Category: Historical Fiction

The Colour Storm by Damian Dibben

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Damian Dibben’s previous novel, Tomorrow, was a fascinating and unusual story of an immortal dog searching for his master across two centuries (it was better than it sounds, honestly!). I was curious to see what his next book, The Colour Storm, would be like, but it turns out that it’s a much more conventional historical novel this time. It’s also a very good one; although the subject reminded me of another of my recent reads, The Fugitive Colours by Nancy Bilyeau, the setting gives it a very different feel.

The Colour Storm is the story of the Italian painter Giorgio Barbarelli, who lived and worked in Venice during the Renaissance. He was a real person, as are many of the other characters in the novel, and you may already be familiar with his paintings – if not, you can easily find images online of some of the pieces attributed to him which will give you an idea of the quality of his work.

At the beginning of the novel, Barbarelli – or ‘Zorzo’ as he is called throughout the book – is finding life difficult. Work is becoming hard to find, the competition from other artists is fierce and Zorzo’s debts are increasing. He’s responsible not only for himself, but also for his team of young apprentices and assistants, so he urgently needs to find some way of gaining commissions from rich clients. An opportunity arises when a wealthy German merchant, Jakob Fugger, arrives in Venice and is said to be looking for an artist to paint an altarpiece for St Peter’s Basilica. When Zorzo hears that Fugger also possesses a new colour, a pigment known as ‘prince orient’, he becomes even more determined to bring himself to the merchant’s attention.

In an attempt to win Fugger’s favour, Zorzo agrees to paint a portrait of his wife, Sybille – but as he becomes closer to Sybille, he finds that he has become involved in a conspiracy which could have huge implications for the people of Europe. And then, while Zorzo is still considering his next move, a new threat arrives in Venice…the plague:

Only the poorest folk, who have no choice but to go to work, are continuing as normal, but they’re wary, treading more carefully than usual. Many cover their faces with their sleeves or improvised masks and everyone keeps their distance. From behind closed windows and shutters, Zorzo’s aware of families pressed together, restless shadows, watching and fretting as to whether this episode will pass – as most do – without significant horror, or if this one will be severe.

Still very relevant, isn’t it? The plague plays a part in the later stages of the novel, but before that we follow the story of Zorzo’s search for the prince orient and his entanglement with Jakob and Sybille (also real historical figures). We are given some insights into the workings of an artist’s studio in Renaissance Venice and there are appearances by other famous names from the art world, including Bellini, Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. By focusing on the dark side of life in 16th century Venice, Dibben creates plenty of atmosphere, and although the parts of the book that concentrate on Zorzo’s relationships with Sybille and her husband interested me less, I found this an enjoyable read overall.

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

This is book 4/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

This is book 30/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

Privilege by Guinevere Glasfurd

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I enjoyed both of Guinevere Glasfurd’s previous novels, The Words in My Hand and The Year Without Summer, so I hoped for good things from her latest novel which sounded just as intriguing as the other two. The title Privilege could refer to all sorts of things, but in this case it’s a reference to the system in pre-Revolutionary France where publishers had to obtain a ‘royal privilege’ before a book could be published.

The novel begins in Rouen in 1749, where Delphine Vimond is being raised by her father, having lost her mother at an early age. Delphine’s father runs a pottery, but he is also a collector of books and Delphine inherits from him a love of literature and a desire for learning. Finding the key to his library, she discovers a whole new world of adventure and knowledge in the pages of his books. However, when a volume by Milton on the killing of kings is found in his possession, Delphine understands for the first time that not all books are seen as appropriate and that some are even forbidden.

Meanwhile, in London, we meet Chancery Smith, an apprentice printer. A box of papers from Paris signed only with the letter ‘D’ has been received at the print shop and Chancery is given the job of visiting France to try to identify this mysterious author. It’s not going to be an easy task – as the papers contain potentially dangerous writings, Chancery must avoid letting them fall into the hands of the censors who would see the papers destroyed and the courier punished. On arriving in Paris, his path crosses with Delphine Vimond’s and together they set off in search of ‘D’, while trying to stay one step ahead of the royal censor, Henri Gilbert, and his spies.

Privilege is a thought-provoking read, exploring issues such as censorship, the power of the monarch, and the freedom – or lack of it – to write and think about topics that matter to us. Before reading this novel I didn’t really know how the ‘royal privilege’ system worked and how it lead to books written in France having to be published in other countries and smuggled back in, so I found that aspect of the story fascinating. I also picked up lots of other snippets of information on the early publishing industry along the way – I had never heard of France’s ‘blue library’, for example.

