Category: Historical Fiction

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.

In Place of Fear by Catriona McPherson

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Catriona McPherson is an author I’ve wanted to try for a while; I keep seeing her books on other blogs I follow and they always sound interesting. Her latest novel, In Place of Fear, turned out to be a good one for me to start with; it’s a fascinating historical mystery set in Edinburgh just after World War II.

It’s 1948 and Helen Crowther is about to start a new job as medical almoner for the newly formed National Health Service. Working alongside two doctors, Dr Deuchar and Dr Strasser, Helen will be making home visits to patients, giving them advice and ensuring that they get the help they need – a role similar to a modern-day social worker. She’s looking forward to the new job, but at the same time she knows there are going to be difficulties: first of all, she will have to convince the disbelieving public that healthcare under the new NHS really is free and they no longer need to worry about paying for their treatment; she also has to contend with the disapproval of her mother, who wishes she would get a job in a factory like other working class women. It comes as a relief when Dr Strasser offers Helen the upstairs flat in an empty building he owns, so that she and her husband, Sandy, can move out of her parents’ overcrowded house at last.

Helen’s marriage has not been a particularly happy one so far; Sandy has spent several years in a POW camp and since returning to Scotland has been struggling to cope with married life. Helen hopes the situation will improve now that they can be alone together, but just as she and Sandy are beginning to settle into their new home, she discovers the body of a young woman in the air raid shelter in the garden! The doctor is summoned and after examining the body he decides that it was suicide, but Helen is not convinced. Who is this young woman and how did she die? Helen is determined to find out, even though everyone else seems equally determined to cover up what has happened.

The mystery aspect of this novel takes a while to get started and never really becomes the main focus of the book until near the end when Helen begins to uncover some secrets that have remained hidden for several years. However, I thought it was a very intriguing mystery and although I had my suspicions as to who the culprit might be, I was unable to guess the other parts of the solution. Looking at other reviews of the book, it seems that a lot of readers were disappointed that the crime element wasn’t stronger but this didn’t really bother me as I was finding it so interesting to read about life in 1940s Edinburgh and the beginnings of the NHS. There’s also a heavy use of Scottish dialect which I suppose people will either like or they won’t, but I thought it added to the strong sense of time and place and I found it easy enough to follow what was being said.

A lot of time is spent on Helen’s visits to people in the community, particularly young mothers and those who are hoping to become mothers, so that she can advise them on diet and hygiene and make sure they are receiving the medical care they’re entitled to. I wasn’t familiar with the role of medical almoners before reading this book, so I found it fascinating to learn about what the job involved. Before 1948, the almoner would assess patients to decide how much they could afford to pay, but with the birth of a health service that was ‘free at the point of use’ this became unnecessary and the almoner could devote more time to actually helping the patients with their medical and welfare needs. However, Helen sometimes goes above and beyond what is required and sometimes she makes mistakes or is seen as interfering in things that are none of her business. It was watching her going about her daily work and trying to decide how to handle each difficult situation that I found particularly enjoyable, so it didn’t matter to me that the mystery was so slow to develop.

I would like to try more of Catriona McPherson’s books. If you’ve read any of them, please let me know which one I should read next!

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

This is book 24/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting by Sophie Irwin

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This was a gamble for me; I don’t usually read Regency romances other than Georgette Heyer’s and I was worried that this book might be silly and derivative. However, I’m pleased to say that I found it entertaining, intelligent and thoroughly enjoyable. Although some elements of the plot undoubtedly draw heavily on Heyer and Austen and we have a heroine who in many ways resembles Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair, Sophie Irwin still manages to make the story feel fresh and engaging.

Kitty Talbot is the eldest of five recently orphaned sisters whose father has left them with a mountain of debt and in danger of losing their home. Having just been jilted by her wealthy fiancé, Kitty decides that the only solution is to find another rich man to marry – but unless she can do so within the next twelve weeks, Netley Cottage will be repossessed and the family thrown into poverty. So, accompanied by her sister Cecily, Kitty heads to London for the Season, determined to launch herself into society and find a suitable husband as soon as possible.

Once settled in London at the home of her mother’s old friend, Aunt Dorothy, Kitty sets her sights on young Archie de Lacy, who quickly succumbs to her charms. But just as Archie seems to be on the verge of proposing, his brother Lord Radcliffe arrives from his country estate – and sees straight through her plans. This is going to make finding a husband much more difficult than Kitty had expected!

Although I could predict from early in the novel how it was going to end, that didn’t make it any less fun to read. Sophie Irwin throws just about everything into the story that you would expect to find in a Regency romance: balls, dinner parties, trips to the theatre and the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, carriage rides, notorious gambling dens, elopements to Gretna Green and encounters with highwaymen. There are also plenty of interactions between our heroine and the man we can quickly guess is going to be the hero, allowing us to watch their relationship develop over the course of the novel.

Kitty is unashamedly open – at least to her family and friends – about her plans to marry for money. She’s ruthless and manipulative, yet it’s clear that everything she does is for the sake of her younger sisters and she is not motivated by greed or personal comfort. Even though you know that what she is doing is morally wrong, you can’t help hoping that she succeeds. I also hoped for some happiness for her sister, Cecily, who at eighteen is just a few years younger and has accompanied Kitty to London at their Aunt Dorothy’s suggestion. The bookish, intellectual Cecily is more comfortable reading poetry or visiting a museum, but she reluctantly tags along with Kitty to tea parties and dances and almost ruins her sister’s schemes by making one faux pas after another.

