without the story of water,” declares Arthur, perhaps the most fascinating character in the novel (and based on an actual Victorian prodigy). Shafak’s impressive research adds constant color to the text. So does her prose, decorated with frequent aphorisms and (always interesting) lists. The three stories of this modern epic ultimately converge and end. But as Shafak concludes, “The rivers in the sky... never cease to flow.”
Susan Lowell
TIMESLIP
THE FIRST LIGHTS OF EVENTIDE
Jaye Burke, Independently published, 2024, $15.00, pb, 341pp, 9798864304150
While exploring the remains of a historical
relic hidden by dense wilderness, Neely Shaw accidentally steps through a portal that takes her from 2016 to 1906. Suddenly, the collapsing structure is a new and bustling tourist attraction. Accompanied by architect Josh Carraway, she begins uncovering clues to the mysterious disappearance of a young woman who vanished without a trace. Is there a hand guiding their excursions to the past? When Neely and Josh become separated in time, Neely finds herself falling in love with a man from the past while also trying to uncover the reason she’s traveling through time.
Taking the point of view of a historical site project reviewer kicks off the story well. Many descriptions, however, are very broad. Much of the narration is expository. Many times, characters come to conclusions out of nowhere without any buildup or forethought into how their conclusions were made. One example is Neely’s insistence that she and Josh needed to hold hands while stepping through the portal. If they didn’t hold hands the first time, why the second time? The time travel aspect lacks any defined rules, making it hard to buy into. Additionally, everyone accepts time travel way too easily. While in the past, Neely keeps stumbling upon answers or meeting incredibly helpful people, so there is little tension in the plot. Any obstacles in her path are solved via simple solutions. There’s some repetition in the narrative with thoughts later being spoken aloud, often in the next paragraph. The entirety of Chapter Two feels unnecessary as everything is summed up in Neely’s later dialogue. Overall, the book could use further development. One final note: having a horse on an old farmstead named after Confederate General Lee and taking it to pick up a Black farmhand? This felt like an ill-considered choice.
J. Lynn Else
THE FALLEN FRUIT
Shawntelle Madison, Amistad, 2024, $28.00/ C$35.00/£20.00, hb, 448pp, 9780063290594
Madison’s new time-slip novel spotlights 200 years of the Bridge family history, from the 1760s to the 1960s. Cecily Bridge-Davis has never spoken to another Bridge family member, nor been told the fate of her father, but in 1964, she receives an unexpected inheritance—a 65-acre orchard in Virginia. This lonely, abandoned place tugs at her childhood memories, and when she discovers a worn mail carrier’s tote containing a carefully preserved bible, its unusual notations send her delving into her paternal history.
The first to fall (through time) was Luke, in 1770, his situation perhaps the beginning of the ‘curse’, but unique to the events which follow. After that, in each successive generation, one child born to each Bridge male falls to the family curse before age 27, disappearing without trace. No one knows who or when it will be, so preparedness is vital. In 1919, Isaiah is never without his heavy survival pack and rolled-up freedom papers,
but his sister, Millie, is quite sure it will be her until one day, when she and Isaiah are preparing packs and ‘Bridge rules’ for future travelers, Isaiah disappears. Now Millie alone must aid travelers who arrive at the orchard from future generations.
The division of dated chapters into five parts makes it easy to follow the remarkable history of the Bridge family, living together on sheltered acreage, with the fear of never knowing which of their children will fall, or how they can protect each other and assimilate their losses. Family anecdotes are compassionately narrated with limited plot threads, too many of which could easily overwhelm a story about multiple generations. I was drawn to the Bridge family lives through Luke’s astonishing story and Rebecca Raley-Bridge’s subsequent meticulous recordings in the family bible. Millie’s legacy is the revelation which spurs Cecily into a new determination about her previously unknown family. A poignant and beautifully realised journey through time.
Fiona Alison
HISTORICAL FANTASY
THE FAMILIAR
Leigh Bardugo, Flatiron, 2024, $29.99/ C$39.99/£20.00, hb, 400pp, 9781250884251
In late 16th-century Madrid, a scullion, hunched in submission with callous-worn hands, slaves away at the rundown Casa Ordoño, using bits of magic to get through her daily chores.
Luzia must go about her days without the “whiff of Jew” while keeping her magic hidden.
The Spanish Inquisition is ever-present. Her world goes awry when the bread burns. When it is presented golden brown, Valentina Ordoño realizes her servant has been hiding a talent that can help her acquire the social invitations and status she craves. It isn’t only the Ordoños who want to use Luzia for their own means, but also Antonio Pérez, King Philip’s former secretary, and the wealthy Víctor de Paredes.
De Paredes becomes her patron for a torneo (tournament) showcasing the magic skills of a chosen few. But the competitors must walk the line between miracles to please the king and church, and accusations of witchcraft by the Inquisition – all while someone is eliminating them. Guillén Santángel, Parades’s servant and henchman, is to prepare Luzia for the torneo. His white skin and white hair make him look otherworldly, “a creature carved from ice.” He is immortal – a familiar, someone who
“exist[s] only to serve others.” A centuriesold curse has doomed him to serve the De Paredes family throughout generations. As everyone around him lives and dies, he remains friendless. Luzia changes that. His heart is reminded to beat, and desire stirs as his physical appearance improves.
Luzia is shrewd and daring as she tiptoes through the dangerous world of informers and manipulators, navigating peril and betrayal at every turn. Starting as a villain, Valentina develops into a remarkable character. The intricate characters, an absorbing plot, and tender, heart-stirring love scenes, perfectly rendered, will have you falling in love with this delightful fantasy. Leigh Bardugo’s first adult standalone novel is inspired by her own family history.
Janice Ottersberg
THE FORMIDABLE MISS CASSIDY
Meihan Boey, Pushkin Press, 2024, £16.99, hb, 288pp, 9781805337553
1895: Miss Cassidy arrives in Singapore from Scotland. It is very, very hot. Her flamered hair glows in the equatorial sun. She and her ward are pulled through the streets on a rickshaw at a furious pace by a man whose waist, in her estimation, is less substantial than her own thigh.