I found the mystery/thriller aspect of the novel slightly less successful, maybe because the identity of the unknown author seemed too obvious. Still, with two engaging protagonists in Delphine and Chancery, as well as a strong cast of secondary characters, and with such an interesting subject at the heart of the story, it’s a book that I enjoyed reading.

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

This is book 29/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn

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I loved The Rose Code by Kate Quinn – it was one of my favourite books last year. Because of that, I think my expectations for her new novel, The Diamond Eye, were slightly too high. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it will be one of my books of the year this time.

The Diamond Eye is the story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a female sniper in the Soviet Army during World War II (and a real historical figure). Lyudmila, or ‘Mila’ as she is called in the novel, was born in Ukraine but considered herself Russian. The book was written before the current war in Ukraine began earlier this year, which gives something as simple as Mila’s choice of identity new relevance.

When we first meet Mila, she is a twenty-one-year-old history student in Kiev (now known as Kyiv, of course) and is trying to get a divorce from her husband Alexei, who seduced her as a teenager then left her to raise their son, Slavka, alone. After an encounter with Alexei at a shooting range during which Mila embarrasses herself by missing a shot, she decides to join an advanced marksmanship course so that she’ll never miss again and can prove to Slavka that she’s the equal of his father. This decision changes Mila’s life because, when Hitler invades Russia a few years later, she is handed a rifle and enlisted into the Red Army as a sniper.

We then follow two alternating storylines – one which describes Mila’s time in the army and how she acquires her reputation as ‘Lady Death’, being credited with 309 kills, and another set in 1942 as Mila embarks on a US tour in an attempt to persuade the Allies to provide support for Russia against the Nazis. The chapters set in America explore Mila’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt and a fictitious plot to assassinate the President. This invented storyline adds some tension and excitement to the book, but with Mila’s own life being so fascinating I’m not sure that it was really necessary!

The factual parts of the novel are based on Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s own memoir, Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper, which I haven’t read. In fact, I knew nothing at all about Mila before reading this book so everything in it was new to me. Quinn includes a very comprehensive author’s note at the end in which she explains where she tried to stick to the known facts and where she had used her imagination to fill in gaps or make the story more interesting (mainly the bits concerning Mila’s marriage to Alexei and her romantic relationships with two men she meets in the army). Some of the most surprising parts of the story, such as Mila’s friendship with the First Lady are actually true.

There’s a lot of focus on military life, weapons and tactics, which I suppose is to be expected in a novel about a sniper, but that’s never been a particular area of interest to me and reading about the Bletchley Park codebreakers in The Rose Code was much more to my taste. Still, it’s always good to learn something new and I did enjoy the parts of the book about Mila’s personal life and ambassadorial work, if not so much the parts about shooting and killing. I’m sure I’ll be reading more of Kate Quinn’s books.

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

This is book 28/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk

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I was drawn to The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by the setting – 18th century Constantinople – but I wasn’t sure that it would really be my sort of book. From the blurb, I was expecting a strong magical realism element, something I don’t always get on with. However, I was pleased to find that this aspect of the novel was actually much more subtle than I’d expected.

The story begins in London in 1754 with the birth of Zachary Cloudesley. Sadly, his mother dies giving birth to him, leaving little Zachary to be raised by his father Abel, a clockmaker and inventor of automata. Fortunately, Abel doesn’t have to do this alone – help soon arrives in the form of wet nurse Mrs Morley and the eccentric Aunt Frances, two very different women who go on to play important roles in Zachary’s life.

From an early age, it becomes apparent that Zachary possesses the gift of ‘second sight’ which allows him to see into the future and this gift only becomes stronger following a serious accident for which Abel blames himself. In order to keep his son safe, Abel is persuaded to accept a commission which takes him far away from his London workshop, to Constantinople (Istanbul). But when Abel fails to return from his journey, Zachary is determined to follow him and do whatever it takes to rescue his missing father.

The first half of this novel has a very Dickensian feel. I was particularly reminded of Dombey and Son, which also begins with a baby being born, the death of the mother in childbirth and the arrival of a wet nurse. I enjoyed getting to know the characters who make up the Cloudesley household: the forthright, opinionated but warm-hearted Grace Morley and her little daughter Leonora; the larger-than-life Aunt Frances who takes her crow and two parrots everywhere she goes; and Abel’s apprentice Tom, an intelligent, talented young man with a not-so-well hidden secret. All of these people have interesting histories of their own, which are revealed during the early stages of the novel.

