Category: Historical Fiction

The Twelve Days of Christmas by Susan Stokes-Chapman

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I’ve previously only read one short story by Susan Stokes-Chapman (in the anthology The Winter Spirits) and I was interested in reading more of her work. This seemed like the perfect time of year to read her new book, The Twelve Days of Christmas!

The book is loosely based on the Christmas carol of the same name, with each chapter inspired by one of the gifts traditionally mentioned in the song – for example, Chapter 1 features pear trees and a character called Miss Partridge (“a partridge in a pear tree”) and Chapter 6 revolves around a game involving hidden goose eggs (“six geese a-laying”). In some cases this is done quite subtly, but in others it’s more heavy-handed; I can appreciate that it’s probably not easy to work all of these references into a novel without it beginning to feel unnatural!

Each chapter feels almost like a separate story (a few of them probably would work as standalones), but they are also linked together through shared characters and a shared setting. That setting is the little English village of Merrywake during the Regency period, with the Napoleonic Wars playing out in the background. Beginning on Christmas Day and ending on Twelfth Night, we join Viscount Pepin of Wakely Hall and his family, friends and servants as they celebrate the festive season. There’s a lovely Christmassy atmosphere as we watch the characters decorate the house, kiss under the mistletoe, open gifts, write and solve riddles, and prepare for the grand Twelfth Night Ball. But although it may all sound idyllic, not everyone at Wakely Hall is having a happy Christmas…

Stokes-Chapman explains in her author’s note that this book is her tribute to Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer and you can definitely see the influence of both. The Viscount and Viscountess Pepin (the name also has links to the song The Twelve Days of Christmas) with their five daughters immediately made me think of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – the chapter based on “five gold rings” deals with the five girls and their hopes of marriage. The servants, though, are given just as much attention as the upper classes: there are stories about Loveday Lucas, the new kitchen maid, who can’t seem to do anything right; Will Moss the under-gardener, who appears to have fallen in love with someone completely unsuitable; and Mrs Wilson, the cold, strict housekeeper who is shocked to find that her staff consider her heartless.

I loved the world Stokes-Chapman created at Wakely Hall, but it was also nice to get some insights into the lives of the other residents of Merrywake, such as the village toymaker whose son, a drummer in the British army, has failed to come home from France. The toymaker’s story was one of the highlights of the book for me and together with the chapter that follows, about another army musician (a piper, as you may have guessed), it shows that the impact of the Napoleonic Wars is being felt all over the country, in even the smallest of communities.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is a lovely book and despite it obviously being very contrived in places, I found it completely absorbing. I particularly liked the way so many different characters from such varied backgrounds are all given their chance to shine, while each chapter also cleverly builds on the one before. I was sorry to say goodbye to the people of Merrywake and would love a sequel so we could catch up with them again in the summer!

Thanks to Random House UK, Vintage/Harvill for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson – #NovNov25

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I’m sure most of us are familiar with the board game Cluedo (or Clue, if you’re in America), but do you know who invented it? I didn’t, but thanks to Nicola Upson’s new novel, The Christmas Clue, I now know that it was invented in the 1940s by Anthony and Elva Pratt, a married couple from Birmingham. Upson tells the story of the game’s creation while also imagining a fictional murder mystery for the couple to solve.

It’s Christmas 1943 and Anthony and Elva are on their way to the Tudor Close Hotel in Rottingdean on the south coast of England. Although he’s currently working in a weapons factory, Anthony is a pianist and before the war he and Elva regularly provided entertainment for hotels, both of the musical sort and also hosting murder mystery events. They’ve been invited to host one of these at the Tudor Close over the Christmas weekend but, on arriving at the hotel, they quickly discover that the war has made things more challenging than usual – there are no actors available to play the various roles in the game and interact with the guests, so the Pratts are going to have to come up with a new format.

Before the game even begins, however, the couple find themselves with a real mystery to investigate. Stopping at their old friend Miss Silver’s shop in the town to collect a box of cigars for Anthony’s Christmas present, they discover Miss Silver’s body in the storeroom apparently beaten to death. The dead woman’s sister works at the Tudor Close and as Anthony and Elva look for more connections, they start to suspect that the killer could be one of the guests staying at the hotel.

The Christmas Clue is a very short book (novella length at 140 pages), but despite its shortness, Upson manages to create a satisfying murder mystery – I found some of the developments a bit far-fetched, but it was fun to read overall, despite taking a darker turn towards the end. I liked the hotel setting, although Elva and Anthony find it very different from their memories of visiting before the war: shortages of staff, no money for decent Christmas decorations, and a group of Canadian soldiers billeted nearby.

