★★★★
I’m a little bit in love with Caitlin Moran. The glorious mixture of frankness, feistiness and common sense in her How To Be A Woman made me an immediate devotee and her follow-up book has been on my wishlist for a long time. Collecting together some of her columns, it gives Moran the chance to demonstrate that she’s able to write wittily and perceptively about many other topics than that of being a woman, although she is, as she points out, quite an expert on that.
★★★★
Kingmaker: Book I
Toby Clements’s novel opens in the bitter cold of the winter of 1460, in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, in a country teetering on the brink of anarchy. In the wake of the battles of St Albans and Ludford Bridge, the weak and unstable King Henry VI and his wife, the virago Margaret of Anjou, cling to the last threads of their power, while the armies of the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick winter for safety in Calais and plot their next move.
★★★
Shortly after finishing In the Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali I was inspired to seek out other books about 15th-century Spain. I wanted to understand more about this period, in which the last shreds of the convivencia of Al-Andalus disappeared forever (if it had ever truly existed). In its place arose the orthodox Catholic Spanish state, with its Inquisition and its autos-da-fé. Laurel Corona’s novel offers a perspective which perfectly complements Ali’s: while he tells the story of Reconquista from a Muslim point of view, Corona looks at the experience of the Jewish people in Spain and Portugal at the same date. It was only at the end of the book that I came to realise how cleverly she has woven her protagonist into the history of two real and very distinguished Jewish families.
★★★★★
A Novel
This was a rare thing: a book I came to on the strength of its subject, knowing nothing about its author, hoping that it would be a amusing read – only to find myself simply blown away by the quality of the writing. And I’m not easy to impress. All I knew at first was that this covered the same period as the excellent The King in the North, which I enjoyed so much. It has turned out to be just as brilliant, in a rather different way. This is a splendid treat of historical fiction, embracing the experiences of both men and women through the story of one remarkable protagonist.
★★★½
This is Maria McCann’s third novel and it has large shoes to fill: her debut, As Meat Loves Salt, set during the English Civil War, is one of the most compelling pieces of historical fiction I’ve read (with one of the most conflicted, unsettling antiheroes). Her second book, The Wilding, was set at a similar period and, for me, wasn’t nearly as powerful; but Ace, King, Knave is a return to form. Moving away from the male narrators and the 17th-century setting of the first two novels, McCann draws us into the roistering world of 18th-century London, and the experiences of two very different women.
★★½
The Islam Quintet: Book I
It begins with an act of book-burning. In 1499, on the instructions of Archbishop Ximines de Cisneros, a troop of Christian soldiers storms the libraries and houses of Gharnata (Grenada), carrying off armfuls of precious theological, medical and scientific manuscripts. With only a handful of exceptions these are burned in front of the shocked Moorish citizens, who see the conflagration for what it is: a warning.
The Idle Woman 