When the action moves away from London, to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, we are treated to some colourful descriptions of Constantinople, the sultan’s palace, and the seraglio, presided over by the kizlar agha (the head of the eunuchs). However, this is where I felt the story lost its way a little bit and for a while I struggled to stay interested. I think this could have been partly due to the focus switching to Zachary who, despite being the title character, was not as engaging as Frances or Mrs Morley. I’m also not quite sure what the point was in the ‘second sight’ aspect of the book as it didn’t really seem essential to the plot. Still, this was an entertaining debut novel by Sean Lusk – if you read and enjoy it, I can recommend Cynthia Jefferies’ The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan for another adventure in Constantinople or The Clockwork Girl by Anna Mazzola if you’re interested in the world of 18th century automata.

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

This is book 27/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

Fortune by Amanda Smyth

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My first book for this year’s 20 Books of Summer is also one of the shortlisted titles for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The winner is going to be revealed at the Borders Book Festival on Friday 17th June, so I wanted to read this one before the announcement. It’s the second of the four titles on the shortlist that I’ve read – the other is the excellent Rose Nicolson; I am currently halfway through the third, The Magician, but am not sure if I’ll finish it in time, and I won’t get to the fourth one, News of the Dead, now either.

Anyway, Fortune is set in Trinidad in the 1920s and begins with a chance meeting between two men. One of them, Eddie Wade, has spent the last few years working in the US oilfields and has recently returned home, hoping to make his fortune on the island. He’s convinced that the land beneath Sonny Chatterjee’s cocoa plantation is rich in oil and is on the verge of persuading Sonny to let him start drilling when his truck breaks down on the road. Businessman Tito Fernandez stops to help and when he hears about Eddie’s project, he agrees to invest.

Soon Eddie and Tito are the best of friends and their trust in each other pays off when the oil begins to flow. However, as Eddie spends more and more time visiting the Fernandez family and becoming part of their social circle, he finds himself increasingly drawn to Tito’s beautiful wife, Ada – and the attraction is mutual.

The novel is inspired by a real event which took place in Trinidad in 1928, but I would recommend not looking it up before reading the book. Although I did eventually guess what was going to happen, I’m glad I didn’t know for certain as it would have taken away some of the impact of the story. The characters also seem to be loosely based on real people, but with different names and obviously with fictitious storylines created around the historical facts.

I can’t think of any other books I’ve read set in Trinidad and I’m ashamed to admit that it’s a place I know very little about, but Amanda Smyth, who is an Irish-Trinidadian author, brings it to life beautifully – the landscape, the plants and wildlife, the bustling streets of Port of Spain, and the cultures, beliefs and traditions of the Trinidadian people. At the time of our story, the island is going through a period of change; the cocoa trees that had formed such an important part of the economy are dying and new sources of income are needed. With the growing popularity of cars and planes, Trinidad’s oil boom comes at just the right time. Smyth does a wonderful job of portraying the ambition and greed of the various oil prospectors, the reluctance of Sonny Chatterjee to give up on his cocoa farming and allow drilling on his land, the fears of his wife Sita, who is mistrustful and suspicious of the whole business, and the excitement the characters feel when the first well is struck.

The tensions between the characters are also very well done; the relationship between Eddie and Ada develops slowly but once their affair begins they take so many risks it seems inevitable that Tito will find out and you wonder what will happen when he does. The personal stories of the characters play out against the backdrop of the oil rush, with all the different elements of the novel falling into place to build towards a dramatic conclusion. Although I still prefer Andrew Greig’s Rose Nicolson, this is an impressive novel too and while it hadn’t sounded very appealing to me at first, I can see now why the Walter Scott Prize judges decided to shortlist it.

This is book 1/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

This is book 26/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

Winchelsea by Alex Preston

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John Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet is a book I’ve been intending to read for a few years now – it’s on my Classics Club list – and I should probably have done so before picking up Winchelsea, a novel described by its author as “Moonfleet for grown-ups”. I often seem to do these things the wrong way round!

The novel takes its title from the seaside town of Winchelsea in East Sussex where the story is set. Our heroine, Goody Brown, rescued from drowning as a baby, is the adopted daughter of the physician Ezekiel Brown and his French wife, Alma. Goody has had a happy childhood and has grown to love her adoptive parents and her brother Francis, another adopted child, but in 1742, when she is sixteen years old, her life changes forever. Ezekiel, as well as being the town’s doctor, serves as ‘cellarman’ to a gang of smugglers, helping them to store their goods out of sight in the tunnels below the cliffs. When things go wrong and Ezekiel is murdered in the night by the gang, Goody and Francis begin to plot their revenge.

