Tag: historical fiction

Affinity (1999): Sarah Waters

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★★★★

Sarah Waters’s novels have impressed me so much more than I expected. Before I read The Paying Guests earlier this year, I had her down as an author who did naughty ladies in corsets, but now that I’ve actually started making my way through her books, I’ve realised how reductionist that was. Affinity has yet again proven her remarkable ability to capture a time and place, this time the curious world of Spiritualism in Victorian London. Deftly unsettling and almost Hitchcockian at times, it’s a fine piece of work, if somewhat more unstated than the tumultuous antics of Tipping the Velvet.

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The Ornatrix (2016): Kate Howard

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★★★

Flavia knows she is ugly. It is the one constant in her life and, because of it, her mother resents her, her father pities her, and her younger sister Pia steals all the glory, savouring the betrothal and marriage night that Flavia herself will never have. With a purple birthmark in the shape of a bird soaring across her cheek, Flavia is irrevocably marked. And yet, when her vindictive behaviour leads her parents to wash their hands of her at last, and confine her to a convent, Flavia discovers a remarkable truth: beauty can be assumed. Assigned to the elegant Ghostanza Dolfin, serving as her ornatrix or beautician, Flavia discovers that beauty can come out of a jar and that ugliness can be hidden beneath the glowing white mask of cerussa. Suddenly, life is full of possibility.

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The Hidden People (2016): Alison Littlewood

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★★★

I was intrigued by the premise of this novel. In the 1870s, a young woman is horribly murdered after her husband and neighbours take her for a fairy changeling. Stung into action, her London cousin comes north to Yorkshire to challenge these country superstitions and to uncover what really happened to little Lizzie Higgs. Having just finished reading The Essex Serpent, I hoped for a similarly deft conflict between popular belief and scientific reason. This juxtaposition is at the heart of the novel, but it didn’t quite pan out as expected. Instead, the book ambitiously tried to combine several genres – crime, fantasy, horror, supernatural and psychological thriller – without ever really committing to any of them.

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The Essex Serpent (2016): Sarah Perry

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★★★★

In 1893, the mysteries of the world are on the brink of being solved. Fossil hunters claw the remains of prehistoric beasts from the cliffs of southern England. The safe securities of Biblical history are brought into question by the realisation that the earth is far older and wilder than had ever been imagined. And yet all the reason in the world can crumble in the face of superstition. Down in the marshes and estuaries of Essex, something moves in the dark waters and legends of a half-forgotten, terrifying beast start to surface once again.

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Esther (1950): Norah Lofts

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★★★½

My enduring mission to hunt down fiction set in Achaemenid Persia brought me to this book: a retelling of the story of Esther by Norah Lofts, who impressed me with her King’s Pleasure. Expressly aimed at teenage readers, it’s a charming little book which conveys both Esther’s intelligence and the king’s humanity in a far more effective and engaging way than the painful film One Night with the King. It was so enjoyable, in fact, that I was willing to accept a fairly major historical swerve.

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The Castrato (2013): Joyce Pool

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★★

When I saw that this book was available for advance review, I jumped on it immediately. In theory, this story of a young castrato studying in Florence in the twilight years of the Medici dynasty couldn’t have been further up my street if it had tried. The protagonist is even offered the lead in a Scarlatti setting of Arminio! I looked forward to being immersed in the sensual splendour of Florence circa 1698, rich with art and texture and music, but alas that didn’t happen. In fact, the book turned out to be such a slog that I doubt I’d have finished it if I didn’t have to review it. More unfortunately, I suspect that the real problem here is that of the translator, not the author.

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Life after Life (2013): Kate Atkinson

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★★★★

Ursula Todd dies at the moment of her birth, strangled by a cord around her neck. She dies in the cellar of a London house, taking shelter from an air raid during the Blitz. She dies falling from a window as a child. She dies in the Spanish flu epidemic. And each time she finds herself back on that cold, snowy February day in 1910, waiting to be born again and to see whether the tiniest shift of chance or design can change her future. Kate Atkinson’s much-admired novel poses the question: what if we could live over and over again, until we were able to design our lives in such a way as to create the best possible future, not just for ourselves, but for the world?

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The Wonder (2016): Emma Donoghue

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★★★★

A new novel by Emma Donoghue is always cause for celebration, and The Wonder takes us into yet another vividly realised snapshot of history. It is 1859 and Elizabeth (‘Lib’) Wright, a veteran nurse from Florence Nightingale’s army in the Crimea, has been called to Ireland on a curious mission. She knows little about her job except the name of her patient – O’Donnell – and the fact that she is required for only two weeks. Only on her arrival in an impoverished Irish village is she given her commission: a strange task that will force Lib to weigh up faith and reason, to face the griefs of her own past, and to confront the possibility that miracles may genuinely exist.

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Boudica: Dreaming the Hound (2005): Manda Scott

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★★★★

Boudica: Book III

And so to the third instalment of Manda Scott’s Boudica quartet, which I’m eking out so as not to finish it too soon. Dreaming the Hound takes us deeper into the story of Breaca, the flame-haired warrior whose leadership against the invading legions has earned her the title of the Boudica, ‘bringer of victory’. It also follows the life that runs parallel to her own: that of her conflicted, troubled half-brother, once named Bán, and then Valerius, who served as decurion of the Thracian cavalry under the aegis of Rome and is now, unwillingly, back among his own people.

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The Miniaturist (2014): Jessie Burton

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Jessie Burton

★★★★

I’m one of those awkward people who likes to be different and usually steers away from books on the bestseller tables. In several cases I’ve got round to reading such novels months or years later when, generally speaking, they definitely live up to their hype. Jessie Burton’s entrancing tale of secrets and commerce in 17th-century Amsterdam is a case in point. Crafted with as much care as the doll’s house that takes centre stage in the plot, the novel is a tantalising thriller which conjures up all the textures and colours of the Dutch Golden Age.

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