Miss Cassidy’s ward is the frail Sarah Jane, who has lost her mother and no fewer than six siblings. Her troubled father, Captain Bendemeer, hires Miss Cassidy to tutor Sarah Jane in the ways of society. Miss Cassidy is no stranger to the East; she settles into her tasks with ease.
The unwary reader may be surprised when a naked woman glides through banana trees like a fish through water, opens a wide mouth full of sharp teeth to chomp on a human, and drinks his blood. Miss Cassidy is unfazed. She makes a note that she will see about it in the morning… and she does.
Having won one battle, she is soon drawn into another one – this time, she cares for two Chinese girls, and their widowed father is drawn to Miss Cassidy. Life is not easy, but Leda Cassidy is no ordinary heroine. She knows how to put strings, black iron needles, and salt – among other things – to good use, and she has family ties to fall back on. She can even converse with a Hindu Goddess.
En route to dispelling dark forces, Miss Cassidy introduces us to the scents, folklore, customs, and cityscape of multicultural Singapore, where a temple to the Chinese sea goddess, Mazu, completed by Indian workers, has a grill gate from Glasgow.
An afterword might have helped readers to appreciate some details (for example, landmarks referred to by now-replaced names), but this prize-winning book remains a highly entertaining mix of fantasy, romance and historical fiction.
A.K. Kulshreshth
THE HAUNTING OF HECATE CAVENDISH
Paula Brackston, St. Martin’s, 2024, $29.00/$39.00, hb, 368pp, 9781250284020
This novel begins a new fantasy series set in Hereford Cathedral, which houses the famed chained library, and the medieval masterpiece, the Mappa Mundi. In 1881, Hecate Cavendish is eagerly beginning her adult life with her first job as the cathedral’s assistant librarian. Over the next few days, she senses peculiarities to which the chief librarian is not privy. While reverently cleaning the map frame, her fleeting touch sets off restless movement fluttering through the various depictions. The little griffin leaves his one-dimensional home, circumnavigates the library, and comes to rest on her shoulder, soon becoming an ally. With the advent of these strange occurrences, Hecate’s life takes a different turn, her only confidant being her archaeologist father, who has been chasing elusive artifacts most of his life and admits he has been longing for her inherent ‘gift’ to blossom. Brother Michael, the ghostly, centuries-old resident of the library, comes to Hecate’s aid. When the crypt is broken into, the police inspector agrees with Hecate’s speculation that, rather than someone breaking into the tombs, something has clearly broken out.
Brackston is an evocative writer and always mistress of an imaginative story, imbuing multifaceted characters with warmth and relatability. She adds charming imagery to her surprisingly human ghosts; Brother Michael’s ethereal makeup allows him to turn pages using only his ghostly breath, so if he spills loose folio leaves, Hecate tidies up. Hecate is an intelligent, principled protagonist, with a willingness to fight evil to her last breath, as the novel ventures into darker territory than Brackston’s previous novels. As with her Found Things series, I loved the marvelous believability of it all, although I did not expect so many unfinished threads at the conclusion, or to have to wait to discover who is responsible for all this mayhem. But, wait and anticipate, I must!
Fiona Alison
THE CAUTIOUS TRAVELLER’S GUIDE TO THE WASTELANDS
Sarah Brooks, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024, £16.99, hb, 369pp, 9781399607537
Sarah Brooks’s novel is a historical fantasy novel, set at the end of the 19th century, which follows an eclectic cast of characters on their journey on the Great Trans-Siberian Express as it crosses the deadly wastelands between Beijing and Moscow. They include Marya Petrovna, a grieving woman with a borrowed name; Zhang Weiwei, a renowned child who was born and abandoned on the train; and Henry Grey, a naturalist seeking redemption. Each of these characters wrestles with their own secret histories, but as rumours begin to swirl about an incident that occurred during
the train’s last crossing, causing fears about its safety to arise amongst the passengers, it gradually becomes apparent that perhaps theirs are not the only mysteries waiting to be solved.
Brooks invites her readers aboard the train and shares with them a tale rich with mystery and wonder. The landscape of the dangerous wastelands is alluring, and readers will undoubtedly be eager to uncover more and more about the magic and creatures that reside there. Yet, the view out of the window is certainly not the only site of interest; indeed, equally compelling is the setting of the train itself. Whilst the aforementioned three named characters centre the novel and act to drive the plot forwards, Brooks does not neglect to provide the people that surround them with such depth that she convincingly captures the intimate and familiar nature of life aboard a train – life that is shaped by the pervading presence of capitalism and the legacies of colonialism. Within Brooks’ captivating tale of a train journey through the fantastical and perilous wastelands, therefore, she also delivers a vibrant critique of modernity, which questions what it means to be living in an age of ever-developing technological advancements.
Athena Heavey
SONG OF THE HUNTRESS
Lucy Holland, Tor, 2024, £16.99, hb, 408pp, 9781529077407 / Redhook, 2024, $19.99/ C$25.99, pb, 448pp, 9780316321655
This novel takes us on an exhilarating ride with the Wild Hunt and the 8th-century warrior queen of Wessex, Æthelburg. The novel draws on the history and geography of 8thcentury Wessex and Dumnonia but adds a thread of fantasy in its engagement with the scop Emrys and the stories of Annwn from the Mabinogion
The story begins at Taunton and moves to Wilton, Glastonbury, Exeter and Tintagel, as Æthelburg and her husband King Ine fight to retain control of Wessex. Æthelburg is aided by, and strongly attracted to, Herla, the Lord of the Wild Hunt. The story is told through the eyes of the three protagonists: Æthelburg, Ine and Herla. Herla is fighting to regain her humanity after many years of being cursed to reap souls, ‘to live as a wordless bloodlusting beast’. Hundreds of years before, Herla was an Eceni female warrior and the lover of Boudica, and now she desires Æthelburg. She moves with ‘the dangerous grace of a wildcat’. There is a wonderful handling of the charged desire between Æthelburg and Herla, and the mutual love and pain between Æthelburg and Ine.