I noticed one or two words and phrases that don’t belong in a Regency novel (‘misgendering’ being the worst example), but the language is generally appropriate and the period is brought to life quite vividly. The book does have a lot of interesting things to say about wealth, the class system and why some people should be denied the same opportunities in life as others just because they come from a less privileged background. This gives the novel some extra depth and makes it more than just a light romance.

This is Sophie Irwin’s first novel, but I’m already looking forward to her next one.

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

This is book 23/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

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Having enjoyed Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s previous book, The Mercies, I was looking forward to reading more of her work. This new novel, The Dance Tree, sounded very different, but equally intriguing. It’s set in 16th century Strasbourg during a plague of dancing – yes, dancing, which sounds harmless but, as the novel shows, is anything but.

The Dance Tree begins in 1518 and introduces us to Lisbet, a young pregnant woman, who lives with her husband and mother-in-law. Lisbet has already lost several babies and is determined to carry this one to full term; while her pregnancy advances she finds comfort in looking after the bees that provide the family’s livelihood and visiting the tree she has decorated in memory of her lost children. One day, Lisbet’s sister-in-law, Agnethe, comes home from the nunnery where she has been doing penance for the last seven years; Lisbet has no idea what the sin was that resulted in Agnethe being sent away, but she does know that her return has changed the dynamics within the household and that life will not be quite the same again.

Meanwhile, in the centre of Strasbourg, Frau Troffea walks into a market square, lifts up her hands and begins to dance. She is soon joined by more women…and more…and more, all of them dancing until the soles of their feet bleed. As the women continue to dance day after day – a desperate, frenzied dance that shows no sign of coming to an end – the authorities try to bring them under control, without success.

I knew nothing about the dancing plague before reading this book, so I found that aspect of the novel fascinating. Many theories have been put forward over the years to explain why the women danced, ranging from demonic possession or religious trance to ergot poisoning or mass hysteria. Even today, historians don’t know for sure what was behind the epidemic, but to help us understand some of the possible reasons, Kiran Millwood Hargrave provides back stories for some of the individual dancers. These stories are presented as brief chapters interspersed between Lisbet’s chapters, and although I thought they could have been better integrated into the novel as a whole, they were interesting to read.

I liked Lisbet and had a lot of sympathy for her situation, and also for her best friend, Ida, who is married to a controlling bully who belongs to the ‘Twenty One’, the group of men who rule the city. Agnethe is another intriguing character, although I found the reason for her seven-year penance too easy to guess. However, despite finding the characters interesting, I didn’t manage to form the deep emotional connection with any of them that I would have liked. I’m not sure why this should be, because Hargrave does write beautifully, except that I often find the use of present tense very distancing and I think that was the case here.

Although I didn’t love this book as much as I hoped, I would recommend Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s books to readers interested in historical fiction dealing with women’s lives in unusual settings and circumstances – in this book, the Strasbourg dancing plague, and in The Mercies, the witch trials on the Norwegian island of Vardø.

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

This is book 22/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

The Fugitive Colours by Nancy Bilyeau

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A new Nancy Bilyeau book is always something to look forward to. I’ve loved everything I’ve read by her so far: her Joanna Stafford trilogy, about a nun displaced in Tudor England after the dissolution of the monasteries; Dreamland, set in a Coney Island amusement park; and The Blue, a wonderful historical thriller involving spies, art and the race to create a beautiful new shade of blue. The Fugitive Colours is a sequel to The Blue and another great read; the two books stand alone, so it’s not necessary to have read the first novel before beginning this one, although I would recommend doing so if you can.

It’s 1764 and Genevieve Planché, heroine of The Blue, is now a married woman running her own silk design business in Spitalfields, London. With the help of her two young assistant artists, Caroline and Jean, Genevieve is beginning to find buyers for her silk designs and is determined to make the business a success. However, she has not given up on her dream of becoming a serious artist and when she is invited to a gathering at the home of the portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, it seems she could still have a chance of achieving her ambition.

This in itself would have been the basis for an interesting novel – a woman trying to build a career for herself in what was still very much a male-dominated field – but there’s a lot more to the story than that. Due to the parts played by Genevieve and her husband in the recent search for the blue, their names have come to the attention of some very powerful people who are hoping to enlist them in further conspiracies. Yet again Genevieve is forced to wonder who she can and cannot trust, but this time one wrong decision could mean the end of her dreams, the loss of her business and even the destruction of her marriage.

The Fugitive Colours is perhaps not quite as exciting and fast-paced as The Blue, but I found it equally gripping. Set entirely in London, it’s a very immersive book taking us from the Spitalfields workshops of the Huguenot silk-weaving community to the grand homes of the rich and famous and the nightlife of Covent Garden. While Genevieve and most of the other main characters are fictional, we do meet some real historical figures too – not just Joshua Reynolds but also Giacomo Casanova, the Earl of Sandwich and the fascinating Chevalier d’Eon. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of the 18th century art world, the snippets of information I picked up (not coming from an art background myself, I didn’t know what ‘fugitive colours’ were, but now I do), and the insights into how difficult it was for women like Genevieve and the real-life Frances Reynolds, Joshua’s sister, to gain recognition for their work.

I hope there will be another book in the Genevieve Planché series as I think there’s certainly a lot more that could be written about her. If not, I’ll look forward to seeing what Nancy Bilyeau decides to write next.

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

This is book 21/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.