On the one hand, Winchelsea is a good old-fashioned adventure story, featuring not just smugglers but also pirates, espionage, political intrigue – yes, it’s the 1740s so the Jacobites and Bonnie Prince Charlie make an appearance – and all sorts of other swashbuckling escapades. On the other, it explores issues that the older novels it imitates would have swept over or not tackled at all, such as race (Goody’s adoptive brother escaped from a slave ship and is the only person in Winchelsea with dark skin) and gender (a cross-dressing storyline with a character who feels most comfortable ‘neither as woman nor man’). This mix of 18th century history and characters with 21st century sensibilities didn’t quite convince me, but other readers might enjoy seeing a modern take on an old story. The language was generally appropriate for the 1740s setting, anyway!

Goody’s name puzzled me slightly because it was historically a shortened form of Goodwife used to address older married women; it seemed a strange name to give a child. I suppose there’s no reason why it couldn’t be used as a first name as well. Most of the novel is written in the first person from Goody’s perspective and she’s a very engaging narrator. Later, two other characters take their turn to tell part of the story and although I found the change in narrators jarring at first, I soon settled into reading from a different point of view and I think the structure of the book was quite effective.

The best thing about Winchelsea, in my opinion, was the depiction of Winchelsea itself – the coastal landscape, the houses with large cellars, the underground network of tunnels known as the ‘Under-Reach’ – and nearby Rye and Romney Marsh. I haven’t read Russell Thorndike’s classic adventure novel Dr Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, but I suspect that was another of Alex Preston’s influences.

Although this book wasn’t a complete success with me, it did keep me entertained for a while and I will try to read Moonfleet sooner rather than later!

This is book 25/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

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Guy Gavriel Kay’s new novel is set in the same world as his previous two, Children of Earth and Sky and A Brightness Long Ago, but although the three books are closely linked, they are separate stories and I’m sure you could read this one as a standalone if you wanted to.

The world to which I’ve just referred is a fictional world which closely resembles the area surrounding the Mediterranean during the 15th century. Countries and cities are given different names (Italy becomes Batiara, Spain is Esperaña, Venice is Seressa) and the characters belong to one of three religions which clearly correspond to the main three religions in that part of the world at that time. The Asharites (Muslims) worship the stars, the Jaddites (Christians) worship the sun and the Kindath (Jews) worship the two moons, one blue and one white, which both shine in the sky. This third novel is set just after the Jaddite city of Sarantium has fallen to the Asharite Osmanlis, who have renamed it Asharias – like our own world’s Constantinople which fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 and would become Istanbul.

Some of the characters we met in A Brightness Long Ago appear again in this book, but the focus is mainly on two new characters. First, there’s Lenia Serrano, a young woman who was abducted by Asharite raiders as a child and raised as a slave. Now free, she longs to return home to Batiara but, convinced that her years in slavery will have brought shame upon her family, home is the one place she’s determined to avoid. Rafel ben Natan, our other protagonist, is a Kindath merchant whose family fled persecution in Esperaña some years earlier. Rafel’s brother has disappeared without trace, leaving Rafel responsible for his sister-in-law and her children.

As the novel opens, Lenia and Rafel have been hired by two pirate brothers to carry out the assassination of the khalif of Abeneven. Their decision to accept this assignment brings them life-changing wealth, but also has huge consequences for the balance of power between rival states, bringing the world to the brink of war.

Some readers may be put off by the labelling of Kay’s novels as ‘fantasy’, but other than the alternate names for people, places and religions, and one or two very subtle supernatural elements, this book (like most of his others) is much closer to historical fiction than it is to traditional fantasy. Setting his story in a thinly-disguised version of Renaissance Europe gives Kay an opportunity to explore that period of history while being freed from the constraints of having to stick to historical fact. However, in this particular book, there are also some obvious parallels with today’s world; exile and displacement are major themes, with various characters being forced to leave their own countries because of war, persecution or other reasons and then either searching for somewhere new to make their home or trying to find a way to return.

This is a beautifully written novel, but I do think Kay’s writing style is probably a bit of an acquired taste. Much as I like his books, I’m starting to find his habit of going off on tangents to explore the lives of minor characters and the heavy messaging around choices and the consequences of our actions very repetitive. These most recent books are not his best, in my opinion – his earlier ones seemed to have stronger plots and a tighter focus, so if you’re new to his work I would recommend starting with one of those; Tigana is my favourite and The Lions of Al-Rassan is also very good (and set in this same two-mooned world several centuries earlier). Readers who’ve already enjoyed some of his other historical fantasy novels should enjoy this one too; I did and am looking forward to reading the remaining ones I still haven’t read.

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