Holland’s writing vividly depicts Herla’s hall inside the Tor of Glastonbury:
‘At the top of the hall is a bench, its back formed of two rearing stags, hooves raised like pugilists. It is a wild seat, and the figure upon it is wild, almost too real to look at … A hunter’s eyes, fierce and afire, pulled from the wilderness where humans should not go… Mercilessness would be at home there … Her arms are inked…’
She conjures up the fearsome Wild Hunt as it ‘wheels upwards, their hooves trampling clouds still saturated with night’. This is irresistible storytelling. I was reluctant to part from Herla, Ine, and Æthelburg at the novel’s close. Highly recommended.
Tracey Warr
GORSE
Sam K. Horton, Solaris, 2024, £18.99, hb, 400pp, 9781837860715
1781 – Mirecoombe, Cornwall. Salan Dell is found dead on the moor, a red handprint around his neck. He is the fifth to be murdered in such a way, despite the protection offered by the tokens embedded within the very fabric of the buildings and the signs etched on the walls.
There are three people in search of the murderer: Lord Pelagius Hunt – Pel to his friends, the Reverend Cleaver, and Nancy Bligh. Pel is the Keeper, who has mediated for countless years between the humans and Them – the brownies, pixies and spriggands –who are unseen by most but whose help has, until now, been gratefully accepted in the fields, on the moor and in the house.
The Reverend Cleaver brooks no tolerance of the old ways and is determined to prove that the little people do not exist, despite evidence to the contrary. Nancy Bligh has been brought up by Pel and has learned a lot of his magic but still has a lot to learn. She has within her, however, the Murmur, a dangerous magic far greater than any of Pel’s, which she cannot yet control.
This is a story about belief, love, grief, friendship and tolerance and is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Every word is wonderful and full of wonder. The magic sizzles off the page, and the reader is utterly drawn into Horton’s world by his stunning descriptions of the landscape, the elements, the humans and of Them. Highly recommended.
Marilyn Pemberton
THE MELANCHOLY OF UNTOLD HISTORY
Minsoo Kang, William Morrow, 2024, $28.00/ C$35.00, hb, 240pp, 9780063337503
It’s hard to put a label on this playful, moving narrative by a professor of history, but fans of time-hopping historical novels like Cloud Atlas will recognize all the elements they love about the genre in this blend of myth, history, postmodern metafiction, and philosophy.
Minsoo Kang draws on his global travels and deep study of both Eastern and Western history to create a many-layered story-within-
a-story that spans millennia, dynasties, and the blurry line between fiction and history. It’s not a doorstop saga, however – this is an elegantly constructed short novel that imagines the consequences of a pre-historical dispute among four heavenly beings and the ways in which the humans that come after replicate that discord in their daily lives. Our anchor to the present moment is a fictional historian who is working through his grief over losing his wife, with the help of a compassionate friend, by trying to find sources for the myths that explain why loss and suffering exist in the world.
Careful readers will recognize myths and folktales from all cultures, but especially those of East Asia, reflected in both the story of the historian’s groundbreaking research, and the narratives he examines. The historian’s present-day world is similar to but not the same as our own, so a layer of historical fantasy overlays the novel’s meditations on how scholars of the past struggle to separate fact from fiction in the documents they study.
This may sound more “meta” than some readers want from a historical novel, but the author’s tone is both humorous and poignant, the stories-within-the-story are rich with adventure and detail, and the guiding philosophy will resonate with any reader who thinks about the difficulty of reconciling one’s past memories with one’s present reality. This is a unique and moving reading experience that I found enchanting.
Kristen McDermott
LE FAY
Sophie Keetch, Magpie, 2024, £16.99, hb, 424pp, 9780861547005 / Random House Canada, $19.00/C$26.00, pb, 432pp, 9781039011953
This is the second in Keetch’s Arthurian trilogy, and I have rarely been so impressed by the technical skill of an author; I went straight out to buy the first book. What I loved was the character arc, which starts with Morgan as a young woman, rather naive, with a talent for healing that goes a little beyond the norm; loving working with her dazzling brother for the good of Camelot, and grateful for his protection against her brutish husband. The pace ramps up, insult by insult, until she is an embittered sorceress, everyone she has loved (with the exception of her household) ripped from her, and she is sworn to destroy the empty gold shell that her brother rules over. Through all of this, you are on her side; you feel the pain of each blow dealt her, and see the logic of the steps she takes to counter them. Keetch lets us feel the joy as well as the
pain, in a wholly sympathetic rendering of a woman whose name has been besmirched by time. I was delighted to find that Merlin was the baddie – and a thoroughly dislikeable one; and thrilled to discover some of the old faerie magic in the tale.
I will now wait with no patience at all for the third to be released.
Nicky Moxey
FLIGHTS OF TREASON
Judith Starkston, Bronze Age Books, 2024, $16.99, pb, 514pp, 9798990249905
Queen Tesha is experiencing family issues, political challenges, and new doubts about her own maternal and magical abilities. She and her husband are rulers of a small realm which is subject to the Great King of the Hitolian Empire. The Great King is her husband’s nephew, and there has long been bad blood between them. Tesha’s daughter and her aunt, Tesha’s blind sister, possess sorcerous powers similar to the queen’s own. One or both of them have been magically communicating with dangerous and powerful griffins. Meanwhile, the Great King has been visited by suspicious emissaries from the rival Egaryan Empire, which further complicates the already precarious situation for Tesha and, indeed, all of the Hitolian people. Somehow Tesha must find a way to save her family and homeland.
This book, fourth in a series, is set in an imaginary off-world empire based loosely around the Hittites and Egyptians, though it is unlikely either of the latter two ever made use of sorcery or mythical griffins as extensively and prominently as takes place here. In one case, a beloved family pet described as having a “cat body, deer hooves, bat wings, and eagle head,” is effectively employed as an aerial intelligence collection platform to support a siege operation. Recommended for fans of all-powerful goddesses, nefarious spirits targeting young girls, majestic queens, magical priestesses, little princesses and talkative, but often dangerous, griffins.