I’ve learned some interesting little facts about the game of Cluedo, both from the book itself and from feeling inspired to look things up while reading. For example, the name Cluedo is a pun on Ludo, another popular board game – which is less well known in America (though Parcheesi is similar) and that’s why the name was simplified to Clue. If Elva and Anthony had their way, it would have been called Murder at Tudor Close and was originally supposed to include additional rooms, weapons and characters. Elva was a talented artist and designed the artwork for the board.

This is the first book I’ve read by Nicola Upson, mainly because most of her other novels are mysteries where the sleuth is the real life author Josephine Tey. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with the recent trend for using real people as detectives – and of course, Upson is doing the same in this book with Anthony and Elva Pratt. I wondered how the Pratts’ family might feel about it, so I was pleased to read Upson’s acknowledgments at the end where she says she has been in contact with Anthony and Elva’s daughter, Marcia Lewis, who gave her best wishes to the project. I think she can certainly be happy with the way her parents are portrayed in this book – they seem like a really lovely couple!

Thanks to Faber & Faber for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood – #NovNov25

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Several bloggers have been reading Benjamin Wood’s Booker Prize longlisted novella Seascraper for Novellas in November after our co-hosts Cathy and Rebecca named it their ‘buddy read’ for the month. I hadn’t decided whether to read it myself but when I discovered that it’s also going to be the starting point for Six Degrees of Separation in December, that helped me make up my mind!

Seascraper is set in an unspecified time period, which I managed to identify as the early 1960s (there are some references to Lawrence of Arabia, which was released in 1962). However, it feels much earlier than that due to the protagonist leading a life largely free of technology and doing a job that was done by his grandfather before him. His name is Thomas Flett and he’s a twenty-year-old man living with his mother in the fictional town of Longferry on the North West coast of England. Thomas has taught himself to play the guitar and dreams of becoming a folk singer, but that seems unlikely to happen because he and his mother rely on the money he makes through his work as a shanker, someone who catches shrimp by scraping the sand at low tide.

Thomas comes home one day to find his mother with a stranger, a man who introduces himself as the American director Edgar Acheson. Edgar is planning to make a new film with the Longferry beach as its setting and he offers to pay Thomas to guide him around the coastline, looking for suitable filming locations. Thomas accepts, as the money is too good to turn down, but when he and Edgar head out to the sea something happens which sets his life on a new course.

This is a quiet, simple story but also a powerful and atmospheric one. The author devotes a lot of time to describing the small, mundane details of Thomas’s daily routines, such as how he prepares his horse and cart for his early mornings shrimp fishing on the beach, so when Edgar Acheson arrives there’s a real sense of something momentous happening. The whole story takes place over a period of less than two days, but the events of those two days change everything for Thomas. Previously his whole world has revolved largely around his mother, who became pregnant with him at fifteen and has been shunned by the community as a result, but his new friendship with Edgar and an unexpected encounter with another person makes him reconsider what he really wants to do with his life.

Seascraper is a beautifully written novella and the coastal setting, with fog hanging over the sea and treacherous sinkpits in the sand, is vividly described. There’s a development later in the book that I would love to talk about, but I can’t really say any more about the plot without spoiling it. I wasn’t sure about this development at first, as it sent things in a direction I wasn’t anticipating, but now that I’ve finished I think it was the perfect way to move Thomas’s story forward. I’m so impressed by this book overall, particularly as it’s not one I was planning to read and I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

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In May 1945, Margaret Salt walks into a hardware store in the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio and asks if they have a radio. Cal Jenkins is working there that day and he accompanies Margaret into the office where they listen to President Truman informing the nation that Germany has surrendered to the Allies. Neither of them knows it, but this brief interaction will go on to have consequences that change both of their lives forever.

In Buckeye, Patrick Ryan explores the stories of Cal and his wife, Becky, and Margaret and her husband, Felix – two couples whose paths cross many times over a period of four decades. We learn more about Cal’s background and the disability that has kept him out of the war and we get to know Becky, who has a gift for communicating with the dead. We also hear about Margaret’s childhood, abandoned as a baby and raised in an orphanage, and we follow Felix as he suffers some traumatic experiences during the war. Later, the focus widens to include their children as we move forward into the 1960s and 70s and another war – Vietnam.

