Category: Books

The Princess Who Wouldn’t Come Home (2008): Irving Finkel

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Irving Finkel

★★★★

Let’s establish the key fact first: Irving Finkel is a legend. Not only does he have one of the most impressive job titles at the British Museum (Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script), but he can read cuneiform, made a replica of the Royal Game of Ur at the age of nine, and looks exactly as a curator should look. I’m resigned to the fact that, even if I spend my entire career wearing tweed and covered in dust – which, to be honest, happens quite a lot – I’m never going to look as much like a curator as Finkel. It’s all to do with the beard, I think.

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The Parable Book (2013): Per Olov Enquist

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★★★

My one previous experience with Per Elov Enquist was via his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician, and it wasn’t an entirely comfortable introduction. I puzzled over what to make of the book’s jagged, disjointed style and was troubled by its detached emotional tone. At the time I wondered whether it was down to author, or translator, but now I can say, quite confidently, that it’s the author’s style. The Parable Book, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner, has much the same cool, conceptual flavour. It is, however, a rather different beast from the Royal Physician: whereas that was a clear historical novel, this book weaves between genres. Is it novel, autobiography, family memoir, confessional history or philosophical exploration? It is even more disorientating than the Royal Physician, but it makes its mark: there’s something fierce and vivid and urgent at its heart.

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The Chevalier (2016): M.C. Hobbs

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★★½

A recent visit to Netgalley revealed a host of interesting fiction titles, but the one which excited me most on first impressions was The Chevalier, based on the early life of the remarkable Chevalier d’Eon. My interest in the Chevalier was originally piqued when a fictionalised version of him appeared in the BBC’s Scarlet Pimpernel series, and it was revived when the National Portrait Gallery acquired his portrait in 2012. He is one of the most colourful and intriguing figures in 18th-century history and I’m extremely surprised that there aren’t more novels about him. I couldn’t wait to settle down with this. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to expectations.

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Boudica: Dreaming the Bull (2004): Manda Scott

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★★★★

Boudica: Book II

Naturally it didn’t take long for me to plunge into the second of Manda Scott’s Boudica books after my admiration for the first volume, Dreaming the Eagle. It is just as magisterial and sensitive as its predecessor, with an epic sweep that now opens out far beyond the tribes of Britannia. Rome is, both culturally and geographically, a more significant player here. Perhaps it lacks a little of the tightly-forged focus of that first book, but this is often the case with second instalments, which both open and close mid-action, as it were. But if that’s a flaw, it’s small and scarcely visible in the finely-crafted whole. Weaving between her two protagonists with elegance, and a fine feeling for the grey areas of the soul, Scott creates yet another gripping glimpse of a lost history.

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The Double Tongue (1995): William Golding

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★★★

When William Golding died in 1993, he was in the middle of working on a new novel, which was left unfinished. At an advanced draft stage, it told the story of a young woman plucked from her miserable family life and offered the chance of a new existence at the ritual site of Delphi, where she becomes a servant of the god Apollo and, later, the mouthpiece for his words. The story was in good shape and so Golding’s editors and executors decided to publish it – and it became The Double Tongue. That title is apparently only one of those which Golding had tried out on the top of the manuscript, but it’s a very fitting name for a book which is all about the duplicity and sleight-of-hand that accompany the act of prophecy.

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Across the Nightingale Floor (2002): Lian Hearn

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★★★★

Tales of the Otori: Book I

I’ve wanted to read this for years. Although I only visited Tokyo last year, I’ve long been interested in certain aspects of Japanese history: the samurai, especially, and the codes of honour and nobility that governed their society. I was intrigued by Hearn’s world, which is inspired by medieval Japan and promised to be refreshingly different from the pseudo-European fantasy norm. And yet, when I began reading yesterday morning, it was with some trepidation. After all, when you’ve looked forward to reading something for so long, there’s always a fear that it might not be as good as you expected. Fortunately that fear was unwarranted. The book lived up to its reputation and dragged me, wide-eyed and wondering, into a thrilling tale of revenge, intrigue and forbidden love.

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Fool’s Quest (2015): Robin Hobb

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Robin Hobb © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

★★★½

Fitz and the Fool: Book II

Some of you may remember that I had difficulty with the first book in Robin Hobb’s new series. Having been a devoted fan of her Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, I felt that some of the tight-knit drama of those books had faded, and that Fitz’s story in the new trilogy had come to be governed by the meandering pace of her more recent Rain Wild novels. But I seem to be the only one who wasn’t convinced. There are many glowing reviews on Goodreads, Amazon and in the press. More than any of those, I give weight to Heloise’s opinion and I know that she enjoyed both the first book and this sequel. So I wanted, very much, for this second instalment in the series to show me how wrong I was. Did it? Well, not quite. But something picked up in the final pages and I’m now cautiously looking forward to the third and final (?) novel, which promises to fire on all four cylinders again.

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The Last Days of Summer (2016): Vanessa Ronan

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★★★★

And now for something completely different. This book arrived in the post a few weeks ago, unsolicited and unheralded, and I was a little perplexed at first because it’s so very unlike anything that I normally read. On the other hand, I am not the kind of girl to turn down a free book and so I dutifully plunged in. It has been a strange experience. Lyrical but not poetic, violent yet gentle, it’s the kind of book you can’t quite shake off. Its mood clings to you like the scent of the diner in its pages, or like the thick, draining heat that blankets the Texan prairie on which the story unfolds.

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Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle (2002): Manda Scott

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★★★★★

Boudica: Book I

Three years ago, just after finishing the last novel in Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolò series, I asked for recommendations of similar books to fill the gap. Although Manda Scott’s Boudica novels were mentioned several times, I didn’t follow them up. I think I shamefully leapt to the conclusion, without any evidence whatsoever, that Boudica was just another identikit sword-and-shield historical series. How wrong I was. When I recently found the first book in a second-hand sale, I decided to see what I made of it. And it’s stunning.

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Children of Earth and Sky (2016): Guy Gavriel Kay

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★★★★

It’s been three long years since River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay’s last novel, so the publication of Children of Earth and Sky is quite an event and a cause for some celebration. From a personal point of view, the new book is made even more exciting by its setting. While Under Heaven and River of Stars took me out of my historical comfort zone – unfolding in the alternate-universe empire of Kitai, which drew on the dynastic splendour of medieval China – Children plunged me into the knotty political world of my very favourite period: the Renaissance.

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