Category: Historical Fiction

A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor

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I love Andrew Taylor’s books and over the last few years I’ve been enjoying his Marwood and Lovett series, set in the 17th century in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London. His new novel, A Schooling in Murder, is not part of the series and leaves that setting behind entirely, taking us instead to the 1940s and a girls’ school near the border of England and Wales.

The novel has a very unusual narrator and when I sat down to write this review I wondered if it would be possible to avoid giving away too much about her. However, the publisher’s own blurb reveals her secret, as do most of the other reviews I’ve seen (and to be fair, she tells us herself in the first chapter anyway): Annabel Warnock is a ghost. In life, she was a teacher at Monkshill Park School for Girls, until being pushed into the river from the Maiden’s Leap, a clifftop viewing point on the Gothick Walk, part of the school grounds. Who pushed her? Annabel doesn’t know, but she’s determined to find out.

As a ghost, Annabel is able to move freely around Monkshill Park – although places she never visited while alive are inaccessible to her – but she can’t be seen or heard by anyone else. This naturally makes investigating her murder very difficult, especially as her colleagues don’t even know she’s dead since her body was never washed up. It seems that the only person who can help is Alec Shaw, Annabel’s replacement – referred to simply as a ‘Visiting Tutor’ to appease parents worried about the school employing a man to teach their girls. Although she can’t speak directly to Alec, Annabel finds a very imaginative way to communicate with him, which was one of my favourite aspects of the book!

As well as the mystery element of the book, we also learn a lot about life in a 1940s girls’ boarding school. Andrew Taylor does a good job of portraying the rivalries and complex relationships that form when groups of teenage girls – and groups of teachers – are living together in a close-knit community. There are occasional references to the war, which is in its closing stages as the book begins in May 1945, but Monkshill Park feels largely sheltered from the outside world, so although the war touches the lives of the characters in various ways it doesn’t form a big part of the story.

The descriptions of the school and its landscape are very detailed, so I was interested to read in Taylor’s author’s note that he based it on Piercefield, a now ruined house and estate near Chepstow in Wales, and that in its fictional guise of Monkshill Park it also formed the setting for his earlier novel, The American Boy. I should have remembered that as The American Boy is my favourite of all the Andrew Taylor books I’ve read!

Although it was interesting to watch a victim trying to solve their own murder, I felt that there was a distance between the characters and the reader, which I suppose is inevitable when your narrator can only watch and observe rather than interact directly with the people around her. Maybe because we’re only seeing them from Annabel’s unique perspective, most of the characters also seem particularly unpleasant! Possibly for these reasons, I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as some of Taylor’s other books, but it was imaginative and different and I’m looking forward to whatever he writes next.

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

Book 3/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

Before Dorothy by Hazel Gaynor

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I’m sure most of us have seen The Wizard of Oz (and/or read L. Frank Baum’s classic novel on which it’s based), but how many of us have stopped to think about what happened to the characters before the story began? Why was Dorothy living with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry? Who were her real parents? And how did the family come to be in Kansas in the first place? In Hazel Gaynor’s new novel, Before Dorothy, she sets out to answer these questions and more.

The book is written from the perspective of Emily Gale – Aunt Em – and begins in 1932 as she returns to Chicago following the death of her sister, Annie. Annie’s seven-year-old daughter, Dorothy, has been left an orphan and Emily and her husband, Henry, are to become her legal guardians. Emily hasn’t seen Dorothy since she was a baby – she and Henry now live in Kansas and her relationship with Annie has been very strained in recent years – and she’s not at all sure she’s the right person to care for a child, particularly one who has suffered the trauma of losing her parents. Once back in Kansas, however, Emily gradually begins to feel a stronger bond with Dorothy than she’d expected.

Moving backwards and forwards in time, we watch as Emily and Annie, originally from Connemara in Ireland, first arrive in Chicago in 1924 and meet their respective husbands, cousins Henry and John Gale. We also see how Emily makes the decision to start a new life with Henry in Kansas and what she discovers when she gets there. The focus is always on Emily rather than Dorothy and unlike the Baum novel and its adaptations, the story is firmly grounded in reality rather than fantasy.

I tend not to read many books that are spin-offs of classics or that borrow other authors’ characters and I only chose to read this one because I’ve enjoyed some of Hazel Gaynor’s previous work. I wasn’t sure I would like it, but I did – although I think it would probably have worked just as well if it had simply been a novel about an original fictional family living on the prairie, with no connection to the Gales. It was fun spotting the references to The Wizard of Oz, though. The scarecrow, tin man and lion all appear, as do the wizard, witches (good and wicked), the tornado and many more – although not necessarily in the form you would expect! Gaynor manages to work these references into the story in a way that feels believable and not too forced.

What I liked best about this book, though, was the portrayal of life on the prairie – the sense of adventure and optimism Emily and Henry feel when they first arrive, followed by a growing awareness that things are going to be much more difficult than they’d expected. With an influx of people coming to the Great Plains in large numbers to farm the land, there’s eventually a surplus of wheat, too much to be sold, leading to a drop in prices. Worse, the overexploitation of the land and removal of the prairie grasses, combined with a prolonged drought, causes severe dust storms (known as the Dust Bowl). The hardships and challenges faced by the Gales, as well as the environmental disaster unfolding around them, forms a big part of the novel.

I’m sure a lot of the people who read this book will have been drawn to it by the links with The Wizard of Oz, but even if that doesn’t appeal to you I think there’s still enough here to make it an enjoyable work of historical fiction in its own right.

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

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.