Almost as soon as I started to read I was reminded of Ann Patchett and I’m not suprised to see that other reviewers have made the same comparison. I think if you enjoyed Tom Lake or The Dutch House, there’s a good chance that you’ll enjoy this book as well – but even if you didn’t, give this one a try anyway as despite the similar feel, Patrick Ryan has his own style and a real talent for creating strong, engaging characters. I was particularly fond of Cal’s father, Everett; when we first meet him at the start of the book, he’s a lonely, bitter alcoholic, writing angry letters to the President and still grieving for his wife and daughter who died years earlier, but a crisis sets his life on a different course and Becky takes him under her wing.

I wasn’t sure at first how I would feel about Becky’s work as a spiritualist – I thought a paranormal element wouldn’t fit the tone of the book – but it actually works very well. It provides a source of conflict with Cal, who is not a believer, but Becky isn’t a fraud in any way: she truly wants to give peace and comfort to those who need it and she does seem to have a genuine ability to contact the dead. Margaret Salt is a complex character and her actions are not always very admirable, but learning more about her early life helped me to understand her. I liked Felix, though, and found several parts of his story very moving.

Buckeye is a long book, but family sagas usually are, and although the pace moves slowly at times it’s hard to know what could have been left out. As well as needing time to fully develop the characters, there are also several decades of American history to get through, with major events sometimes happening in the background but in other cases directly impacting the lives of the Jenkins and Salt families. I certainly don’t regret the length of time it took to read it – it’s definitely going to be one of my books of the year.

Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ) for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Simon the Coldheart by Georgette Heyer – #1925Club

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This week, Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon of Stuck in a Book are hosting another of their very popular clubs, where we all read and write about books published in the same year. This time it’s 1925! When deciding what to read for the clubs, I usually start by looking to see whether any of my favourite authors had a book published in that year. Georgette Heyer had such a long career there’s nearly always something suitable for whichever year it is and she didn’t disappoint this time.

Simon the Coldheart, published (obviously) in 1925, is one of several straight historical novels Heyer wrote, rather than one of the Georgian or Regency romances for which she’s most famous. It does feel very different and I don’t think it will necessarily appeal to fans of her other books, but I still liked it.

We first meet Simon in the early 1400s when, at the age of fourteen, he presents himself at the castle of Fulk of Montlice, demanding to join his service. Simon is the illegitimate son of Fulk’s bitter enemy, Lord Geoffrey of Malvallet, but Fulk is impressed by his confidence and determination and offers him a position as page. As the years go by, Simon repays Fulk’s faith in him, serving him well for several years before being knighted by the King and gifted lands of his own.

Now known as Sir Simon of Beauvallet (a play on the name of his father, Malvallet, and on the name of his lands, Fair Pastures), Simon has his life in order, exactly as he wants it. His friend Alan, Fulk’s son, and his half-brother Geoffrey, however, believe there’s still something missing from Simon’s life: a wife. Simon insists that he has no interest in women and no plans to get married. But when he meets Lady Margaret of Belrémy, it seems he may have met his match.

I’ve been meaning to read Simon the Coldheart since I read Heyer’s Beauvallet a few years ago – technically a sequel to this book, although it’s set several generations later and features completely different characters. I didn’t find this one as much fun as Beauvallet, which is an Elizabethan pirate novel, but I still found it quite enjoyable. Simon is a strong character, if not particularly easy to like at first – he becomes known as Coldheart for a reason – but later in the book we start to see a more human side to him, first in the close friendships he forms with Alan and Geoffrey, then in his kindness to children and finally his romance with Margaret, which forms a relatively small part of the novel. I also loved his relationship with Fulk, who comes to love him like a son (sometimes, it seems, more than his real son).

As she always does, Heyer attempts to write using language appropriate to the era, which in this case means lots of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’. Today’s historical fiction authors tend not to do this, so it does make the book feel dated – which again won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I didn’t find the romance element of the book particularly satisfying, though; Margaret is introduced quite late in the novel and Heyer’s usual witty dialogue between hero and heroine isn’t much in evidence here. I found Margaret a more interesting character when she’s away having adventures on her own than I did in her scenes with Simon.

Apparently Simon the Coldheart was one of six books Heyer tried to suppress in the 1930s (the others were another historical novel, The Great Roxhythe, and four contemporary novels) as she considered them inferior early works. In 1977, a few years after her death, her son gave permission for this one to be republished. In general I believe an author’s wishes should be respected, but I also think she was maybe being too hard on Simon the Coldheart – it obviously isn’t one of her best, but it’s not a bad book at all. It got my 1925 Club reading off to a good start and I hope to post another review later in the week, as well as looking at some of my favourite reads from previous club years.