Thomas J. Howley
CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULT
NUSH AND THE STOLEN EMERALD
Jasbinder Bilan, Chicken House, 2024, £7.99, pb, 274pp, 9781915947024
Like the start of a Bond movie, the reader is swept into this story as Anushka races bareback through the Indian desert dawn on her pony. She and her twin brother are out without permission, defying the wrath of their father –the Maharajah. As they scramble back to the palace, they glimpse officers of the East India Company, who pose an unexplained threat. The scene is set for a pacy action adventure in which Nush travels as a stowaway to the court of Queen Victoria, in search of a huge
emerald stolen from her family by officers of the Raj.
From Nush’s palace home with its ornate jali screens allowing cooling breezes, we are transported to a very different place. London is described through her Indian eyes as having ‘streets filled with horses, and smoke rising into the sky like funeral pyres’. With her royal heritage, Nush proudly enters the Royal household as an equal. (The grand paintings must be the Queen’s family “placed, just as ours are, for all to see.”) Befriended by the royal children, Nush’s quest takes her into fascinating situations such as the royal box at the theatre, riding by carriage to St Paul’s and staying with Prince Albert on the Isle of Wight.
The narrative, as the author notes, is based on an actual visit by the Maharaja of Coorg and his daughter to Queen Victoria in 1852. Like Nush’s papa, he came to enlist the Queen’s help to get his kingdom back from the East India Company. This dark period of colonial history is cleverly sketched alongside Anushka’s attempts to recover the gemstone that has spiritual meaning to her country. The story is a page-turner, involving detective work, rooftop chases and underground escapes. An exciting read from an awardwinning writer for readers 9+.
Marion Rose
AN ETROG FROM ACROSS THE SEA
Deborah Bodin Cohen and Kerry Olitzky, illus. Stacey Dressen McQueen, Kar-Ben Publishing, 2024, $19.99, hb, 32pp, 9798765604496
Young Leah and Aaron receive a letter from their Papa, who is sailing from Corsica to colonial New York. He promises to bring home an etrog, a fruit traditionally used in the Sukkot holiday, and hopes to arrive in time to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with his family. When he does not return as scheduled, the children worry and argue. This story provides readers a slice of life from American colonial times while at the same time being childrelatable with the references to sibling rivalry. The illustrations are well done and reflect the folk art of the period. I learned about a Jewish holiday that I didn’t know about previously, but I wish there had been more of an explanation about the holiday and where the tradition of creating a sukkah comes from, even if only addressed in the back matter. Ages 4-10.
Bonnie Kelso
LION OF THE SKY
Ritu Hemnani, Balzer + Bray, 2024, $19.99/ C$24.99, hb, 416pp, 9780063284487
Coached by his kind grandfather in the art of kite flying, shy Raj, 12, is desperate to prove himself, since he keeps failing at the things his father prizes—being bold, and math skills. With Iqbal, his Muslim best friend, by his side, Raj (Hindu) lives an idyllic life. The boys fly kites, climb mango trees, cool their feet in the Indus River, and sneak delicious sweets to each other. The boys are excited about both
the Kite Festival–which Raj intends to win—and India’s upcoming independence from British rule.
But it’s 1947, and Britain draws a line on the map to split the country into two: Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. Independence Day brings religious strife and violent street clashes. In a matter of days, some fourteen million people are displaced, forced to leave their homes, their belongings, and their livelihoods behind.
Written in lyrical free verse sprinkled liberally with Sindh words, Lion of the Sky captures the mixed feelings of a young boy trying to find his place in the world, complicated by the chaos and heartbreak of national upheaval. It’s a tough story to read at times, but all the events are handled in a way that’s not too graphic for readers 12-14.
Lisa Lowe Stauffer
THE BRIGHTWOOD CODE
Monica Hesse, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2024, $18.99/C$24.99/£14.99, hb, 336pp, 9780316045650
Eighteen-yearold Edda St. James spends her nights working in the rigidly controlled job of telephone operator and her days sleeping to forget what happened during her recent war service near the front lines in France.
She’s barely coping when an anonymous phone call brings up a word that haunts her: “Brightwood.” As she works to find the caller, other mysteries surface, including one her attractive but flippant friend Theo seems to be hiding. With war and treatment of women in the forefront, these mysteries twist in unexpected ways, keeping the truth from the reader until the very end.
This was a book I couldn’t put down. Edda is a very engaging and sympathetic character, as are her problems and dilemmas. If you’re looking for a nostalgic look back at a teenager’s life in 1918, this is not the book for you. With clear-eyed focus, the author brings us deep into the mind of a scarred, depressed young woman who believes herself to be at fault for things she had no control over. The book contains a content note that the story “touches on many issues that remain all-tooprevalent today, including misogyny, grief, PTSD, bullying, and sexual assault.” While none of these are graphic, they run like threads through the book, in a way that resonates still today.
This story will show teens that their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers were
once teens, too, with the same emotions and struggles they deal with today. Young adult. Lisa Lowe Stauffer
THE DAY MADEAR VOTED
Wade Hudson, illus. Don Tate, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2024, $18.99, hb, 32pp, 9780593615744
In 1969 Louisiana, Madear votes for the first time. Previously, Jim Crow laws prevented Black citizens from voting through poll taxes, reading tests, and other unfair practices. But now, Madear can finally vote. She takes her two young sons with her, and she continues to vote, year after year. In 2008, she helps elect the first Black president.
This picture book’s beautiful, bright, fullpage illustrations celebrate one Black woman’s voting journey. Each page contains clear, accurate prose teaching the history of Black Americans and elections, and the importance of voting. Ages 3-7.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
A CRANE AMONG WOLVES
June Hur, Feiwel & Friends, 2024, $19.99/ C$26.99, hb, 368pp, 9781250858108
This dense but fast-moving YA adventure begins with 17-year-old Iseul staggering through the forest of medieval Korea, desperate to find and rescue her sister. The teen feels partially responsible for her lovely sibling’s abduction by the minions of the evil king, Yeonsan, whose reign (1495-1506) is recorded in history as one of the most violent and despotic in the turbulent history of that nation.
