Tag: historical fiction

Penelope’s Web (2015): Christopher Rush

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★★★

I was drawn towards this book in the library by a kind of magnetic field, as usually happens with books about Troy. I’d never heard of Christopher Rush before, but I was tempted by the sound of a novel that retold the story of the Odyssey and Iliad from different perspectives, focusing on the way that stories ennoble and refine the hard, unpalatable facts of real life. The concept is intelligent, but the language is occasionally unremittingly filthy and the attitude to women is (perhaps unsurprisingly for soldiers in Bronze Age Greece) dismally misogynistic. While I don’t for a minute suggest that the author shares the views of his characters, I found it very hard to warm to a book in which women are seen as having only one function.

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City of Masks (2017): S.D. Sykes

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★★

The Somershill Manor Mysteries: Book III

The first thing to bear in mind about this book is that it’s actually third in a series. This wasn’t made clear in the blurb for my Netgalley ARC, so I was immediately wrong-footed when it assumed much more knowledge of its protagonist, and his history, than I had. It’s part of the Somershill Manor Mysteries series, the first of which is Plague Land and the second The Butcher Bird. If you are interested in reading City of Masks, I strongly recommend you read those two first, as I think they would add considerably to your enjoyment. In my ignorance, however, and lured by the promise of a novel set in 14th-century Venice, I simply plunged straight in…

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The Winter Isles (2015): Antonia Senior

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★★★★

Lyrical and heartfelt, this novel set in 12th-century Scotland feels like a natural successor to King Hereafter. It occupies much the same territory, following the ambitious young lord Somerled as he negotiates the rivalries and alliances of the Western Isles and develops a name for himself as a fearless warrior. Based on a figure who is as tantalising a blend of history and myth as Macbeth himself, it’s a novel that lingers on the feel of the wild land and the yawning breadth of the playful, fearsome, lovely sea, despite the occasional savagery of its battle scenes. With characters you truly grow to care about, and with a wonderful star-crossed love story at its heart, it’s a rewarding read.

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Oswiu: King of Kings (2016): Edoardo Albert

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★★★★

The Northumbrian Thrones: Book III

In this third and (currently) last instalment in The Northumbrian Thrones, the ramifications of Oswald‘s untimely death spread across the feuding kingdoms of Britain. It is now 642 AD and the unification that seemed within reach during the reign of Edwin has crumbled away. Even Northumbria is no longer united. Oswald’s younger brother Oswiu faces a long, hard battle to secure his kingship against the mightiest ruler in the land: Penda, ambitious and ruthless king of Merica. But Oswiu has one advantage that Penda lacks: the posthumous, miracle-working reputation of the murdered Oswald.

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The Confessions of Young Nero (2017): Margaret George

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© Alison Kaufman

★★★

The only novel I’d read by Margaret George was Helen of Troy, some years ago, which didn’t quite do it for me, but I was keen to try her new book, the first of a pair, about the Emperor Nero. Set in the duplicitous, cutthroat world of the Roman imperial family in the first century AD, this had the scope for plots and psychosis aplenty, an impression encouraged by its titular promise of ‘confessions’. I hoped for something along the lines of I, Claudius, taking the story of the Julio-Claudians into the next generation with the same kind of meaty detail that I enjoyed in Tom Holland’s Dynasty. However, George’s decision to take a revisionist viewpoint, and present Nero as a well-meaning, misunderstand and popularly-beloved emperor, means that much of the story’s dramatic flair is sacrificed.

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Larchfield (2017): Polly Clark

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© Ruth Clark

★★★★

Striking and unusual, Polly Clark’s debut novel delves deep into one of the most isolating emotions we can feel: that of being a stranger. Two interwoven storylines unfold in the Scottish spa town of Helensburgh, eighty years apart, and spark unexpected connections between their two characters. One is Dora Fielding, a poet who has left her comfortable liberal world in London to move up north with her husband Kit. The other is also a poet: the young W.H. Auden, fresh from Oxford and trying to settle into a new career teaching at Larchfield boys’ school in Helensburgh.

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Oswald: Return of the King (2015): Edoardo Albert

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★★★★

The Northumbrian Thrones: Book II

Having warmed to Albert’s Edwin in its second half, I was keen to follow the struggle for Northumbria into its next generation. Oswald opens in 633, with High King Edwin’s death in battle against Penda of Mercia, and Cadwallon of Gwynned. His fall throws his kingdom’s future into the balance as predators circle the vacant throne. Cadwallon would have Northumbria as a client kingdom, but there are still men living who have the right to rule as independent kings. These come from two rival families: the Yffings (descendants of Edwin) and the Idings (descendants of Edwin’s predecessor, Aethelfrith). And whoever becomes king must now face up to this new power that has grown, unchecked, in the west. Northumbria desperately needs a worthy leader, but the one who can best answer that call is, ironically, the one claimant who wants nothing less than to be a king.

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Eagles in the Storm (2017): Ben Kane

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★★★★

The Eagles Trilogy: Book III

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this final book in Ben Kane’s Eagles trilogy, which completes a story that I’ve followed avidly in Eagles at War and Hunting the Eagles. The series follows the military and psychological aftermath of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, when three Roman legions under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus were wiped out by a German tribal army under the aegis of the chieftain Arminius, a former Roman ally. In the first book we watched the tragedy unfold; in the second, set some years later, we saw the young general Germanicus stiffening the Romans’ resolve as Arminius tried to knit the tribes together into a viable force. Now, in 15-16 AD, the moment has come for battle to be joined again, and this time there can be only one victor.

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Edwin: High King of Britain (2014): Edoardo Albert

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★★★½

The Northumbrian Thrones: Book I

There’s a bit of a thrill in reading a story whose exact dates are lost in the mists of time. In this first novel of Albert’s series, we are in the early years of the 7th century, perhaps in 616 or thereabouts. The Romans are long gone, leaving their ruins and their roads behind them; the raiders from the east have yet to come over the grey whale-road. Britain is split into kingdoms, roughly following the lines of the old tribal lands from the days of Boudica. But times are changing. A man who has moved from host to host, keeping one step ahead of the king who wants to kill him, has a dream of a united country, its petty kings subject to one overarching High King. It’s a grand dream, for a man who doesn’t even have a single kingdom to his name yet, but Edwin is shrewd and brave and has loyal men. As he inches his way back to power, his own rise is mirrored by that of a new religion, brought over from the Franks: a religion which will change the face of Britain forever.

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The Girl in the Glass Tower (2016): Elizabeth Fremantle

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★★★★

It is 1615 and the years have not been kind to Aemilia Lanyer. Once, she and her poetry were celebrated at Court but, since the accession of James I, with his dislike of educated women, Aemilia has been forced to live a meaner existence. Now, weighed down with the debts of her dead husband, she ekes out her days in Clerkenwell with her teenage son Hal. It is Hal who offers Aemilia some unexpected distraction from her financial woes. As a young musician at Court, he happens to see the rooms of the late Arbella Stuart being cleared. Remembering that his mother once knew this unfortunate princess, he brings home a bundle of old papers destined for the fire, little realising what a treasure he has found. For this is Arbella’s account of her own life: the tale of a woman who dared to dream beyond the confines in which circumstances kept her. Faced with the words of this almost-friend, a woman she never truly understood, and one whom she inadvertently betrayed, Aemilia longs to finally learn the truth about Arbella Stuart.

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