A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder by F. H. Petford

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Twenty-two-year-old Alma Timperley is stunned when she learns that her Aunt Gladys has died, leaving her hotel in Cornwall to Alma in her will. The news comes as a particular surprise as Alma didn’t even know that Gladys existed in the first place! Still, she accompanies her lawyer, James Nascent, to Falmouth on the Cornish coast to inspect her inheritance and likes what she sees. The Timperley Spiritualist Hotel overlooks the town below and has a very special clientele. The people who come to stay are hoping to make contact with loved ones beyond the grave and their reservation fee includes three sessions with one of the hotel’s two mediums, George Weaver and Valentine Wragge.

Alma has always believed she has psychic abilities herself, so she’s intrigued and decides to immediately take ownership of the hotel. She soon finds that she has more than ghosts to worry about, however, because it’s 1914 and war has recently broken out with Germany. Why has a book written in German been hidden inside a cooking pot in the hotel kitchen? And who turned on a light in the tower, guiding an enemy Zeppelin in from the shore? Is someone in the hotel spying for the Germans?

This is the first book in a planned series of novels starring Alma Timperley and based on this one I’ll definitely be looking out for more. It wasn’t really what I’d expected, though; the title and cover gave me the impression this would be a humorous cosy mystery set in a haunted house, but it’s actually something very different. There’s no ghost hunting (unless you count mediums trying to contact spirits) and there’s not really a mystery either. The identity of the German spy – referred to as Excalibur – is revealed to the reader very early in the book and although Alma and the police don’t know who it is, I would have preferred to be kept in suspense as well, wondering who it was.

Despite the book not really being as advertised – which is a shame, as it seems to have resulted in the book receiving worse reviews than it deserves – I still enjoyed it. I particularly loved the Cornish setting: Petford does a great job of bringing Falmouth to life, with its bay and harbour and local landmarks such as Pendennis Castle, which played a part in the town’s defences during the war, and the King’s Pipe, a chimney used to burn tobacco illegally smuggled into the country. We also learn a lot about PK Porthcurno, once the world’s largest telegraph station where many cables from overseas came ashore and now a museum open to the public.

I think this book has a lot to offer, as long as you approach it as historical fiction about German spies in the First World War and not a ghost story or a detective novel. It covered some aspects of the war I hadn’t read much about before and it held my interest from beginning to end. I liked Alma and her friends and hope to meet them again soon.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 4 for RIP XX

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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This is another book that I probably wouldn’t have read if it hadn’t been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize this year (I have an ongoing project where I’m attempting to read all of the shortlists for that particular prize). I’m glad I decided to read it, because after a slow start I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would at first.

Glorious Exploits is set in 412 BC during the Peloponnesian War. An attempt by Athens to invade Sicily has ended in failure and thousands of defeated Athenian soldiers have been imprisoned in a disused quarry in Syracuse where they are slowly starving to death. Gelon and Lampo, two out of work Syracusan potters, occasionally take food to the quarry and in return the prisoners recite lines from plays by the Athenian tragedian Euripides. Gelon loves Greek theatre and when he discovers that some of the prisoners are familiar
with Medea and, even better, Euripides’ newest work, The Trojan Women, he comes up with a plan to stage both plays in the quarry, with the Athenians as actors.

Lampo is our narrator and tells his story using lots of modern Irish vernacular (Lennon is an Irish author) and lots of swearing. He also has a dry sense of humour and I know many people have found the book hilarious, although it didn’t quite work as a comedy for me. Whether or not you’ll like the writing style is entirely down to personal taste, I suppose. I tend to get irritated by historical novels written in very modern, anachronistic language, although as I said when I read Natasha Pulley’s The Hymn to Dionysus earlier this year, it bothers me less when the book is set in the ancient world. I got used to Lampo’s voice after a while and accepted it.

The relationship between Lampo and Gelon forms an important part of the novel. They are very different people but their friendship has endured since childhood. Lampo is illiterate and directionless but always seems cheerful and ready with a joke – until we start to see signs that there’s more to him than meets the eye and we see another side when he falls in love with a slave girl, Lyra. Gelon has a more serious nature and has taught himself to read, developing a love of Greek plays. He’s afraid that the defeat of Athens could mean that the work of great Athenian playwrights like Euripides become lost to history, which is why he comes up with his idea to keep the plays alive. Gelon knows that it’s possible for warring nations to appreciate each other’s art and culture, even if not everyone would agree.

Towards the end, things take a surprisingly dark turn and I found the final part of the book quite moving. It seemed I was more emotionally invested in the story than I thought! I’m not sure if I would rush to read more books by Ferdia Lennon, but I’m glad I stuck with this one despite initially thinking it wouldn’t be for me.