Iseul’s saga is told in her own cranky, headstrong voice, alternating with scenes that focus on the idealistic Prince Daehyun, the only surviving brother of the savage king. The two protagonists survive a perilous initial meeting to become reluctant allies in a conspiracy to topple the reign of Yeonsan, and also solve the mystery of the identity of a serial killer who is targeting members of the Royal Council (which includes Daehyun). Iseul must find a way to assist Daehyun and his mentor, the sage detective Wonsik, before the killer strikes at the prince she feels increasing attraction to—and before her sister succumbs to the vicious appetites of the king.
The setting, as the author admits, is intense and grim for a YA novel, but Hur lightens it with her energetic, dryly witty characters and a truly moving romance. Details of daily life in Korea raise the stakes for Iseul’s commitment to saving it from its own wicked king, even without the reader’s connection to the growing
love between Daehyun and Iseul to maintain interest. This is a compelling narrative about a neglected but fascinating place and time that the author convincingly argues can serve to inspire its young readers to work for peace and justice.
Kristen McDermott
THE COLOR OF A LIE
Kim Johnson, Random House Books for Young Readers, 2024, $19.99/C$26.99, hb, 336pp, 9780593118801
This young-adult book, set in 1955, is perfect for anyone struggling to embrace who they are. When high-school junior Calvin Greene is uprooted from his life in Chicago after a tragedy befalls his family, he has to pass as white in a suburban 1950s American town. Levittown is picture-perfect—no picket fences, but there might as well be, with the line dividing Calvin from his neighbors that everyone else is blind to. As if fleeing his old neighborhood wasn’t enough, now Calvin must choke back everything that makes him who he is to fit into this all-white Pennsylvania town.
Spots of brightness amongst Calvin’s worryridden days are his crush Lily Baker, and the Black friends he makes across town. Hiding takes its toll. And when he finds out that Levittown is riddled with secrets, will Calvin be able to protect his family and the people who are starting to make his new life feel like a home?
Kim Johnson explores the context in which historical events and ideology impact regulations, practices, the social justice system, and social institutions from the 1950s up to this day, through the eyes of a teenage protagonist. As Johnson says in the note in the introduction: “[I] use my writing to unearth a hidden history some might prefer to keep buried. I invite you to enter this novel, its setting a symbol of countless communities, and join Calvin Greene on his journey through Color of a Lie.” It is a journey well worth taking.
Ellaura Shoop
TWO PIECES OF CHOCOLATE
Kathy Kacer, illus. Gabrielle Grimard, Second Story Press, 2024, $21.95, hb, 36pp, 9781772603682
While trying to escape Paris during World War II, Francine and her mother are arrested and end up in Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp. Starving and unsure of whom to trust, Francine’s mother reveals to her that she has two pieces of chocolate she is saving for when Francine really needs them. Francine meets Hélène, who is hiding her pregnancy from the guards for fear of execution. The women in the camp rally around Hélène to help her and her baby survive. This dramatic story is based on accounts from Holocaust survivors. Twelve-year-old Francine’s voice is well written, giving children a sense of what it was like to be captive in a concentration camp without going into too much of the horrors. Author Kathy Kacer focuses on the tiny miracles and gifts of
kindness that can prevail even under the most unimaginable of situations. Ages 9-12.
Bonnie Kelso
PUGGLETON PARK
Deanna Kizis, illus. Hannah Peck, Penguin, 2024, $6.99/C$9.50, pb, 144pp, 9780593661246
Penelope the pug lives a happy life with her Lady in nineteenth-century London. During a picnic in Puggleton Park, a squirrel steals a raspberry tart. Penelope chases the squirrel and becomes lost. Days pass without Penelope and her Lady being reunited, but Penelope is resilient, eventually helping another Lady and finding another home. Will Penelope find her original owner? Will she want to leave her wonderful new owner?
Children will enjoy and relate to the delightful Penelope. Her adventures are suspenseful without being frightening. The simple vocabulary, with a few words explained, make this accessible for early readers. The illustrations (some full page, some partial page) show Penelope in all her cuteness, as well as the Regency-era setting through clothing and carriages. Ages 7-10.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
KILL HER TWICE
Stacey Lee, Putnam, 2024, $19.99/C$26.99, hb, 400pp, 9780593532041
Hold on to your hats—this is a thrilling mystery no one should miss.
Forget the first sentence, just the title “Kill Her Twice” is a stroke of genius and a wonderful hook.
When Lulu Wong, a famous young actress in 1932 Los Angeles, is found dead, you’d think there would be an intense investigation by the police. But they don’t want to be bothered with the Chinatownoriginating girl’s demise. May and Gemma, former friends and neighbors of the movie star, discover her body. They will have to lead their own investigation if they want to discover the truth. Shining a spotlight on the harsh realities faced by residents of the thenvoiceless Chinatown, this work of young adult fiction can provide insight to all audiences. May and Gemma have their work cut out for them on this case as all signs point to a heinous cover-up and the intent of some of the local authorities to paint Chinatown as a den of criminals. Can May and Gemma save their home in the midst of investigating their friend’s murder?
This at times heartwarming and tragic tale, with two instantly relatable protagonists in the teenage sisters May and Gemma, Kill
Her Twice won’t give readers a moment of peace until they find out who could have killed Lulu… and if by investigating they’re next on a murderer’s hit list.
Ellaura Shoop
TREE. TABLE. BOOK.
Lois Lowry, Clarion, 2024, $18.99/ C$23.99/£12.99, hb, 208pp, 9780063299504
This small masterpiece makes a moving, subtle statement.
In her latest middle-grade novel, Lois Lowry, a twotime Newbery Award winner (for Number the Stars and The Giver) and the author of over 50 much-lauded books, has done it again. Dealing effortlessly—and amusingly— with the tough topic of dementia, Tree. Table. Book. packs a big punch, even for readers well beyond her target audience.
Deceptively simple, it tells the story of two Sophies who are neighbors and best friends, although one is 11 and the other is 88. To young Sophie Winslow’s consternation, Sophie Gershowitz is becoming forgetful and is at risk of being moved to assisted living. So 11-yearold Sophie tries to help her. Sassy, smart, and sweet, young Sophie tells this story, which is both hilarious and sad.
