Category: Historical Fiction

Love, Sex & Frankenstein by Caroline Lea

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Love is a light you can see only when you reach for it. You hold it in your hand and, for as long as the flame glows, it warms you.

I’ve read three of Caroline Lea’s previous books, all of which I found interesting, so I was looking forward to reading her new novel about the life of Mary Shelley – although I have to admit, if I hadn’t already known I liked Lea’s work, the cover and title of this one would have probably put me off. I’m glad that didn’t happen because I really enjoyed it; it’s probably my favourite of her books so far.

The main focus of the novel is the events of 1816 – known as the Year Without a Summer due to the unusual weather caused by a volcanic eruption the year before. It’s also the year that Mary Godwin and her lover, Percy Shelley, travel to Geneva with their baby son and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Not for the first time, Shelley’s debts have brought the bailiffs to their door and, tired of constantly moving around London to avoid them, Claire has seized the opportunity to persuade Mary and Percy to come to Switzerland with her to visit Lord Byron. Claire is convinced that Byron loves her and claims that he has been begging her to go and spend the summer with him at Lake Geneva but Mary, who is familiar with Byron’s reputation, thinks she’s deluded. However, in their desperation to escape the bailiffs, she and Shelley agree to Claire’s plan.

As they arrive at their hotel in Geneva, the foggy, oppressive weather mirrors Mary’s mood. She and Shelley seem to do nothing but argue and with no sign of Byron, Claire has turned her attentions to Mary’s lover, making no secret of what she is doing. When Byron finally does appear and the party start to spend time with him and his companion, John Polidori, at his rented home, the Villa Diodati, Mary hopes things will improve. However, the dynamics between the four of them only grow more tense and strained and Mary thinks of taking baby Willmouse and running away. Then, during a storm one evening, they gather to read ghost stories and, unimpressed, Byron issues a challenge: they should each write one of their own and see whose is best. Now Mary has something to focus on and during this difficult, emotional time, her famous novel, Frankenstein, begins to take shape.

Despite the title, the writing of Frankenstein forms only a small part of the book; instead Lea concentrates on exploring Mary’s state of mind in the period immediately before and during the creation of the novel. There’s some jumping around between timelines in the first half of the book as Lea tries to fill the reader in on Mary’s background, her childhood and the beginning of her relationship with Shelley, and I found it slightly difficult to keep track of things, but this became less of a problem later in the book when I had settled into the story.

Having read several other novels about the Shelleys and Lord Byron, I was interested to see how Lea’s portrayal of the characters would compare. As our protagonist, Mary is a complex woman but also a contradictory one. She has the strength and determination to repeatedly defy convention to be with the man she loves – the already married Shelley – while at the same time she feels trapped in her relationship with him and unable to escape. Shelley seems to love her in his own way, but is insensitive towards her and expects her just to accept his various infidelities. Mary’s relationship with Claire is equally difficult, continually switching between resentment and affection. As seen through Mary’s eyes, Claire doesn’t come across well at all in this book, flirting openly with Shelley in front of her sister then complaining when Mary later does the same with Byron. (For a more sympathetic view of Claire, try Clairmont by Lesley McDowell.) The portrayal of Byron is also largely very negative – he treats Claire appallingly, although we see a more tender side of him in his interactions with Mary.

This is definitely not a book with likeable characters, then, but the fact that they are all, like Mary, complex and contradictory is what makes them feel human and believable. It’s also beautifully written and I enjoyed reading it, despite not really learning much about Frankenstein!

Thanks to Michael Joseph for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Surgeon’s House by Jody Cooksley

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I haven’t read any of Jody Cooksley’s previous novels, but loved the sound of her new one, The Surgeon’s House, described as a ‘thrilling Gothic historical mystery’. It’s a sequel to The Small Museum, which I wasn’t aware of until after I started reading, but I hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.

