The best books that connect with the thinking, feeling past, at its human heart

The testament of Cresseid, written in Old Scots in the fifteenth century, was framed as a response to Chaucer’s earlier telling of the Troilus story—the ill-fated love between Troilus and Cressida. Henryson imagines what becomes of Cressida where Chaucer’s version ends. I read this poem at school, together with the fables, and loved it straight away. It was a revelation to find a view of Cresseid sympathetically disposed, in language that was vivid and direct; a telling that was startlingly humane. There is humour, heart and feeling in the fables too. It blew away my preconceptions that Scotland in the past was dour and inaccessible, and the language difficult, and replaced them with a fondness and a familiarity lasting to this day.  

A Thousand Notable Things was first published in 1579, coincidently the year in which my first Hew Cullan story is set. A miscellany of marvels, magic, myths and medicine, ‘facts’ and household tips designed to entertain rather than instruct, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the sixteenth-century mindset to be taken, like its remedies, with a pinch of salt. Where else can you find, in the space of a heartbeat, that robins will cover dead faces with moss; that a married man made impotent by witchcraft should ‘make water’ through his wedding ring to remove the spell; or that basil causes scorpions to breed inside the brain? "Take heed therefore ye smellers of basil." A thousand times diverting. "This is proved and true."

I first read They Were Defeated over thirty years ago, and recently reread to see if it had the power to move me still today. It does. Set in 1641, in Devonshire and Cambridge at the very brink of the Civil War, it reads like a love letter to a lost world, where the poets and Platonists are illuminated in already fading light, beautifully and tenderly observed. Rose Macaulay wrote that she had done her best "to make no person in this work use in conversation any word, phrase or idiom" not used at the time. "Ghosts of words," she calls them, after Thomas Browne. An astonishing feat in the pre-digital age. Yet the language of her ghosts is clear and true and natural. And the still moment, at the very heart of her heart-breaking story, transcends the factions that surround it and stays fixed for all time. This is a book that remains with you.

I’ve chosen Sarah Waters’ darker reimagining of Victoriana because it has the most satisfying plot of any work of historical fiction I have come across—and possibly of any other kind bar one (the exception is Great Expectations—the book I could wish to forget completely, in order to discover it again). But good books are far more than plot. The best of them convince, through sense of time and place and above all through character, and completely take us in, so that plot revelations, however momentous, can shock and surprise us yet not seem contrived. This Fingersmith does, deftly alluring, distracting to manipulate the reader from the start. But no spoilers here!

An Instance of the Fingerpost engages with the intellectual world of the seventeenth century in a complex and compelling mystery of misdirection, with multiple shifts of perspective. It’s a way of thinking—and of blindly feeling—through the science of the day, as well as through the shifting layers of plot. And though the focus in this instance is the mind—this is a thinking, not a feeling book—it is quite literally a story of the heart: of the scientific debate about the circulation of the blood.

The ’fingerpost’ is a reference to the typographical marker used in the margins of black letter books to help the reader navigate the text. And it’s a reminder that books, historical or not, look to other books to find their place in history. So Henryson begins with his reading of Chaucer, Lupton quotes from classical and older English works, Macaulay resurrects the ghosts of long-dead words, and the locus at the heart of the plot in Fingersmith is a library.