Lowry is famous for dealing with difficult subjects in her work, which has occasionally been banned, and as young Sophie encourages older Sophie to delve into her long-term memories, it becomes clear that this is also a novel about surviving the Holocaust. Three brilliantly told stories from Sophie’s Polish childhood form the climax of the novel, contrasting very effectively with young Sophie’s charming, insouciant 21stcentury kid voice (captured to perfection by the 87-year-old Lowry).
And this is a novel about storytelling itself. Young Sophie sets out confidently to write it: “You need all the obvious stuff,” she says, “characters, setting, plot ...” It’s “like making spaghetti sauce.” But by the end, she is wiser and more rueful. Besides the simple ingredients, “you have to put in the feelings. That’s the secret. That’s the hard part.”
In a final note, Lowry shows her hand (a little). Tree. Table. Book is “about memory,” she says, “and how it becomes story.”
Susan Lowell
SALIMAN AND THE MEMORY STONE
Erica Lyons, illus. Yinon Ptahia, Apples & Honey, 2024, $18.95, hb, 32pp, 9781681156316
Saliman is a young boy when his family
decides to emigrate from Yemen to Jerusalem as part of the First Aliyah in 1881. He takes a stone from his home’s foundation so he’ll remember where he came from. The trek is long, hot, and hard. Eventually they arrive at the golden city of Jerusalem.
The text is simple and melodic. The full-page color illustrations are bright and beautiful and make clear the love of family and the difficulties of the journey. Ages 4-7.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
MAMA’S CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS
Dionna L. Mann, Margaret Ferguson Books/ Holiday House, 2024, $17.99, hb, 208pp, 9780823455553
In 1930s Charlottesville, Virginia, ten-yearold Allie Lewis hatches a not-very-subtle plan to find a suitable husband for her mother, alone since Allie’s “no-good nobody” father ran off and got killed. How better to tempt a man than with her mother’s chicken and dumplings? But when romance begins to bloom, it’s not with Allie’s favored candidate, but with the uncle of Gwen, a classmate and school-band rival whom Allie heartily detests.
Narrated in a lively manner by Allie and set in Charlottesville’s Black neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, this is a charming and heartwarming novel, yet one that subtly reminds us from time to time of the indignities of the Jim Crow era. Allie, her friends, and her family are engaging, and it’s good to see teachers portrayed as positive role models. Vinegar Hill, mostly lost in the 1960s to “urban renewal,” is vividly portrayed. I did sometimes struggle to remember that the novel was set in the 1930s, instead of a decade earlier or later, as the occasional mentions of a popular movie or song furnish the only clues to the era. But that is an adult’s quibble about something that would likely not bother young readers at all. Middle grade.
Susan Higginbotham
VEENA AND THE RED ROTI
Namita Moolani Mehra, illus. Beena Mistry, Kids Can Press, 2024, $21.99, hb, 40pp, 9781525307355
Young Veena learns that freedom can have dramatic consequences when she and her family are forced to emigrate after the 1947 Partition of India. India, now free from British colonization, divides into two nations, one for Muslims and one for Hindus. The family leaves their lush seaside home with very little to start a new life in Delhi. In the dreary migration camps, Veena finds ways to work with the dry red flour they are given to make the tastiest rotis she can, bringing hope and comfort to those around her. Delightfully written, the story is based on the author’s grandparents’ journey. Fascinating back matter includes details of her family’s experiences, a glossary, and historical context. The story engages the senses as bangles jingle-jangle over the buttery smell of ghee as Veena kneads, rolls,
turns, flips, and stacks the rotis. A colorful, child-friendly take on a complex historical subject not often seen in children’s literature. Ages 4-8.
Bonnie Kelso
EYES OPEN
Lyn Miller-Lachmann, Carolrhoda Lab, 2024, $19.99/C$27.99, hb, 352pp, 9798765610114
Eyes Open tells the story of 1966-67 Portugal, an era and place that most history books skip. In this land, the Leader’s photo is alongside the Crucifix, emphasizing a not-to-be-debated hierarchy of obedience: “
God
Leader
Landowner
Boss
Father
Husband
. . . we, the foolish girls.”
When the story opens, Sónia Dias, 16, starts a poetry club at her Catholic school. Sónia’s free verse is in praise of her hero-her revolutionary printer/artist boyfriend Zé Miguel. She hides these poems from all but her best friend.
Zé Miguel’s arrest begins a cycle of loss for the whole Dias family. Increasingly Sónia’s certainty becomes uncertainty . “Who is a hero? Who deserves a poem?” Sónia asks herself and the reader. As the story moves her from Catholic schoolgirl, to working in a hotel laundry, she sees the world ever more clearly.
Told in free verse, Sónia has a growing awareness that true freedom means not only living without fear of the PIDE (police), but also living in equality with men, instead of being considered “one twenty-fourth of a man.” (A reference to the Bible story about how Eve was created from Adam’s rib.)
With graphic details, and the deep emotions of a teenager, this story realistically brings both Sónia and her patriarchal, authoritarian country to life. The free verse format, the true-to-life emotions, and Sónia’s grueling hardships make this a compelling read for anyone teenage or older.
Lisa Lowe Stauffer
UPRISING
Jennifer A. Nielsen, Scholastic, 2024, $18.99/ C$24.99, hb, 356pp, 9781338795080
World War II began in 1939 with the ferocious invasion of Poland by Germany, Russia, and the Slovak Republic. Thirty-five days later, Poland was an occupied nation. Although the Polish military was destroyed, the spirit of resistance still breathed among the Polish people.
In Uprising, author Nielsen recounts the brave story of twelve-year-old Lidia, who, after her father leaves to join the Polish army
and her brother joins the resistance in Warsaw, is moved to do whatever she can to help her people. She begins by smuggling food to the Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the Jewish uprising in the ghetto is violently put down by the Nazis, Lidia is emboldened to join in the citywide uprising a year later. Too young to be a fighter, the resistance at first uses her as a courier, and to smuggle weapons and messages to fighters throughout the city. But her bravery soon gives her a more dangerous role in the fight against the Nazis.