The book is set in 1883 and begins with the murder of Rose Parmiter, the cook at Evergreen House, a refuge for women and children run by Rebecca Harris and her husband, George. At first, Rebecca can’t understand why anyone would kill Rose – it seems completely senseless and inexplicable – but when more mysterious incidents follow, she begins to wonder whether the legacy of Evergreen’s former residents, the evil Dr Everley and his sister Grace, is casting a shadow over the house. But Everley is dead and Grace confined to an asylum, so how could they possibly have anything to do with the events of the present day?

Meanwhile, Rebecca is trying to concentrate on providing a safe and happy home for ‘fallen women’ and their illegitimate children, but she faces opposition from Mr Lavell of the Charity Board who insists she is being too lenient. He believes the children belong in an orphanage and the mothers should be made to study the Bible and take in laundry to pay for their bed and board. Rebecca is determined to prove that her method is better, but when more people are found dead at Evergreen House she begins to fear that this will give Mr Lavell an excuse to take control of the refuge for himself.

I found a lot of things to like about The Surgeon’s House, but it took me a long time to get into it because such a large portion of the first half of the book was devoted to filling the reader in on the plot of The Small Museum. It seemed to me that the author was more interested in explaining what happened in the previous novel, what the characters had been doing in the intervening years and how they had coped with their traumatic experiences than she was in moving forward with the plot of this novel. It made me think I should have just read The Small Museum instead. Things did eventually start to move on, though, and by the middle of the book it had become much more compelling.

The setting was interesting as it reminded me a lot of Urania Cottage, the women’s shelter founded by Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts which Stacey Halls wrote about in her recent novel, The Household – and I think if you liked that book, there’s a good chance you’ll like this one as well. Rebecca’s conflict with Mr Lavell forms a big part of the story, as she tries to keep her vision for Evergreen House alive despite his insistence that it should be run on the same model as the notorious Magdalene Laundries (which again reminded me of another book I’ve read, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan).

The mystery element of the book, as I’ve said, was slow to develop at first but became stronger later on. There are some chapters written from the perspective of Grace in her asylum and we also meet Dr Threlfall, a psychiatrist who has a ‘clinic’ in the basement of Evergreen House where he is carrying out research and experiments. It’s an interesting novel, then, with lots of different threads to it, but I felt that these threads didn’t all come together as well as they could have done. It’s possible that I would have enjoyed this book more if I’d already read the first one, so it hasn’t necessarily put me off reading more of Jody Cooksley’s work.

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

The Cardinal by Alison Weir

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In a market crowded with Tudor fiction, it’s difficult to find something new and different. This novel about Cardinal Wolsey – although maybe not the only one to be written about him – at least gives us the perspective of a prominent Tudor figure other than Henry VIII and his six wives. As with Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell novels, the focus is on politics, the forging and breaking of alliances with foreign powers, rivalries within the King’s inner circle and, above all, the rise and fall of a clever, ambitious man. We are also given some insight into Wolsey’s personal life as he is forced to choose between his career and the woman he loves.

The Cardinal covers Thomas Wolsey’s entire life, beginning with his childhood in Suffolk. Thomas – or Tom as he is known throughout the book – is the son of a yeoman farmer who also owns an inn and a butcher’s shop. However, Tom proves to be academically gifted from an early age, so instead of going into one of the family businesses he is sent to study at Oxford. At only eleven years old, he is much younger than the other students and is expected to have a bright future. Nobody could have predicted just how bright, as after making the decision to enter the church, Tom catches the eye of several influential patrons and rapidly gains wealth and power, becoming a trusted friend and adviser of first Henry VII, then Henry VIII.

Wolsey’s positions include Lord Chancellor, Bishop of York, cardinal and papal legate, and he begins to construct for himself a magnificent palace, Hampton Court. Needless to say, he quickly incurs the jealousy and resentment of other courtiers and Weir shows us how he systematically goes about bringing down his enemies and ensuring that he remains closer to the King than anyone else. Eventually he meets his match in Anne Boleyn, who has reasons of her own to dislike him. Anne is very much the villain in this book, which seems to be the case in most of Weir’s Tudor novels, probably due to the perspectives from which they’re written. Anne Boleyn, a King’s Obsession gives a more nuanced portrayal.

