Tag: Netgalley

Anna and the King of Siam (1943): Margaret Landon

5 Comments

★★★★

This wonderful little book is a reissued classic first published in 1944, which tells a story made famous by the Rogers & Hammerstein musical The King and I. Having neither heard nor seen that musical, I had no real idea of what to expect from this novel. My vague notions that I’d picked up here and there turned out to be completely mistaken and perhaps the result of confusing The King and I with The Sound of Music (musical governesses, you see). This book is not a love story at all, but something far more interesting: the tale of a confrontation between two worlds, two belief systems and two indomitable personalities. Based on Anna Leonowens’s own letters and other documents, it lures the reader into the exotic world of mid-19th-century Siam.

Continue reading →

The Girl Who Fought Napoleon (2016): Linda Lafferty

Leave a comment

★★★½

A novel of the Russian Empire

This book is one for those who were taken by the BBC’s recent production of War and Peace. It sweeps from the glittering salons of the upper classes in St Petersburg, where French language and culture reign supreme, to the brutal bleakness of the battlefields on which Russian soldiers fight to hold back the steady creep of French imperial ambition. At the heart of this novel – based, I should emphasise, on a fascinating true story – are two characters whose experiences offer complementary perspectives on the situation.

Continue reading →

Cathar (2016): Christopher Bland

2 Comments

★★★

I asked to review Cathar with a hint of trepidation. In recent historical fiction the Cathars, like the Knights Templar, have been appropriated by the religious-conspiracy crowd and I wasn’t quite sure what I was letting myself in for. Fortunately I was pleasantly surprised: there were no secret societies (beyond Catharism itself) and no hint of the Grail. This is pure historical fiction. More than, there’s a lot of genuine history here: it reintroduced me to a crowd of real-life figures whom I last encountered during my history degree in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s magisterial study of Montaillou.

Continue reading →

Lament for the Fallen (2016): Gavin Chait

Leave a comment
© David Fisher

★★★★

Again, it was the cover that did it. The eerie face, with its scored lines and sunburst of golden rays, reminded me of an ancient tribal mask. I was intrigued by the apparent disconnect between that and the sci-fi plot summarised on the back of the book. Gavin Chait’s first novel turned out to be quite different from any such novel I’ve read before, and not just for its African setting. While on the one hand it offers a sobering future, in which the planet’s ecology has been ravaged by greed, it also shows seedlings of hope, as people strive, even in the darkest days, to create a better world.

Continue reading →

The Trouble with Women (2016): Jacky Fleming

2 Comments
© Kevin Hickson

★★★★

I suspect Jacky Fleming will hate being labelled with this word, but she’s a little bit of a genius. Her new, tongue-in-cheek book of cartoons takes on one of the big questions of modern society: why is it that there are so many more male geniuses than female? Carefully studying the evidence from the 19th century, and presenting us with the ‘facts’, Fleming embarks on a simple exposé of the downright absurd reasoning by which men have traditionally ‘proven’ that women are the weaker sex.

Continue reading →

The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach (1925): Esther Meynell

21 Comments

★★

I have an ongoing ‘merry war’ with a friend of mine about whether Bach or Vivaldi is the better composer. Before you all splutter over your morning cups of Earl Grey, the squabble is primarily founded on an unjust comparison. I point out that Bach surely couldn’t have written a decent storm aria if he’d tried, whereas my friend quite reasonably argues that Vivaldi is nothing but a faint shadow of Bach when it comes to religious music. Anyway, when I spotted that this book was up for review, I thought I’d better show willing and try to understand a little bit more about (and here I quote my friend) ‘the best composer born in 1685’.*

Continue reading →

The Harrowing (2016): James Aitcheson

Leave a comment

★★★

Set in the dark days after the Norman invasion, this novel takes us behind the martial glamour of the shield wall and the sword song and gives us a glimpse of the experiences of ordinary people in a newly uncertain world. As the new king Wilelm secures the south, bribing and terrifying local thegns into submission, those loyal to the aetheling Eadgar retreat north. As English forces make a stand at Eoforwic, Wilelm sends an army to meet them, burning, killing and destroying as it goes. In this land of blood and fire, no one is safe and a  motley band of travellers find themselves drawn together on the road as they flee, partly from the Normans, but also from their own dark pasts.

Continue reading →

The Strays (2014): Emily Bitto

2 Comments

★★★★½

The Strays has enjoyed great success in its native Australia and it’s easy to see why. It brims with the ribald, feverish glamour of bohemian life, seen through the eyes of a narrator who grows to adulthood on the margins of an exotic world so very different from her own humdrum existence. Romantic and poignant, it manages to feel much larger than its slim size would suggest. There are hints of Brideshead Revisited, of The Secret History and The Lessons, of A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book and, like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, it focuses on an intensely-rendered, many-layered picture of adolescent female friendship. It’s a stunning debut.

Continue reading →

The Chimes (2015): Anna Smaill

3 Comments

★★★★

When I asked to review this book, it was a shot in the dark. I knew nothing about it, nor the author, nor that it had been longlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. I was simply interested by the blurb’s description of its world: a future England, post-apocalyptic and dystopian, with the crowded hubbub of London at its heart. It turned out to be a gem: one of the most original concepts I’ve encountered for a very long time, and a story told with a profound sensitivity to the musical quality of words.

Continue reading →

The Wicked Boy (2016): Kate Summerscale

7 Comments

★★★½

The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

This is the third book I’ve read by Kate Summerscale, after Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace and the excellent Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which I haven’t yet got round to posting about. Like her earlier books, it is a vivid recreation of 19th-century history based on dramatic cases heard in the Victorian courts and reported in the press and, like Mr Whicher, it focuses in on a horrific act of murder. Unlike Mr Whicher, however, this is not a whodunnit. The ‘who’ is clearly and frankly admitted from the very beginning. Summerscale’s investigations seek to understand more about the ‘why’ and to unpick the historical context of the crime and the way in which it was reported by the rapacious press.

Continue reading →