Based on the true-life adventures of Lidia Zakrzewski, this novel is an exciting pageturner. The history is well researched but never becomes heavy-handed. There are important themes underlying the history as Lidia discovers courage she never knew she had, not only in fighting enemies but in choosing her own path away from a mother from whom she feels estranged. This thrilling and moving novel is highly recommended.
John Kachuba
JUST ONE GIRL
Trinka Hakes Noble, illus. Amanda Calatzis, Sleeping Bear Press, 2024, $18.99/C$25.99, hb, 40pp, 9781534113046
Fourth-grader Jillian Parker gets laughed at when she signs up for Math Club because only boys are in that club. Conversations with her neighbor, her mother, and a teacher show her the historical and modern difficulties of being a woman, and the need to fight for equal rights. A straightforward story with a good message. Illustrations are full page and colorful, and display characters in 1970s style clothing. Ages 5-9.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
ANGEL OF GRASMERE
Tom Palmer, illus. Tom Clohosy Cole, Barrington Stoke, 2024, £7.99, pb, 208pp, 9781800902169
Tarn’s brother, Joss, is believed to have died in the retreat from Dunkirk. In this novel, set between 1940 and 1942, we find out what actually happened to Joss and the consequences of that for him and his family. We meet Tarn, Joss’s younger sister, on the day of his memorial service. Aged eleven, she is lost in grief and rage. As a girl, she is not even allowed in the church for her brother’s military memorial.
Tarn’s only solace in her grief is her friendship with Peter and Eric, the evacuee who is staying with him. Tarn and Peter have always said that they will go off exploring far-flung places together when they have both passed the local grammar school exam. Will this happen, or will events intervene, and who is the anonymous angel of Grasmere who performs good deeds for the community at an increasingly dark time?
This is a beautifully crafted novella, longer than is usually published by Barrington Stoke. It deals with some serious themes such as PTSD and the notion of cowardice in war as well as what happens when someone is recovering
from a serious accident. The two overarching themes are grief and identity, however.
Tom Palmer has a reputation for writing skilfully about war – in this book it is richly deserved.
Rebecca Butler
THE VOYAGE OF SAM SINGH
Gita Ralleigh, Zephyr, 2024, £8.99, pb, 272pp, 9781804545522
This middle-grade adventure is the second of Gita Ralleigh’s fantasies set in an alternate India. Land pirate Sam Singh is on a quest to find his brother, Moon, imprisoned in the ‘Octopus’ by colonial occupiers on the Isle of Lost Voices. Sam and his multi-lingual parrot, Suka, get a passage aboard the Yellow Pearl as the servant of the Collector, a grumpy anthropologist who has a dubious interest in the skulls of indigenous peoples’ ancestors. On board ship, Sam is befriended by the Princess of Moonlally and her servant, Sparrow, who turn out to be on a quest of their own. Sam and the Collector are guided into the Isle’s interior to stay with the forest people by Lola, who is learning to be a shaman and communicate with the spirit world. Lola and the Princess help Sam in his quest, but they must defeat prison guards and sea pirates led by the infamous Jalai Rajah.
The pace improves as we move toward an engaging climax with a surprise turn. Sam and the Princess attempt a prison break while Lola attempts the dangerous task of returning the lost souls of the skulls to their rest. Sam’s quest involves themes of brotherhood, friendship across cultural divides, the powerful presence of ancestors, and how rectifying colonial damage is an enduring project.
Ralleigh contrasts a range of indigenous voices – princesses, thieves and shamans – with those of the occupiers – the Governor, the Collector and the prison Superintendent. All of these voices are beautifully differentiated, showing how the world views of conqueror and conquered are unbridgeable without the kind of second sight achieved by the shaman, who can fully enter into the world of the ‘other’ and hear their stories.
Louise Tree
MEDICI HEIST
Caitlin Schneiderhan, Feiwel & Friends, 2024, $20.99/C$27.99, hb, 432pp, 9781250907189 / Atom, 2024, £16.99, hb, 432pp, 9780349125398
As the title suggests, this novel is a playful historical pastiche in the spirit of A Knight’s Tale. Set in 1517, the story centers on the return to Florence of the Medici pope, Leo X, and his plan to punish the city that exiled his family with crippling indulgences that will also enrich him. When seventeen-year-old con artist Rosa Cellini gets wind of the pope’s scheme, she decides to steal the fortune for herself.
The book is told from the multiple points of view of the gang of misfits Rosa assembles for the heist. The diverse voices include Sarra, who lives a double life as the virtuous sister of a master printer by day and a tinker who makes
weapons for the underworld by night. Khalid, a brawler who has learned his trade on the rough docks of Genoa, is forced into an uneasy partnership with Giacomo san Giacomo, a grifter and master of disguise whom Khalid can’t trust. Rosa also enlists the help of two reluctant allies: Dominic, an artist’s apprentice with a useful knack for forgery, and Dominic’s ill-tempered master, Michelangelo, who is looking for his own revenge on the Medicis. Rosa’s plan is predictably complicated by both internal bickering among the gang members and the discovery that the stakes are much higher than they thought.
The book is an enjoyable caper for fans of heist novels, but a disappointment to any reader looking for a convincing portrait of Renaissance Florence under the Medicis. Young adult.
Erica Obey
PEARL
Sherri L. Smith, illus. Christine Norrie, Graphix, 2024, $12.99/C$16.99, pb, 144pp, 9781338029420
Amy grew up nourished by stories of her near-mythical great-grandmother, a pearl diver in Japan who once found a pearl as large as her fist. Now it’s 1941 in Hawaii, and even though the world is at war, Amy is a young girl interested in her friends and going to the movies, not international politics. But when her family learns that her great-grandmother is sick, perhaps even dying, Amy is the only one who can take the trans-Pacific steamer to Japan to visit. No one, of course, imagines that Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor, stranding Amy in Hiroshima.
