Historical fiction

Officers and convicts

Having enjoyed The Lieutenant, I was looking forward to another Kate Grenville novel. A Room Made of Leaves is the account Elizabeth MacArthur nee Veale writes 12 years after her husband’s death, contradicting the narrative he had spun. John MacArthur...

A span of black American history

Heads-up: this novel has a daunting cast of characters. In their favour, they are interestingly diverse: they live over multiple decades in two continents, they are black, white, married, single, straight, gay, male, female, and of various ages. Some are...

Cultural appropriation?

Should authors write about communities that they themselves do not belong to? I can see both sides. On the one hand, a writer should be free to write about anything they want, and we, the readers, get to decide if...

Juvenile writing

“Noriko, promise me that you will obey in all things. Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist. Do not think if thinking will lead you somewhere you ought not to be. Only smile and do as you are...

A less mythical frontier story

In the 1900s, authors like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour rode the peak of the ‘Western’ genre with their enormous output. These books typically featured tough, sharp-shooting, quick-on-the-draw white men with beautiful horses who rode the wild country of the...

Atrocity

There are all too few novels written in English on the ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese occupation in Singapore from 1942-1945, so I seized on this one and read it avidly. It certainly tells a very important story, though how...

But never doubt I love

The novel starts by telling us that Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. O’Farrell’s novel is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s life, without ever mentioning...

Goodnight, sweet prince

The beguiling Hamnet is historical fiction at its best: set solidly in 1500s England, beautifully detailed so that the reader can appreciate every aspect of the characters’ distant lives, and yet written so that the same modern reader can identify...

Women at War

Women are typically at the margins of war history: they send their men off with pride and sorrow, they serve as camp followers, they nurse the injured, they hold up the fort back home, and they mourn the fallen, while...

Remaking History

Many historians, opinion writers and regular people have speculated whether being married to Bill has helped or hurt Hillary Clinton. The opinions are mixed: some think that her years as First Lady brought her public prominence and jumpstarted her senatorial...

Lovely Literary Layers

If ever a reader was seeking a book built on an excellent cast of characters, this will fit the bill beautifully! It is a book by a consummate storyteller, about a storyteller, and in an entirely unobtrusive but quietly pleasing...

Shellshock

It seems to have taken me four decades of reading, to come on a startling realisation midway through this novel, exactly why I so value the imaginative, innovative, skillfully crafted writing styles when reading novels, above the pedestrian and prosaic...