I loved the first half of the book, dealing with Wolsey’s early life and career, as there was a lot of material here that I had never read about in much detail before. I was also interested in the character of Joan Larke, the woman with whom Tom falls in love just as he’s beginning his rise to power. His position in the church makes it impossible for them to live together openly and he is forced to watch as she marries another man, unable to acknowledge the children he has had with her. I couldn’t feel too sorry for him, though, because he could have given up his career for her and chose not to. My sympathies were more with Joan (who would probably make a good subject for a novel in her own right, even if a lot would have to be invented as factual information on her seems quite limited).

The second half of the book is mainly devoted to Henry VIII’s Great Matter – his attempts to divorce Katherine of Aragon so that he can marry Anne Boleyn. Having already read about this several times in Weir’s other novels, from the perspectives of Katherine, Anne, Henry and Mary I, I didn’t really feel the need to read about it again so this part of the book dragged a little bit for me. Apart from that, I did enjoy The Cardinal and its portrayal of Thomas Wolsey. I’ll be interested to see which Tudor figure Alison Weir writes about next – or whether she’ll move away from that period and do something different.

Thanks to Headline Review for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Sirens by Emilia Hart

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After enjoying Emilia Hart’s first novel, Weyward, in 2023, I’ve been looking forward to reading her new one, The Sirens. Weyward linked the stories of three women in different time periods through a family connection, a shared love of nature and a theme of witchcraft. The Sirens also has multiple timelines, but this time the characters are linked by water and the sea.

The novel begins in Australia in 2019 with student Lucy waking up from a sleepwalking episode with her hands around her ex-boyfriend’s neck. Ben is not entirely innocent – they broke up after he shared a nude photo of her with his friends – but she’s afraid he’ll report her for assault, so she packs her things and flees. Planning to take refuge with her sister Jess, an artist, Lucy heads for the town of Comber Bay, but on arrival she finds her sister’s house empty, as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. Lucy is concerned, but on learning that Jess did tell one of the neighbours that she would be going away for a while, she decides to wait in the house until she returns.

Comber Bay is a small town on the coast of New South Wales and has a sinister reputation; over a forty year period, eight men disappeared without trace, never to be seen again. Also, in 1982, a baby was found abandoned in a cave not far from Jess’s house. As she waits to hear from her sister, Lucy begins to uncover the truth behind these mysteries – but she becomes distracted by unsettling dreams of another pair of sisters who lived two centuries earlier.

Lucy’s present day story alternates with the story of those other two sisters, Mary and Eliza, who were found guilty of a crime in Ireland in 1800 and transported to Australia on a convict ship. Later in the book, Jess’s story also begins to unfold, mainly in the form of diary entries from the 1990s (the diary reads more like a novel, but I think we just have to suspend disbelief there). It takes a while for all of these threads to come together, but we eventually begin to see how cleverly they are connected. There are some surprising twists that I didn’t see coming, as well as some that I was able to guess before they were revealed. As ever, when a book has more than one timeline, I find that some are more compelling than others – and in this case, I particularly enjoyed Lucy’s story and the flashbacks to Jess’s teenage years. Mary and Eliza never fully came to life for me, so their adventures on board the Naiad didn’t interest me quite as much as I would have liked.

The title and cover of the book made me think there would be more siren/mermaid mythology incorporated into the story, but there’s only a little bit of that. There’s a lot of beautiful watery imagery, though, and water plays a big part in the novel in so many different ways. There’s Mary and Eliza’s sea voyage on the Naiad; the setting of Comber Bay, with its coastline, cliffs and caves; Jess’s paintings of ships; even the rare skin condition Lucy suffers from, aquagenic urticaria. It’s a book with lots of layers and things to think about. Having read two Emilia Hart books now, however, I do have a problem with her portrayal of men. Almost every male character in both books, with only a few exceptions, is either violent and abusive, a rapist or generally misogynistic or predatory. Obviously that’s true of some men, but I think it’s unrealistic that nearly every man who crosses paths with our female protagonists would be a terrible person. I think it should be possible to promote feminism and give women a voice without going too far in the other direction.