Pearl tells an underappreciated war story: that of the Japanese Americans left on the Japanese side of the line once war broke out. Amy’s struggle with the dual facets of her nationality feels both realistic and compelling, and her efforts to survive war and understand herself are moving. Particularly moving are the beautiful illustrations by artist Christine Norrie, which on some pages carry the story entirely, no words needed. This graphic novel is an accessible, engaging book, perfect for middlegrade readers and older.
Carrie Callaghan
THE TREASURE OF TEL MARESHA
Tammar Stein, illus. Barbara Bongini, Apples & Honey, 2024, $18.95, hb, 116pp, 9781681156323
In her author’s note, Tammar Stein relates that a ten-year-old girl found a gold earring representing the Greek goddess Nike, in an underground cave at Tel Maresha, an archaeological site in Israel. Wondering about this beautiful object—where it came from, who had owned it, how it had been lost—led Stein to write The Treasure of Tel Maresha, her sixth book for young readers.
Becca has reluctantly accompanied her family to Israel for summer vacation. She would have preferred to stay home, especially since they will be moving before school starts
again and she’s missing precious time with her best friend. But when their tour group is invited to participate in a dig in what was once someone’s basement, she begins to get interested.
In chapters alternating between the present and 2,200 years ago, we learn more about Becca, and also about Rebeka, who had once lived in the house where the earring was found. Rebeka is also facing a move; the increasing tension between Edomites and Jews is making Maresha dangerous. When a Greek merchant invites the family to join his caravan and relocate to Athens, Rebeka’s parents leap at the chance to go someplace safer, even if it means leaving their community and many possessions (including a pair of gold earrings) behind.
Stein has a light hand with history, and readers will readily absorb details about daily life, family relationships, customs, and ethnic conflict in the area 2,200 years ago. The lure of archaeology and the chance of finding buried treasure, as well as the well-drawn and sympathetic characters, make this an inviting and satisfying read. Ages 10 and up.
Tracy Barrett
THE RIVER SPIRIT
Lucy Strange, illus. Júlia Moscardó, Barrington Stoke, 2024, £7.99, pb, 80pp, 9781800903258
Tom’s life as a Victorian chimney sweep takes a dramatic turn when he begins to see fairies in flowers, a soot monster within a chimney’s interior, followed by the vision of a water spirit called Elle. The last is visible to the other young apprentices and the master sweep, Mr. Crow.
Tom’s character is based on the true life and death of twelve-year-old George Brewster in 1875; a young chimney sweep whose short life influenced a change in attitude of what it was acceptable for children to do. However, this tale is embellished by mystical and supernatural aspects, drawn from Charles Kingsley’s famous The Water Babies
The cruelty and abuse of these children in what is the relatively recent history of the 19th century are graphically portrayed. Tom’s carefree life as the son of a ferryman by the river ended abruptly when he was orphaned at six. As he grows so does the danger involved in entering the chimneys, but Tom is brave and takes the place of a new apprentice.
This beautifully written tale describes the dark and sad ending of Tom’s life after detailing the horror of the work of a child sweep. However, it also shines light and warmth on friendship, courage, kindness, and the ability to dream of freedom. This last being an essential survival skill. There is a historical note at the back which adds more detail and context.
This dyslexia-friendly short novel is recommended for all readers of 8+ years who enjoy a page-turning historical adventure laced with magic. An excellent source read for those studying the Industrial Revolution, portraying the terrible working and living conditions of child workers.
Delightfully illustrated by Júlia Moscardó. Valerie Loh
THE WEATHER GIRLS
Sarah Webb, O’Brien Press, 2024, £8.99, pb, 192pp, 9781788494397
An unusual story based on fact, about a friendship between two ambitious young girls, Grace and Sibby, one of whom helped to ensure the Allied D-Day landings in June 1944 went ahead successfully. That it manages to discuss Ireland’s role as a ‘neutral’ in World War Two, with all its ambivalences, is an additional pleasure.
Grace’s family runs not only the Post Office but also the Blacksod Lighthouse in Co. Mayo in the Irish Republic. Grace is keen on science and meteorology: one of the lighthousekeeper’s duties is to send weather reports to the Irish Meteorological Office. Sibby has plans to become a famous film actress, and though the girls fall out, their friendship, which in real life lasted into old age, is stronger than any adolescent tempest.
When the Germans either accidentally or on purpose bomb Dublin, Ireland remains officially neutral but begins to aid Britain in crucial yet undeclared ways. In 1944 it falls to 13-year-old Grace to pass on to Britain the first news of a storm that must delay the planned Normandy invasion: her information is key in preventing the invasion becoming a disaster. Adding excitement and danger to the mix, German planes strafe the Blacksod Lighthouse, and the girls rescue a young German airman from a crashed plane.
This is a beautifully written and wellresearched book, whose effects rely on its powerful messages, sharp dialogue and empathic characterisations. It is guaranteed to surprise even those who feel they have a good historical knowledge of World War Two, and Ireland’s role, or lack of it, in the fighting. It makes an excellent tool for the discussion of a specific war, and war in general, for schoolchildren aged 10-14, as well as being an engrossing novel to read for fun.
Jane Burke
THE MANY PROBLEMS OF ROCHEL-LEAH
Jane Yolen, illus. Felishia Henditirto, Apples & Honey, 2024, $19.95, hb, 32pp, 9781681156392
Rochel-Leah wants to learn to read, but she lives in a Russian shtetl in 1830. Only boys learn to read. When no one will teach her, she spies on the boys’ school. The rabbi decides to bend the rules. Eventually she becomes a teacher.
This picture book is a delight! The illustrations are full-page color and gorgeous, displaying the time period and community, as well as Rochel-Leah’s passion for literacy. The vocabulary is simple, with a few Hebrew words. End notes explain those words and the author’s relationship to Rochel-Leah. Ages 4-7.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
CONFERENCES
The Society organizes biennial conferences in the UK, North America, and Australasia. Contact Richard Lee <richard@historicalnovelsociety.org> (UK), Jenny Quinlan <jennyq@historicaleditorial.com> (North America), or Elisabeth Storrs <contact@hnsa.org.au> (Australasia).
