Historical fiction

Marble and Misery

It seems to be a season of historical fiction for me: the latest to cross my path is set in the early 1900s, in Colorado. At 17, Sylvie Pelletier is the oldest child of a Quebecois family, whose father Jacques...

Jazz City by the Bay

I’d venture to guess that when most people think of San Francisco, they think of one of the following: the ’60s, with flower children and LSD; an epicenter of the gay rights revolution; or the tech era with highpriced real...

Redemption, Down Under

The book cover has a wonderful evocative image, of a lone sailing ship on wide open seas under a massive, looming sky which takes up four fifths of the image. The colour of the skies are ominous above, with massive...

The Roaring ’20s

Kate Atkinson has great talent. Her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum was a lovely, if sometimes grim, multigenerational tale of a family in York, with a twist that is hinted at occasionally, and slowly becomes clear over...

Shipboard noir

The Batavia sails! From a distance, a queenly glide; on board, the frantic effort of all hands. Roars and curses and trumpeted orders. The new ship must be learned and felt. A week at sea and ship and crew will...

A short-lived Medici teenager

This latest Maggie O’Farrell novel is once again a work of historical fiction, like Hamnet, and even more riveting. Now the reader finds themselves in the mid-1500s, Renaissance Italy. Our protagonist is Lucrezia, fifth child of Cosimo D’Medici of Florence....

The woods were lovely, dark and deep

Finland has a population of 5 million today, and the Finnish-American population is about half a million. The Scandinavian-American community is dominated by the 3.5 million of Swedish origin. Given these numbers, it is not surprising that most people know...

Slide Rules against Ballistic Missiles

There’s no shortage of authors who write popular historical-fiction novels. What makes Robert Harris distinctive among them is the solid research that goes into his novels, and the accurate, detailed descriptions that leave the reader more knowledgeable than before. Some...

Divinity or deception?

In a small Irish village — “dead centre. The exact middle of the country” — in the 1850s, an English nurse is hired for a most unusual task: to watch over eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a child who has taken no...

Espionage in Ouagadougou

Marie Mitchell is a welcome update to the fictional is spy contingent. She is female, black, and American, all of which give Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel a completely different atmosphere from the classic spy genre dominated by Cold-War British men....

Indigestible treacle tart

British WWII novels often have an oldfashioned charm with their dashing doomed fighter pilots or sturdily phlegmatic women keeping up the home front. On the surface, The Kitchen Front would appear to be a pleasant addition to the collection, but...