Tag: Netgalley

Dark Lady (2017): Charlene Ball

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★★★½

A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer

After reading The Girl in the Glass Tower, I was keen to learn more about the poetess and musician Aemilia Lanyer, and so was thrilled when I was offered this book to review. It takes a much broader view of Aemilia’s life (or Emilia’s, as she’s called here), following her from childhood to middle age. It explores the challenges faced by well-educated, independent women, even in the age of Elizabeth I, who was surely the paragon of such virtues. Unlike The Girl in the Glass Tower, there is little mention of Arbella Stuart here: this isn’t a book about court intrigue so much as the simpler human desire for self-expression, and the limits placed upon that. Accompanied by an engaging cast of secondary characters, Emilia is brought to appealingly vivid life and the book teems with the sights, sounds and scents of Tudor England.

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Dunstan (2017): Conn Iggulden

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★★★★

This was a welcome chance to delve back into the unfamiliar world of early medieval England, as well as a long-overdue introduction to the writing of Conn Iggulden. Several of his other novels are waiting on my shelves and it’s just chance that Dunstan got there first. I should add that I knew nothing about St Dunstan before reading this, although if I had, I would surely have felt a kind of proprietary interest in him, as a local Somerset lad and the man responsible for Glastonbury Abbey’s first flowering. Iggulden gives us a thoroughly worldly saint, shrewd, ambitious and unscrupulous, very rarely sympathetic and yet always fascinating: the partial architect of a new, united England.

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The Hideout (1943): Egon Hostovský

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★★★½

A man writes a long overdue letter to his distant wife, from the cellar where he has been hiding in Normandy since the invasion of France by the Nazis. It is a confession, an affirmation and a form of self-analysis. The narrator is by turns ridiculous and profound, confined in his hiding place while war rages above: forced, while great events unfold unseen outside, to retread the well-worn paths of his own memories. Yet, in coming to understand his past, he has more sense of purpose in the present and, finally, begins to see the shape that his own future must take.

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The Samurai of Seville (2016): John J. Healey

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★★★½

Until I read this book, I’d never heard of the extraordinary Japanese embassy that arrived at the court of King Philip III of Spain in 1615. Its members had come halfway round the world, encouraged by the need to seek new trading markets and made curious by the stories of Christian missionaries. Led by the ambassador Hasekura Tsunenaga and escorted by a party of samurai, this remarkable entourage arrived in Europe to be feted and gawped at by peasants and nobles alike. Healey’s readable novel spins a tale around this encounter between two great empires and, even if the writing isn’t always the most gripping, it’s well worth seeking out for its fascinating and very unusual subject.

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These Dividing Walls (2017): Fran Cooper

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★★★★

Paris is easy to love, isn’t it? Think of the sleek, chic boulevards and grand buildings; the art, department stores and pavement cafes… But this is only the side of the city that the tourists see. Over on the rive gauche, in a quiet apartment building, a group of mismatched inhabitants deal with another face of the world’s most romantic destination. In these rooms, jumbled cheek-by-jowl and yet rarely connecting, the inhabitants of number thirty-seven live their complicated parallel lives, negotiating the paths of grief, love, loneliness, failure and a growing sense of hatred. For this is a sweltering summer and tensions are rising, directed against a scapegoat ‘other’. In this, Fran Cooper’s debut novel has its finger firmly on the pulse of a world in which tolerance hangs by a fraying thread.

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Slow Boat (2003): Hideo Furukawa

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★★★

A Slow Boat to China Rmx

This new Japanese novella, published by Pushkin Press in a translation by David Boyd, is an odd beast. I asked to review it as part of my mission to read more from other cultures and because I’ve been generally impressed with the Japanese fiction I have read. The tale of a man wandering in Tokyo on Christmas Eve 2002, pondering the boundaries of the city, the body and the self, it’s a curiously hallucinogenic mix.

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Vindolanda (2017): Adrian Goldsworthy

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★★★★

One of my forthcoming scheduled reviews questions the current trend for historians to write historical fiction. It’s become something of a fashion but it doesn’t always work: good historians may tell stories with novelistic flair, and good historical fiction writers have to get their facts right, but the two genres do demand a different skill-set. Not everyone can make the transition from one to the other. So I was amused to see that Adrian Goldsworthy, the celebrated historian of the Roman Empire, has decided to try his hand at a novel. Naturally, I couldn’t resist; and I’m pleased to report that Goldsworthy is one of the rare breed who can make the leap. Focusing on the men based at the forts along the northernmost frontier of Roman Britain, he tells a story full of battles, diplomacy and honour, with a very enjoyable ‘odd couple’ pairing at its heart.

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Feast of Sorrow (2017): Crystal King

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© Wayne Earl Chinnock

★★★½

The young cook Thrasius is purchased for an exorbitant sum of money in 1 BC by the wealthy Roman epicure Marcus Gavius Apicius. It proves to be a match made in heaven. Although he’s only nineteen, Thrasius has already made a name for himself as the inventor of mouthwatering delicacies, and Apicius harbours designs to become gastronomic adviser to Caesar himself. Together, master and slave embark on a quest to create the most dazzling and most delicious banquets that Rome has ever seen. It’s a collaboration that will enter history, making Apicius’ meals a byword for luxury, producing the world’s earliest surviving cookbook, and probably its first cookery school.

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Manchu (1980): Robert Elegant

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★★

The Imperial China Trilogy: Book I

Sometimes a book wears you down. You find yourself plodding away at it, determined to finish but finding that the number of remaining pages never seems to get any less. This, I’m afraid, was one of those books. A sweeping epic following the Jesuit mission in China in the mid 17th century, and told through the eyes of an ambitious young Englishman, it had scope to be very engaging. And it isn’t screamingly bad. It’s well-informed and detailed to a fault. But one is left with the powerful sense that 200 of its 634 pages could have been cut without any great loss to the story – in fact, probably to its advantage.

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Flame in the Mist (2017): Renée Ahdieh

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★★★

Since childhood, Hattori Mariko has always been regarded as a bit odd: too curious, too inventive for a girl of her high station. But even oddness can’t protect her from fate. As she travels by litter from her parents’ home towards the imperial city of Inako, she feels no different from any other well-born young woman, being forced into a marriage not of her choosing. Far away in Inako, in the enchanted precincts of Heian Castle, her betrothed waits: Minamoto Raiden, son of the emperor himself. But between the Hattori lands and Inako lies Jukai Forest, the haunt of ghosts, spirits and desperate men. And Mariko’s entourage, having entered the Forest, will never emerge.

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