Apart from that, I did like the book and loved the eerie atmosphere Hart creates with Lucy alone in the abandoned Cliff House, uncovering the troubled history of Comber Bay’s past while being haunted by the cries of the women on the convict ship. It’s very similar to Weyward in some ways, but also different enough to be an interesting novel in its own right.

Thanks to The Borough Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Traitor’s Legacy by S.J. Parris

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I know S.J. Parris’s Giordano Bruno historical thrillers, set in Elizabethan England, are very popular, but I’ve only read one of them – Sacrilege – and wasn’t particularly impressed. When I saw that she’d started to write a new series, of which Traitor’s Legacy is the first, I thought it would be a good opportunity to give her another try. As it turned out, this is actually a spin-off featuring some of the same characters (but not Bruno himself, although he is mentioned once or twice).

Traitor’s Legacy is set in the winter of 1598 and follows Sophia de Wolfe, formerly an agent of the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Now Walsingham is dead and Secretary of State Robert Cecil has stepped into his role. It’s Cecil who summons Sophia when a girl’s body is found in the foundations of a building site with a scrap of paper tucked inside her clothing. The paper contains a message written in a cipher used by Sophia during her time as a spy, suggesting that someone is trying to link her to the murder. But who would want to do that and how could the secret cipher have fallen into anyone else’s hands?

The girl is quickly identified as Agnes Lovell, a wealthy heiress and a ward of the powerful nobleman Sir Thomas North, who had been planning to marry her to his son, Edmund. It’s possible that the murder could have been committed for political reasons – North had gained a reputation for corruption during a recent military campaign in Ireland – but there also seems to be a connection with the ambitious Earl of Essex, the Queen’s favourite courtier. However, things take a more personal turn for Sophia when suspicion falls on her own illegitimate son, Tobie. Sophia will do whatever it takes to clear his name, but this is made more difficult by the fact that Tobie himself has no idea that she is his mother!

Having only read one of the Giordano Bruno novels, I’m not sure how much we actually learn about Sophia in that series. I vaguely remember her from Sacrilege and presumably she’s in some of the other books as well. It’s definitely possible to follow what’s happening in this book without any prior knowledge, but I did feel there was a lot of backstory I wasn’t familiar with and had to pick up as I went along. I didn’t find Sophia entirely believable as a 16th century woman, but not wildly anachronistic either and she’s aware of the limitations placed on her by society. I liked her as a character and enjoyed following her investigations. She’s assisted by Anthony Munday, a playwright and another former spy, sometimes working together and sometimes separately which helps the story to move along.

Many of the characters in the book are people who really existed; I’ve already mentioned some of them, but we also meet others including Thomas Phelippes, Cecil’s cryptographer, and Frances Devereux, wife of the Earl of Essex. Through the character of Anthony Munday, the novel also touches on Elizabethan London’s theatrical world and the rival groups of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men. There’s a lot going on, then, but the plot, although complex, is easy enough to follow and I gradually became gripped by it. I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to meeting Sophia and her friends again as the series progresses.

Thanks to Hemlock Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Edinburgh Murders by Catriona McPherson

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This is the second book in Catriona McPherson’s new mystery series set in 1940s Edinburgh, but if you haven’t read the first one (In Place of Fear) it shouldn’t be a problem as both books also work as standalone novels. Those of you who have read In Place of Fear will remember that it introduced us to Helen Crowther, a welfare officer (formally a ‘medical almoner’) in the newly formed National Health Service. This second novel again follows Helen as she carries out her duties for the NHS and becomes embroiled in another mystery.

The novel opens with Helen taking a patient to the public bath house on Caledonian Crescent. As she helps the woman to wash herself, they become aware of a disturbance in one of the men’s cubicles. A man has been found boiled to death in a bath of scalding hot water – but how? Why would he continue to lie there as the water got hotter and hotter? And how could it have reached such a high temperature anyway? Even more worrying for Helen is the fact that she has spotted her father, Mack, at the baths, but when she speaks to him at home later, he tries to deny that he was there. As the bodies of more men are found around Edinburgh, all killed in equally unusual, gruesome ways, Helen becomes convinced that her father knows more about the deaths than he’s admitting to.

When I reviewed In Place of Fear, I mentioned that the mystery only formed a small part of the book, with more focus being on the historical element and the work of an almoner in the NHS. This book is the opposite – the mystery is much stronger, with the first murder discovered in the opening chapter and several more following soon after. The murders are carried out using imaginative methods and are obviously linked in some way, so Helen needs to decide exactly what the link is in order to identify the killer. It’s quite a dark book, but although the descriptions of the murders are unpleasant, they’re not too gory or graphic.

As with the first novel, there’s a great sense of time and place, bringing the atmosphere of Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge area to life. McPherson uses a lot of dialect and there’s a glossary at the front for those readers who need help with the Scottish words and phrases. I found that there was less time spent describing Helen’s welfare work, though, which was one of the things I thought was particularly interesting in the first novel. Still, I enjoyed meeting her again, as well as the other recurring characters such as the two doctors she works for and her younger sister, known as Teenie. There’s also the beginnings of a possible romance for Helen with her friend Billy, who works at the morgue and helps her investigate the mystery and I’ll look forward to seeing how this develops in the next book.

I still haven’t read any of Catriona McPherson’s other novels, although she seems to have written a lot of them! I should probably investigate while I’m waiting for a third Helen Crowther book.

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

Cleopatra by Natasha Solomons

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This is a novel about Cleopatra, as you’ll have already guessed from the title and cover! Beginning with a visit to Rome with her father – the first time Cleopatra, then thirteen, has ever left Egypt – and ending just after the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, it’s a retelling of the life of one of history’s most famous women.

Although I love history and historical fiction, Cleopatra is not one of the historical figures I have a particular interest in and I haven’t read a lot of factual information about her. This means I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the book or how the choices Solomons makes on what to cover or not cover compare with choices made by other authors. Purely as a work of fiction, I found it quite enjoyable, especially the parts of the book dealing with Cleopatra’s personal life – her friendship with her beloved servant, Charmian; the development of her relationship with Caesar; and the birth of her son, Caesarion (depicted here as Caesar’s child). Solomons also delves into the politics of the period, the shifting allegiances and power struggles and the changing dynamics between Egypt and Rome. I found some of this a bit difficult to follow and I think including dates at the start of the chapters may have helped me keep track of the passing of time.

The novel is narrated mainly by Cleopatra herself, which allows us a lot of insight into what she is like as a mother, lover, sister and friend. However, there are also some chapters narrated by another woman: Servilia, sister of Cato the Younger and a mistress of Caesar’s (as well as the mother of his eventual assassin, Brutus). There weren’t enough of these chapters for me to fully connect with Servilia on an emotional level, but seeing things from her point of view did provide a very different (and more negative) impression of Cleopatra. I can understand why Solomons chose Servilia, but it would have been interesting if she had also written from other perspectives such as Charmian’s or maybe one of Cleopatra’s brothers and sisters.

The novel ends soon after Caesar’s death, leaving a lot of Cleopatra’s story still untold – her relationship with Mark Antony and the events leading to her suicide, for example. I haven’t seen any indication that there’s going to be a sequel, but there would definitely be enough material for one. Maybe Natasha Solomons will move on to something else for her next book, though; her previous work has included a novel narrated by the Mona Lisa, a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, and a saga about a wealthy banking family, so clearly she likes to write about a wide range of topics and characters!

Thanks to Manilla Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.